What does veterancy add to the game?

[Turkey]

I implemented a system that made sense to me as a Sim mod (in the Vault as Shared Experience). It awards XP based on mass cost, and adjusts veterancy such that each unit needs to kill about twice its mass in enemy units fore each level. It also shares experience around attackers based on damage dealt, rounded up.

What I found when playtesting is that experimentals have a huge amount of difficulty leveling with this system. A monkeylord needs to kill nearly 40 harbs, or nearly 400 strikers to vet once. Compared to vanilla, where 50 strikers or 17 harbs will do the trick. This suggests to me that experimentals vet too easily in vanilla, and that the levels should at least be increased. It also suggests that basing the system purely on mass cost might not be ideal, as build time and energy cost are also a factor in a unit's construction. If I had used some combination of build time and mass cost, the ml would level slightly more easily as it has a much lower build cost than its mass in t1-t3 units.
Another thing I noticed was that a UEF scout escorting 2 t1 tanks vetted very fast. It would deal about 4 damage total to something before the tanks would kill it, then get 1 xp due to rounding. Because its mass cost was so low, it would be max vet after only a few targets. The simplest solution to this would be to round xp to the nearest integer instead of rounding up all the time.

I made leveling behave differently, too. Instead of a chunk of HP restored, they get a 5% per level buff to damage, speed, max hitpoints, and current hitpoints. (I left regen untouched). This way, the unit's fractional health remains the same. A unit that levels when nearly dead remains nearly dead, while a unit that vets while healthy can make better use of the health buff. By buffing damage as well, veterancy becomes useful to units which can't take much damage such as sniper bots and artillery (at least in theory. I haven't playtested this aspect much).

[codepants]

I made leveling behave differently, too. Instead of a chunk of HP restored, they get a 5% per level buff to damage, speed, max hitpoints, and current hitpoints. (I left regen untouched). This way, the unit's fractional health remains the same. A unit that levels when nearly dead remains nearly dead, while a unit that vets while healthy can make better use of the health buff. By buffing damage as well, veterancy becomes useful to units which can't take much damage such as sniper bots and artillery (at least in theory. I haven't playtested this aspect much).

I like the thought, but I am really, really hesitant to buff anything but health. I feel like speed, in particular, is so nuanced (everything is faster than an ACU, but fatboys are the slowest, x units need to be faster than fatboys but slower than y other units, etc) that it's really dangerous to just give something a speed boost on a whim. Could a 5 vet ACU outrun a monkeylord?

I like the idea of a fractional health vet, but I think buffing damage and speed (in particular) should be done cautiously.

[Turkey]

I feel like speed, in particular, is so nuanced (everything is faster than an ACU, but fatboys are the slowest, x units need to be faster than fatboys but slower than y other units, etc) that it's really dangerous to just give something a speed boost on a whim. Could a 5 vet ACU outrun a monkeylord?

In this case, no, the ml still outruns the ACU. But a fatboy doesn't, even if the ACU vets only once. I ruled out buffing range because that's definitely too nuanced, I think you may be right about speed as well.
There are some units that have most of their value in hitpoints, and others with most of their value in dps. I buffed speed hoping to make vetting more valuable to those with most of their value in speed (labs are the only example I can think of), but I don't see a way to keep it balanced.

I'm a big fan of the veterancy in Red Alert 2, where at the highest level they sometimes get a whole new weapon. It really makes a vet a unique unit.

[Zock]

I implemented a system that made sense to me as a Sim mod (in the Vault as Shared Experience). It awards XP based on mass cost, and adjusts veterancy such that each unit needs to kill about twice its mass in enemy units fore each level. It also shares experience around attackers based on damage dealt, rounded up.

What I found when playtesting is that experimentals have a huge amount of difficulty leveling with this system. A monkeylord needs to kill nearly 40 harbs, or nearly 400 strikers to vet once. Compared to vanilla, where 50 strikers or 17 harbs will do the trick. This suggests to me that experimentals vet too easily in vanilla, and that the levels should at least be increased. It also suggests that basing the system purely on mass cost might not be ideal, as build time and energy cost are also a factor in a unit's construction. If I had used some combination of build time and mass cost, the ml would level slightly more easily as it has a much lower build cost than its mass in t1-t3 units.
Another thing I noticed was that a UEF scout escorting 2 t1 tanks vetted very fast. It would deal about 4 damage total to something before the tanks would kill it, then get 1 xp due to rounding. Because its mass cost was so low, it would be max vet after only a few targets. The simplest solution to this would be to round xp to the nearest integer instead of rounding up all the time.

I made leveling behave differently, too. Instead of a chunk of HP restored, they get a 5% per level buff to damage, speed, max hitpoints, and current hitpoints. (I left regen untouched). This way, the unit's fractional health remains the same. A unit that levels when nearly dead remains nearly dead, while a unit that vets while healthy can make better use of the health buff. By buffing damage as well, veterancy becomes useful to units which can't take much damage such as sniper bots and artillery (at least in theory. I haven't playtested this aspect much).

That mod sounds really good, it stumbles on the same problems i saw when thinking about this and when i made a few rough calculations. The idea for a mass based veterancy system is actually a few years old, and the last vet changes were a step into that direction to see how well it works.

Basing something on the build time of exps is fragile, because there is a good amount of people that believes the buildtime of exps is bad and should be changed.

Vees suggestion

Or you'd have to do some slowly growing function like square root instead.

might help to avoid exps becoming unable to vet with a mass based system, but then you might have to kill your t1 tanks to prevent vetting again. Finding a way that prevents both problems might be one of the bigger difficulties with such a change, and if you plan to continue your mod, that would be something i'd focus on.

Finding a way to make vet attractive for units that don't profit from HP is good too, but i agree that touching speed is very dangerous.

Another problem is that you either have to make an exception for ACUs, or change their masscost which can lead to economy crashing when accidently repairing it (thats why it was changed in the past) , though if you keep the energy cost of the ACU very high, this might not become an issue.

The experience sharing is interesting, but doesn't it negatively impact simspeed? If so, thats a huge downside.

[zeroAPM]

Finding a way to make vet attractive for units that don't profit from HP is good too, but i agree that touching speed is very dangerous.

If you mean shielded units then the shield HP and regen could be raised by the same percentage as the health and health regen.

Maybe then the Titan wouldn't be too much of a utter piece of trash after mopping up some t1 units, heck a 5 star one might even go toe to toe with a t2 unit

[Turkey]

I've put a new version of Shared Experience on the vault.

The slow growing function of mass is a good idea, but you are correct in that square root is too far the other way. I settled on mass^(3/4), which allows a ml to vet once off 21 harbs or 151 t1 tanks. It's still much slower than vanilla, but possible to vet while wrecking somebodies army or base.

I removed the speed buff, but increased the health and damage buffs to 10% per level. There's also a 40% buff on shield regen, and 20% on shield recharge time after taking too much damage.

ACUs have a fixed value of 30, making them vet off 20 t1 tanks (the same as a brick, incidentally). I might have to do a similar thing for SCUs, because the presets might have a different mass cost in their blueprints. I haven't looked into that specifically.

Regarding sim speed, IceDreamer's comments above apply for my mod as well, except I have 2 tables per unit after taking/receiving damage for easy cleanup when a unit dies. There's a few extra lines of code on unit damage, and a few more on unit death. Computationally negligable. Memory impact is the only thing bigger than O(1), which can be as much as O(n^2) if all units take damage from all enemy units and survive. This worst case doesn't actually happen in game, though, and even if it did it wouldn't necessarily be the bottleneck on simspeed.

[Korbah]

One way to stress test it might be to benchmark a big ai game with and without the mod and look at the framerate once you get 3k plus units.

Not hugely scientific but better than nothing. You've probably already done this

[ZenTractor]

Honest opinion: I like vet as it is and I don't see any reason to change it. If you don't like a Monkey getting more HP half way through killing your base maybe you should have scouted

That's the worst argument for balance I've seen in a while! It's all well and good to say that someone should have scouted for experimentals, but Monkeylords are stealthed naturally. You'd have to keep vision of your entire territory in order to see it coming. Now, that's easiest to do with t1 airscouts, but it just so happens that a monkeylord has an AA range of 64, and a scout has a sight range 42. So any Monkey with intel is going to kill your scouts before they see it.

The vet numbers for vanilla in terms of T3 often involve killing enough units to kill the Exp itself. The problem becomes the goofy people who throw 50 hover tanks at a monkey, leave 100 engineers on an air factory to get gobbled up... Honestly if you are that noob you deserve to be punished for it.

Here you're sort of arguing from a strange perspective. A player threw combat units at an experimental that the could shoot and it was a.... bad idea? We're talking game design here. Do you really think that using combat units in combat should be something to be avoided? Surely both players would feel great if there was a huge land fight and the Monkey got damaged (win for tank player) and the tanks all explodes under a beam of microwave laser death (win for Monkey player and all spectators/michael bay fans)

The instant HP promotes aggressive play with experimentals, and honestly without them being strong with Vet I think they would be pretty weak in most contexts...

While aggressive play with experimentals is great, there are non-instant healing ways to promote that. Think of a monkey with 200ish hp left. A strat bomber flies overhead and drops the bomb, and then right before it impacts the monkey kills a mex or something equally silly and ranks up and gets massively healed. By all rights, the killing blow had already been dealt, it just hadn't landed yet.

Somewhere else someone suggested having units be granted their veterancy HP quickly, but not instantly, over time. They could get exactly the same amount of healing, but over, say, 10 seconds. This would mean that the monkey in the above situation would die, but players would still be rewarded for getting in and winning fights with their experimentals.

[Turkey]

The vet numbers for vanilla in terms of T3 often involve killing enough units to kill the Exp itself.

As of FAF 3642, A monkeylord will win in a straight fight against 15 harbs, during which it will vet twice.

[pza]

Somewhere else someone suggested having units be granted their veterancy HP quickly, but not instantly, over time. They could get exactly the same amount of healing, but over, say, 10 seconds. This would mean that the monkey in the above situation would die, but players would still be rewarded for getting in and winning fights with their experimentals.

Another idea would be to grant a max HP bonus, but only "heal" as much as it needs to stay at the same health percentage. That's actually what i expected veterancy to be like when i first came in contact with it.

example:
50% damaged 100k maxhp unit (=50k currenthp) gets vet, putting his maxhp up to 110k, but leaving the percentage the same(=55k currenthp). it effectively heals for 5k hp instead of what would be 10k, but healthbar doesnt go up. veterancy would stay the same for undamaged units, but absolute healing would be reduced the more hp the unit had lost.