XP: Progress in Life VS Killing Things

Discussion in 'Arcanum Discussion' started by Post-Internet Syndrome, Sep 6, 2009.

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  1. Post-Internet Syndrome

    Post-Internet Syndrome New Member

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    Hello forum, I have been lurking here for a year or so, but felt it was time to make my presence known.

    I have for quite some time been bothered by the uneven distribution of XP in arcanum. You get massive amounts from killing stuff, and only tiny bits from completing quests.

    In the beginning, you level at a modest pace, but once your killing power starts to increase, you can just cash in a new level when you feel like it. This makes life for a thief or a diplomat quite annoying, especially when the time comes to face places like the BMM. Personally, I would prefer if you got less xp from battle, and more from quests.

    This would accomplish two things (I believe): A) It would even the field between combat and non-combat characters and B) make you hit max level later, possibly decreasing the boringness of the later parts of the game. Enemies exists in infinite amounts, it would still be possible to hunt random encounters for xp, but the results would not be quite so spectacular.

    Even if you use a level cap remover, stopping you from hitting max, the late game is still very easy.

    Is this possible to do in a mod or similar? I am royally unfamiliar with how this would be done, but I would be very interested if someone made something like this.

    Maybe I am a lone pacifist in this question, but I see the potential for a far more enjoyable experience with the more obscure character concepts, as the focus would be getting the job done, regardless of how.
     
  2. Mesteut

    Mesteut New Member

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    Welcome!

    As fas as "my knowledge goes", you need to either access hard coded data on exp gain to do that (with no knowledge I possess) OR you need to go uppity on all quests' experience output values by changing the game scripts (easier). However, combat characters will ALWAYS level higher than pacifists, as they'll be doing quests + killing while you're only doing quests.

    Unless killing things netted 0 exp., that is.

    Hope this helps =)
     
  3. Anonymous

    Anonymous Guest

    Well, yes, that's quite simple. Undat Arcanum3.dat and in the 'rules' folder you'll find two files named xp_critter.mes and xp_quest.mes. The first one contains XP values for killing critters of different levels and the other one contains all possible XP rewards for quests. These are text files and can be opened with any text editor, such as Notepad.

    There's no need to recompile Arcanum3.dat, just create a 'rules' folder in the 'data' folder and put the modified files there.
     
  4. Muro

    Muro Well-Known Member

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    Welcome to the forums, PIS! Hm, wow, that's a nicely sounding nick, I'll give you that.

    Even though the XP changes are possible, choosing the most desired values of the combat XP % decrease and quest XP % increase would be quite hard, since the goal would be to not change the total XP gained by a quest-solving-and-fighting character while making the quest-solving-not-fighting character's path less sucky. Doing this without violating the already not-that-stable balance of XP per game would be a hard task, but I guess everyone is free to try.

    Unless there would be situations, in which avoiding a fight by dialogue would provide a bigger XP reward than choosing to fight. It's hard to balance the whole game that way, though, it's just too big.

    As for places like the Black Mountain Clan mines, they can indeed be hard for both diplomats and thieves. Yet keep in mind that there are only a few areas that force combat, the BMC having most propably the hardest "difficulty devided by player's power" factor. For those few areas, a diplomat should be charismatic enough to have a bunch of powerful bodyguards, while the thief could either sneak his way through, which would be hard for a character with a low prawl skill (which propably equals everything without mastery, so it's not possible for the BMC), or backstab his way through, being a deadly assassin. Or they can both just run through the area. After all, golems are slow and give up quickly.
     
  5. Post-Internet Syndrome

    Post-Internet Syndrome New Member

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    Yeah, that was my first idea, but that would ruin the mechanic where depending a lot on followers gets you less xp (which I find reasonable). Still, might be the simplest solution all-round.

    Hmm, maybe I will try that. As Muro said though, I can see that the real problem would be coming up with appropriate values. Do I need some sort of unpacking tool for that? If I do, I bet I can find it in the d/l-section of this site, it really is packed with goodies.

    I can just as well also take this opportunity to thank you, Drog, for your excellent patch, I have enjoyed Arcanum immensely thanks to it.

    Thank you! It is just my personal joke with myself really. I adopted it instead of my old one when I started hanging out on forums again last year, after a couple of years in the cold, so to speak. Sort of means "I'm back" you know. :p

    I did run through the BMC once with a thief character, and it was not much fun, since I abused TB combat to do it. (My prowl wasn't high enough to do it "hardcore".)

    I agree with you that it seems a monumentous task to rewrite the entire XP distribution system for the whole game, I shall at least look at the files, but I suppose in the end I will just have to make do with what I have. It's still a wonderful game.

    Thank you for the answers, and I apologize for this massive post, I get carried away sometimes.
     
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