Admirals not leveling up

[TheHolyAsdf]

I do not see anyone experiencing this issue so i thought and ask.

Are admirals leveling up extremely slowly for anyone? Some admirals emerge from battles wiping out a whole score of crisis fleets and not gaining any noticeable amount of XP. It seems as though they only gain XP via suppressing piracy.

It could be a mod, I have only lightly modded my game. But just wondering if anyone has this cause testing for it is time consuming.

 

[Masoz]

You're not the only one. I thought patrols would help, but it seems to take a couple of years of that just to gain one single XP!

If you have the Apocalypse DLC, your best bet is to forget about training your own and buy them from a marauder faction.

 

[CuddlyTurtle]

iirc they gain XP from time spent in battle, most battles don't last anywhere near long enough to give a noticeable amount.

 

[WhiteKyubey]

I guess they now trait based on days in batte instead of number of ships killed. Before they could train to max lvl if they used something like 100k fleet to destoy 50k fleet. But battles are finished much faster then they can train. And if you have big advantage, then it's even worse for training. Well, you can abuse mechanic in Skyrim way, making battles longer for no reason but training (like make very tanky ships with no guns and fight with neutals).

 

[Gratak]

Ah yeah... Admiral experience... One of the things not working at all atm... It was way too fast in the doom-stack period of the game. And somehow Paradox thought that when reducing the fleet size (which already means less experience for admirals), they also need to reduce the experience per ship killed they would get by a factor of 10+...

Also, I'm pretty sure they get even LESS experience per fleet-power killed from fighting crisis. Why? Well crisis ships are actually pretty weak. They get almost all of their strength by insanely high modifiers that are applied to those tags (up to 1500%). So you are probably getting the experience of the non-modifier ships, not the experience of the up to 16 times as strong ship you are actually fighting.

If anyone knows of a modifier to increase admiral experience gain please tell me. Would love to add that option to my mod...

 

[TheHolyAsdf]

So admiral experience gains are completely canned after all.

Thanks for the confirmation all

 

[Kilmantor]

They nerfed the experience gain for admirals in 2.2 - too much imo

 

[Typee]

They nerfed the experience gain for admirals in 2.2 - too much imo

That's an understatement. When you end up with an admiral that won a couple of wars, killed leviathans, has the dragon slayer trait, defeated the contingency, and is still not level 2, something has gone wrong.

 

[The Boz]

Level 3 admirals only appear if you buy them from the marauders.

 

[Mímisbrunnr]

Yes, agreed, admiral XP gain feels far too low.

 

[Kaigen]

Not sure if this is working as intended or not, but admiral XP gain from piracy suppression seems to be based on making the actual piracy numbers in the system go down, not just time spent on patrol. A short patrol route where they're only knocking off half a point of piracy at a time doesn't seem to do anything, but a longer route where piracy has a chance to build up before they return (probably need a bit of trade protection to keep it safe) at least nets some XP.

 

[Nakkivene]

Level 3 admirals only appear if you buy them from the marauders.

Or have Helperbot G3 who has since the start of the game helped purge the galaxy of sapient organic life. He gets to be level 5!

 

[Chthon]

Not sure if this is working as intended or not, but admiral XP gain from piracy suppression seems to be based on making the actual piracy numbers in the system go down, not just time spent on patrol. A short patrol route where they're only knocking off half a point of piracy at a time doesn't seem to do anything, but a longer route where piracy has a chance to build up before they return (probably need a bit of trade protection to keep it safe) at least nets some XP.

I read somewhere that suppression gives +1 xp per 2 piracy level suppressed. This seems about right, until you start doing partial fractions of 1 which don't seem to add up 1 for 1. Since piracy builds far too slowly, it's hard to build the piracy level up properly to meaningful levels that you can gain automatic xp from patrols. This gets worse as you upgrade engines or hyper-drives. I almost never get even half way to level 2 for a admiral during peace time.

Then again, I did get an admiral to level 3 once during a war. I went on a war-path bullying an empire that couldn't defend itself and barely had any fleet. Over the course of the war I hunted down every ship that ran away repeatedly. I was shocked when I noticed his level by the end.

 

[RandomZach]

I have an admiral that has been parked at the L-cluster entry gate for 150 years fighting unbidden while i watched mostly AFK. In that time his fleet has killed several thousand unbidden ships while suffering the loss of only a single battleship (when 4 unbidden fleets jumped in simultaneously). He's only about to hit level 6 despite having +100% experience gain. His flagship, the titan ISS Majestic Carnage II, is only experienced rank.

The exp per combat for Admirals is way, way too low and individual ships need to get experience from more than just days in combat. It's confusing why this is even the case as their experience numbers haven't changed from 2.1 to 2.2 except for the addition of experience from fighting piracy. Perhaps the calculation is bugged.

Admirals are just the most extreme example, though. They nerfed governor experience from 3.5 per month plus experience for each building completed, tile cleared, pop grown, and active edicts to simply being a flat 5 per month. Scientists, Generals, and Rulers were already painfully slow before this patch and their numbers remain unchanged. Even with a 100% modifier to leader experience gain it still takes 250 years for a scientist on assist research to hit level 10. It takes 150 years in the same scenario for a ruler or governor to do so.

I'm not saying level 10 leaders should rain from the sky, but it shouldn't be basically impossible without massive leader life span modifiers. It also definitely shouldn't just be a straight function of time for 3 of the 5 leader types (once exploration is complete, anyways). This is especially true for governors because there's no way to level them up separately from their primary function like the other leader types.

 

[TheHolyAsdf]

I've used a mod to speed up ship experience gains. But the vanilla experience gain for ships should be increased and no mod should be necessary.

Perhaps I could try making a mod for the first time and fix admiral experience gain until Paradox gets around to it.

 

[Arnovitz]

You could try electing an important admiral as your empire leader during peacetime and they will gain experience in that position until they are replaced. Of course, this isn't ideal and a more permanent solution is needed.

As an aside, there's no point in raising the leader level cap (as many traits, civics, and traditions do) if the leaders can never realistically attain the higher levels before dying. My guess is that we need a new mechanic where some of these abilities should automatically start leaders at a higher level when recruited.

 

[DeathSheep]

For every one complaining about admirals not earning XP from kills in combat, there's a report in the Bug Reports thread of a bug related to war score/war exhaustion not properly accounting for destroyed ships. May be related.