Well there None of the ships are any different. I want to have some type of a balance betweenutilae wrote:
I think a simpler version of the above is this (though a little different):
*There is an empire wide pool of crew experience and it is like a resource basically.
*All ships in battle collect experience, eg when they kill something. This goes to the empire wide pool of crew experience.
*When any ship dies, it takes away from the empire wide pool of crew experience, based on its size and experience level.
*All ships have the same experience level, which is always equal to the empire wide pool of crew experience.
*A ships experience level affects combat performance, eg increasing accuracy, damage, repair rates, etc. Training technologies may affect this, or allow focus.
*The empire wide pool of crew experience is depreciated slightly if there is no combat that turn, however technolgies may affect this, eg training.
A-"all ships are the same interchangable parts" and
B-"ships are characters on your RPG team"
That's why I think that
1. Ships should get more experience for battles they are in (B factor)
2. That experience should be shared (A factor)
3. Experience should be gainable from your population (A factor)
4. That experience should decay, the only other way to lose experience is Death.
I would actually Not have experience "level up" I would say that a ship that has 568 exp points should be slightly different in stats than one with 567 or 569 exp points... now there might be changes in description for UI purposes (ships with 0-100 exp points are "green" ships with 10,000+ points are 'strike force elites') but a green 50 would be worse than a green 51 (slightly).
Now with "Leaders" that adds an RPG factor... Them I could see 'leveling up'. [If we decide to include them]
Also, Experience Decay would be Directly combated by the population input. If your experience goes out to the ships from the Imperial pile to combat that decay, then your ship with 100,000 exp will stay at 100,000 exp (As long as your empire can produce enough exp/turn to make up for the loss/turn)
I think the real debate is how closely to follow effect A or B
Utilae's proposal is closest to A
and
RP's proposal (for MME) is probably closest to B that we will have in an Empire game.
Now I think that an 'economy like' effort Should be something you use for getting well trained troops (This is a 4x and not an RPG). Combat helps a Whole lot, but it should be possible to have a totally peace ful empire with a small elite military... not only well equipped, but 'well trained'.
I would say that "Military Leaders", if we have them. would have initial and ongoing costs of Exp (and level up in combat). "Civilian Leaders", if we have them, would have initial and ongoing costs of Money (and level up based on the size of the economy they are overseeing).
But Even if we have Military Leaders, they should Not be the dominant use of experience, because Leaders are necessarily 'managy' it should be possible to not hire Any leaders and just let your experience give generic bonuses to your fleet.