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Hey all, I have a quick question.

As regular units rack up kills in myth, they gain experience, right? Perhaps I misunderstood, but I thought that when, say, a Droon your Bowman gets 5 kills, he does slightly more damage or attacks faster or something, and more so at 10, and then he stops gaining bonuses past that. Am I right about that? I'm sure the numbers aren't correct, but what exactly happens there?

Secondly, if that is the case, or even if it isn't, I want my solo campaign to see heroes born. Therefore, I want to make the bonuses for battles survived and kills much higher and unique. Is that doable? I don't know if I am talking about an easy fear edit, a difficult map-action type thing, or something that is engine-impossible.

Thanks in advance for the help,
~fildred13

Your information is relatively correct, save as you suspected, the exact numeric values.

Default Myth 2 allows vetting up to 5 kills. The amount a unit vets by is determined by a value in the monster tag under its attacks list. Something about Recovery Time Experience Delta. By entering a value in this field it means that your unit will reduce its recovery time by that amount each time it gets a kill, up to the internally set limit of 5 kills. However, with that said, somewhere along the line a mapmaking feature was added so that you can have units vet past 5 kills. I forget the exact details and I'm at work right now so I can't double check, but I believe if you go under "Terrain Passability" in the monster tag, and enter X value under Marsh(??) Terrain Cost, it will affect vetting so that your unit caps out at the value of X. This way you can have a very small bonus for the recovery time delta, and say a cap of 100 kills, resulting in a very slowly progressive improvement on the units attack times. This can then be tweaked to aquire the progressive curve you want for any given "Hero".

Pyro: Please correct my mistakes.

If you are using the latest Fear (no reason not to), you don't need to mess with terrain cost values which was what Graydon mentioned. That was the old way of doing it. Fear has been updated since so that you just go to the monster tag of your choice and click on the Flags button. Check the box for "Use Extended", then check the box for "Custom Experience Limit". After that place a value in the Max Experience area that is between 0 and 255. Each shield/skull a unit gets in the status bar is an experience bonus. You might notice that the number you added might become a different negative value next time you take a look at that tag. This is normal, it is still the value you placed as long as it is between 0 and 255. Fear has some limit in the way it shows that value but it still saves it correctly.

As for what changes with added experience, just take a look at the monster's attacks. There are two experience delta values that are affected. Recovery Time Experience Delta is as Gray mentioned, the value that is subtracted from Recovery Time per experience (kill). So if your Recovery Time is 1.000 and your delta for it is 0.100 and the unit has 3 experience points (kills), then the unit's recovery time is 0.700.

There is also the Velocity Experience Delta which subtracts from the Initial Velocity values used to throw the unit's projectile. If a unit has a value of 0.0 for both deltas then no matter how high you set their max vet limit, it won't make a difference.

Of course you can always do something extra like some coops do using script to give the unit something extra when they hit a certain number of kills. Could be ammo, artifacts, extra health, whatever the script allows you to do.

I understand now. Once again this place and it's regulars have proven to be the best. Thanks a bunch.

So I'm in Fear now mucking about with his attack. I am looking at a standard myth 2 warrior. I see that his recovery time is .1, and his experience recovery time delta is .1. So that means that after 1 kill he is "maxed out" in terms of how much experience he will gain that will do him any good?

So, if i'm right, further question: that means that I will have to increase all units' recovery time by X percentage so that experience will be noticeable? Say a 200% increase all around, that means that non-vetted units will be slow as molasses while vetted units will approach standard myth 2 units?

I think you can have recovery time that is faster than 0.0 using negative values. However, I don't know which is the point where they get to the best recovery time, but I think it depends on how long the unit's attack sequence takes to run its course.

Maybe instead of just increasing their recovery time, just lower their delta for it, or do a little of both. Increase the recovery time and decrease the experience delta.

Also, I'm not entirely certain this factors in with unit vetting, but units that have a blocking sequence (like the warrior) might also get a blocking percent bonus that's somehow tied to experience delta... Meaning his attack speed might max out at 1 kill, but his defensive ability continues to increase to 5 kills. This is purely speculation though. One of the devs would have to comment on the code side of things to prove or disprove this theory, I'm not sure watching in game would provide accurate enough data, what with miss fractions and such.

I'm only guessing at this point, but I think shorter recovery time is the reason a unit can block faster. Once a unit is ready to attack it has to decide either to attack or to block. If it detects an enemy in the process of attacking, it will try to block in that small window of oppertunity. If it doesn't it will go ahead and attack back.