Experinces of characters

[Pulec]

I can't understand, when i have my characters on 8 level and characters which i can hire are on 5 level and they have more experience then my characters. For example my character have shooting on 51 and character have shooting on 61 and more thing are better then on my character.

I can't understand it?

 

P.S. Sorry for mistakes, i am only 14 and my english is not prefect.

[kermix]

Based on the game info I've found here, I've rationalized it this way: basic character XP - levels - are gained during combat, by killing the enemy. Skills, on the other hand, increase on a per-use basis, which could make it difficult (in theory) to boost some of the special-purpose skills (not just Medical and Engineering, but in some cases Throwing and others).

 

So the way I figure it, the characters that aren't seeing action are off in training. While it kind of makes sense if you think about it this way, it seems to me that the designers are encouraging you to develop the levels of available recruits more evenly by switching them out every so often.

 

This is something that I've tried to do more often lately, because I've noticed that if a character does gain levels outside of my squad - and they have, on occasion - I don't get to choose their perks!

 

So when I feel like going out looking for trouble (i.e. a few random encounters in a row), I'll usually take the lowest-level characters, and/or the closest to levelling up, so that they'll not only improve faster under fire, but I'll have more control over how their abilities build up.

 

Personally, I like this mechanic. It's difficult to exercise all the skills that you want to, as has been discussed elsewhere on this forum (especially pertaining to medical and engineering, but also throwing and others), so the fact that the game kind of helps you along this way makes it a little less daunting.

 

Plus, if you develop more of the characters evenly, you can build up a lot of diversity in your groups, and have more options later on. For example, you can have one strong combat engineer and one "pure" engineer by choosing different perks as you go, and work each character down to the bottom of the "tree" along a different route. You can do the same thing with any other characters who share a class.

[Whisper]

As attractive as the base guys' stats may look, you can easily train your team's skill levels quite a bit higher with just an hour or two spent practicing shooting. It's not terribly exciting, but on the other hand if you do this you have the luxury of being able to pick your perks (the base guys just try to take all the perks and end up with several sub-optimal ones).

 

For Shooting, Sniping, Throwing and Burst, equip guns and get lots of ammo, kill a few guys in a random encounter, drop the corpse in the corner of the map, arrange your squad in a quarter circle around the deader and proceed to shoot it a lot. You can select all ("=") and have everyone fire at once. The game allows you to mix firing modes (e.g. two guys sniping, two guys bursting and two guys throwing). While you could have a guy or two meleeing at the same time I guess, he'd likely catch a few bullets in the back while doing it.

 

For melee you can have your guys punch pretty much anything, including each other. A bonus to this is that you get to train your medic a bit (although there aren't enough bandages in the game to really get a high medical skill imo).

 

Engineering, find a hard lock and try to pick it. You will rapidly run out of lockpicks though, which was the sole aspect of the game for which I used cheat codes (to summon more lockpicks).

 

For Vitality Points and Evasion, when you take damage both of these skills go up. When you get a Bleeding condition, they go up with each bleed. I found this to be rather too chimpy so I didn't do it a whole lot, but I did find that you could easily pass the base guys in both Vitality and Evasion with just a little bleeding (which is stupid).

 

The only skill that can't be quickly practiced is Interrupt. Even in the end game, after much combat on Hard difficulty, my highest Interrupt score is I think 39.