Crossfire Forum

I note that while it's possible to do multiple batches of a recipe in one go, this only gives the same basic experience for the recipe. This isn't unreasonable in itself, but a comment elsewhere suggested that might not be how it's supposed to work.

It occurs to me that it would be possible to strike any of several balances here, such as:

Most generous: N batches give N times the experience, same difficulty.

Less generous: Same, but add N-1 to the difficulty.

Different tradeoff: Add 1 multiple of experience, and 1 difficulty, for each doubling of the recipe. (Or use the square root of N, etc.)

And so on...

I think this was changed at one point. I believe it is intentional change that you get exp for each attempt (and based on complexity of the recipe), not on the number of batches.

Some of this might have been to combat too easy exp gain in alchemy - if you can do a batch of 500 of whatever at one time and get 500x the exp, that could lead to rapid games (presuming one can get the ingredients).

While it would be tedious to make those 500 by hand, there is some precedence elsewhere in the game. In many areas of the game, one can slowly gain exp by doing things in a controlled manner - that in itself not a problem.

I think the problem with the less generous method (increase difficult) is that it tended to make lots of recipes too tough. As a real life example, increasing the size of a recipe 10 times really isn't that much difficult (it is somewhat more difficult). IIRC, the amount of exp rewarded is also based on the difficulty, so just increasing the difficulty would be its own reward.

It may be something more limited is needed. Difficulty is increased by sqrt(N). Exp is also increased also - perhaps sqrt(N/2) or something.

Doing recipes one at a time should still be the way to get the most exp at the expense of time. Note that even with those reduced formula, doing them one at a time may not be the fastest - based on time to do one at a time, one may have a faster exp gain rate by doing batches.

I think the problem with the less generous method (increase difficult) is that it tended to make lots of recipes too tough. As a real life example, increasing the size of a recipe 10 times really isn't that much difficult (it is somewhat more difficult). IIRC, the amount of exp rewarded is also based on the difficulty, so just increasing the difficulty would be its own reward.

Thus the ideas to increase difficulty by 1 for each doubling....

As far as I can tell, the experience is always as listed in the recipe, with no further adjustments. Also, I did up a recipe list sorted by skill and difficulty (much easier to read!), and the experience seems to have only the loosest connection to the difficulty, or to the rarity of ingredients. E.g., the basic missile recipes -- all difficulty 5 and 5000 exp whether using a ghost ecto, a wyvern steak, a beholder eye, or a skull's tooth. In contrast, the low-end smithy recipes have several "experience bonuses" for more-or-less useless items with cheap ingredients: for example, boots of granite and clawing, compared to weapons of Fear or shields of Mostrai.

(BTW, the artifacts file indicates boots of clawing should have damage+2, suiting their "story". but this doesn't get reported by ID'ed description, or client display).

PS: And why am I the only one posting to the bugs forum lately? It's not like these are hard to find!