Isn't it frustrating when levelling up (which to me is, perhaps, the biggest moments in the game)to know that next time you level up you will need twice as much experience than before? I have played wiz8 for a few weeks and I find the 2x/level a little drastic.

Some people talk about having smaller party in order to level up faster. This can't be much faster if the level system works as I think it does (ok im a beginner, might be very wrong on this)

A 3-party will obviously have twice as much exp. as a 6-party. This means that at a given stage in the game where a 6-party would be lvl 25, a 3-party would definitely be level 26, and a solo-character would be lvl 27 or 28.

Therefore I think that the fact that "smaller parties level up faster than bigger ones" is irrelevant in Wizardry 8, while in HOMM4 a 1-hero army will be level 20 where a 2-hero army would be level 12-13.

The slightly slower leveling of ninjas and bishops is also irrelevent because they will never be more than 1 level behind e.g. fighters and rogues.

I find it a little annoying down the road too. I usually take my party so far and then start over.

That's close, but not quite how it works. Here's the scoop:

For a non-magic user, the delta between levels is 1000 XP for 1->2 and 2->3. It doubles for levels up to 10->11, which requires 265K XP. From there up, the delta drops to 1.2 times the previous value. So, the XP requirement for 11->12 is not 512K, but "only" 307200 XP. For specialist casters other than the Bishop, multiply the non-magic-user values (both level-to-level deltas and total XP for a given level) by 1.2; for hybrid casters other than the Ninja, multiply by 1.4; for the Bishop and Ninja, multiply by 1.6. There's a little "jitter" in the values above level 13, so the exact multiplier might be 1.19999874whatever instead of exactly 1.2.

Actually they will. The non-magic-user classes will hit level 18 shortly after the Bishop/Ninja reaches level 16. And the 6.9 million XP it takes to get the Fighter to level 21 won't even get the Bishop to level 18. At the end of the game, the 15.4-million-XP Fighter will be at level 25; the Bishop will almost be to level 20.

Thank you Chaos. I had a feeling that there got to be a change like this in the higher levels. I have only reached lvl 9 so far. Now I am encouraged to continue my game.

Here is a link to the most accurate experience table that I have seen:

http://users.bigpond.net.au/easymoney/exp.html

It eventually approaches approximately 20% more experience per level at level 30+.

ChaosTheorist provided the numbers. The effect is that in higher levels, you gain 4 levels when doubling your XP. So a 3 character party would end 4 levels higher than a six character one.

In praxis, it is somehow more, since your party level is higher, which means higher level monsters in the same areas, which leads to more XP.

Thanks CT! I've been wondering about exactly this for a while now.

I looked at why there was a "jitter" in the level increases, and this is what I found. This is for non-casters.

Level, Experience Required, Delta(Actual), Delta(1.2* method)
12, 819200, 307200, 307200
13, 1187840, 368640, 368640
14, 1630208, 442368, 442368
15, 2161049, 530841, 530841.6
16, 2798058, 637009, 637009.92

So the actual formula is INT(Delta*1.2) for the non-caster types.

Minor note: the "round down" function is called the Floor function. It is the highest integer below a value, and is written as Floor[z] for a number z. From Wolfram site: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Integer.html

An excerpt from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FloorFunction.html

"In many computer languages, the floor function is called the integer part function and is denoted int(x)."

Just got a little lazy. Should have been more explicit on what INT() meant.