Experience dependent upon army size?

[azsportsfan]

Originally Posted by TemjinGold

It would have to be or my Amelie would be like Level 100 with all the 1-troll fights she won...

Thanks for the responses. So, other than ease of management/control, there is no advantage score-wise to a smaller force.

[DGDobrev]

I think there was a correlation between your own leadership vs. enemy leadership for offensive pet dragon abilitites, though. If you have less leadership, the dragon takes "more decisive action" and gains more xp when killing enemies, or something like that. However, I'm not certain about that and I can't confirm it now because I use the pet dragon for digging and spamming mana accelerators for the mage...

[TemjinGold]

I'm pretty sure that's true as my dragon is 10+ levels higher than my character at one point and I only had training 1.

[Stepsongrapes]

Originally Posted by DGDobrev

I think there was a correlation between your own leadership vs. enemy leadership for offensive pet dragon abilitites, though. If you have less leadership, the dragon takes "more decisive action" and gains more xp when killing enemies, or something like that. However, I'm not certain about that and I can't confirm it now because I use the pet dragon for digging and spamming mana accelerators for the mage...

Dragon experience is calculated based on the ability used (each ability has difference exp potential) in conjunction with a multiplier determined by a ratio of your army leadership value to enemy leadership value, at the time the ability is used.

There's no affect on whether it kills something or not (though some of the damaging abilities are the highest experience potential ones).

There's a thread for it somewhere in the dragon ability subforum.

[Zechnophobe]

Yeah, dragon xp is a strict scalar of your total leadership over the enemies. Fight a victorious battle with a single peasant, and you would get the most possible dragon experience.

There is also a tapering off when using the same ability more than once in a combat though, which I don't recall if I ever figured out exactly.

[Stepsongrapes]

Originally Posted by Zechnophobe

There is also a tapering off when using the same ability more than once in a combat though, which I don't recall if I ever figured out exactly.

I don't recall any mention of this in the long dragon exp thread in the subforum.

Are you sure you're not simply seeing the affect of the yours/theirs leadership ratio changing as the battle progresses? Dragon exp is calculated based on the ratio at the time the ability is used, not for the overall battle.

In other words, casting an ability when you have 1 peasant to their 100 peasants (early in the battle) nets you more dragon exp than casting the same ability after you killed half of their peasants.

[Zechnophobe]

I am not basing this at all on observation, but rather on what I recall reading in the manual.

Edit: I was somewhat inaccurate, see below post.

[Zechnophobe]

So I translated some more, and found additional tidbits:

The dragon gains more experience if its level is lower than the hero's.

It DOES gain experience based on the damage it deals... but only if the damage happens DURING THE CASTING OF THE ABILITY. That means ball lightning's surprisingly high base damage is actually compensating for you not getting any credit for the damage. You gain a bonus to experience (this is simply added to all else) = 1.7% of the total leadership of units killed. This value is bounded by an odd equation:

LevelDiffExp / (Petlevel/5 +2)

Where LevelDiffExp is the amount of experience it takes to get from the current dragon level to the next (independent of your current actual experience).

This means that killing things somewhat above your level is good, but it maxes out.

Furthermore: The scalar for dragon xp (K) which is determined by your leadership / enemy leadership maxes out at 1. That is, having far less leadership will only ensure that the value remains at 1, it will not increases it past one. In addition, the first ability you use every battle will always have a K of 1, independant of the size of the opposing force.

This is why you can get actual dragon experience from the 10 devilfish you kill on debir, even though they are a vanishingly small percentage of your own leadership.


Let me try to sum this all up into a few key words:

• You always get full experience on your first dragon ability
• You get less experience after the first, if you have more leadership than the opponent in play
• You get full experience so long as your leadership at casting time remains equal to or less than theirs
• You get 1.7% of the direct damage you deal as bonus dragon experience
• You get more experience if you are higher level than your dragon
• That means increasing your own experience also increase your dragon's experience!
• It also means it becomes hard to level your dragon up if it is higher level than you.