I’ve been playing this game for about a week now, and had a thought about improving the footman.
I’ve been reading about and have seen how long it takes a footman to level up, and seen a few suggestions for adding training dummies or training activities. So far I like the simplicity of leveling up a professions, and I’d like to keep things simple. I would like to offer an alternate way to help out the footman:
If a footman earned a tiny bit of experience while patrolling, (i.e. give 1 exp per Stonehearth hour on patrol) it would allow a slow progression over time, even while things are quiet. Gaining experience wouldn’t detract from what is currently in place with the current patrol routes, and you wouldn’t need to manage training schedules like in DF.
hey there @GeekLegion… I too love the simplicity of the suggestion, and think it would work well… the XP gains would have to be small by comparison, but there should definitely be alternate means for our soldiers to gain experience…
I love it, even a peaceful village can level up this way as well. Due diligence in patrols should be rewarded, and with such a small amount (Max 24 per day), I think that’ll work great.
Patrolling yourself to level 5 would take ages, so I don’t see it being a balance breaker at all.
I’m going to agree with @Solus on this that it doesn’t sound like a balance breaker, but at the same time, I would like to see an experience cap placed on it. Like paroling alone only gets you to LvL 3, and you have to fight after that to get to level 5. My reasoning behind this would be based on logic, as say you do have a soldier that patrols till level 5. You can’t tell me that he would know how to swing his sword to gain +40% damage, when he’s never been in a battle.
The idea that patrolling experience should have diminishing returns does make sense as @SirAstrix suggests. I can think of a number of ways to approach this but here is one that I like.
If you are trying to reach level one, you gain 1 XP for each hour patrolling
If you are trying to reach level two, you gain 1 XP for every 2 hours patrolling
If you are trying to reach level three, you gain 1 XP for every 3 hours patrolling
and so on…
By combining the time required per reward with the increasing amount of XP required per level, patrolling experience would become less and less valuable as the footman progresses. Since the footman still needs to eat and sleep, the exp earned per day drops significantly once a few levels are gained.
If you then manage to have a Footman level all the way to level 5 without any combat, I would have to assume that something is wrong with your world setup because nothing dangerous is being generated.
How many hours can you assume a footman will patrol in a day, and how many days would you need to patrol to reach level 5 if this was used?
There is already diminishing returns, because you need more and more XP to gain a level the higher a level you already are. So you can just keep it at 1xp per hour (or whatever) and it will already take longer to go up higher levels than lower ones.
