Experience

Experience hover popup

Experience is the main progression system for the player character that is deeply tied to Skills and Story Points, found in the Character Screen.

Leveling

Evidently, the player would need to gain enough experience to meet certain thresholds in order to level-up.

Upon reaching these thresholds, the player will gain a skill point which they can invest into one of the Skills of the 4 Aptitude trees.

The maximum level that a player can reach is level 15 for a total of 15 Skills, however, the player can still earn experience past level 15 to earn Story Points.

Leveling Table

Leveling Experience Thresholds
Level	Experience Threshold	Accumulated Story Points
1	-	-
2	50,000	4
3	70,000	8
4	90,000	12
5	100,000	16
6	300,000	20
7	500,000	24
8	700,000	28
9	900,000	32
10	1,000,000	36
11	1,200,000	40
12	1,400,000	44
13	1,600,000	48
14	1,800,000	52
15	2,000,000	56
15+	4,000,000	56+

Sources of Experience

Various activities in the game will generate experience points, but combat is by far the largest source for a given amount of ingame (and often real-world) time, and one of the few renewable sources.

A non-exhaustive list of exp sources:

• Exploring:
  • Discovering things (Derelict Ships, Debris Fields, Domain-Era Probe, etc.)
  • Surveying planets
• Trade and smuggling (profitable trades only)
• Combat
• Story missions

Story Points & Bonus Experience

Main article: Story point

Each experience threshold will give the player 4 Story Points before moving onto the new threshold.

At maximum level of 15, the threshold will be 4,000,000, requiring 1,000,000 experience to gain a single Story Point, and this threshold will go on indefinitely (without increasing).

Bonus Experience provides increased experience upon gaining experience, assuming that there's enough to match the gained experience where it will just exhaust the remaining bonus experience.

Before the maximum level of 15, it will double any incoming experience, and at the maximum level of 15, it will quadruple the incoming experience.

As such, bonus experience can help accelerate the normal leveling process.

Extra Experience from Difficulty

Fighting enemies more powerful than the player's fleet gives extra experience, displayed as a percentage bonus before the player starts the fight. The maximum bonus is +500% and this applies to the base experience of the enemy fleet before the doubling for Story Point Bonus experience. With both sources stacked at maximum, a player can gain 12x the usual experience of destroying enemy ships.

The bonus is calculated from (effective enemy DP/effective player DP), with the following rules applying:

• Each ship contributes its DP
• Each D-mod reduces the ship's DP by 0.9 (multiplicative).
• Ships with the CIVILIAN hint count for 1/4 of their DP, regardless of if they have weapons. Note that this is the actual CIVILIAN hint in ship_data.csv, like the Atlas. Ships like the Atlas Mk.II which have the "Civilian-grade Hull" hullmod but not the CIVILIAN do not count for this, they count for full DP if they have any weapons,
• Other ships that have no weapons equipped also count as 1/4 of their DP, Fighters count as weapons here.
• Mothballed ships do NOT count their DP toward the total.
• DP from Converted Hangar does NOT apply

In addition there are rules for the enemy fleet:

• For the enemy fleet, officers count as 15 DP base + 7.5 DP per skill.
• Enemy fleet's DP is multiplied by 0.67, after accounting for everything else.

And the player fleet:

• For the player fleet, officers count as 7.5 DP base + 3.75 DP per skill. This includes your character, so once your character is level 15, it costs 63.75 DP in terms of the XP bonus.
• Support Doctrine does NOT count as officers, making it extremely valuable for earning extra XP.
• After the above, there is one final formula: $PlayerfleetDP=max(Playerflee{t}^{\prime }sDPfromabove,min(enemyfleetDP*0.5,PlayermaxshipDP*6))$

Your max ship DP is the ship that has the highest base DP (mothballed ships don't count and ships with no weapons count for 1/4 of their DP)

This second terms does 2 things:

• If the player's largest ship DP * 6 is less than half the enemy fleet DP, then the player is limited to a maximum of +100% DP. This usually only applies for very small player fleets and biggest-ships.
  • For example, if a player in a Wolf (5 DP) is solo-killing a 100 DP pirate fleet (somehow), then 30 is less than 50 so the (enemy fleet DP * 0.5) term applies.
  • The player fleet DP is then: max (Calculated DP with player levels, 50)
  • The bonus experience is then at most 100/50 = 2.0 = +100% bonus.
• For the second term of the 'max': If the largest ship is too large, it will overweigh the rest of the fleet.
  • For example, if the player is in a Hyperion (15 DP), then the smallest the player fleet can count for in the calculation is 90 DP.

Both of these factors combined means that solo ship play earns less experience than it otherwise would, and there is often no penalty to adding AI escorts to a player in a powerful ship.

References

Up to date for latest version, 0.97a.