Earth and Beyond Player Guide

Getco

Character: Experience

Main Experience/Skills Interface

In developing Earth & Beyond™, we recognized that players don't always want to participate in combat as the only means of character advancement. As such, we decided to take a three-pronged approach to developing the RPG systems and game content for Earth & Beyond™. We loosely divided various player pursuits into three categories: Combat, Trade, and Exploration.

To provide a method of balance and appropriate reward for these pursuits, Earth & Beyond™ supports three different experience pools. When you kill an opponent, you get combat experience. When you complete a trade mission or successfully manufacture an item, you get trade experience. When you visit an exotic location for the first time or discover an ancient technology, you get exploration experience. Most skills that are utilized in an individual play style advance appropriately, thus you will never become a great explorer by simply blowing things up!

Earning experience in each type of method is accounted for separately, although the total earned experience accounts for your character's overall level. If you are performing a particular task that falls into one of the three categories, the difficulty and earned experience is based on the category that task falls into and not your overall level.

This means if you have 48 levels of exploration experience, 35 levels of trade experience, but only 2 levels of combat experience, you will still be able to earn combat experience from level 2 monsters. This also means you should concentrate on specific tasks that correspond to your individual levels and not the overall character level.

A character that is level 85, but only has a level 2 combat skill, would quickly be vaporized by level 85 creatures.

Experience Debt
Once you've reached Level 10 (combined from your three experience pools), you will incur an experience debt each time you are incapacitated. The debt is calculated by averaging the amount of experience you need to gain a level in each of your three pools, then dividing by 10.

For example, if you need 5,000 experience points to gain a level in each of your three pools, your debt would be 15,000 divided by 10, or 1,500 experience points.

When you have incurred an experience debt, you will still gain experience from in-game activities, but half of that new experience will be applied toward paying off your debt. In other words, you can still advance while you have an experience debt, but at half the normal rate.

In addition, your experience debt will "decay" while you are offline at a rate of 20% per hour. However, this does not mean your debt will be gone in five hours. In the first hour offline, 20% of your debt will decay; in the next hour, 20% of the remaining debt will decay, etc.

Note that you cannot lose a level because of an experience debt, nor can you lose skills.

Combat
Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people - and kill them. One method of advancement in Earth & Beyond™ is to get into fights with strange alien beasties, evil pirate scum, and each other. You have to win to receive experience, of course.

Trade
Have you ever wanted to pick up a load of contraband and deftly smuggle it through lawful territory? Wheel and deal your custom-crafted wares across the known universe? Scour the asteroid belts for exotic ores? These will all be possible pursuits in Earth & Beyond™. You will be able to advance your character simply through trade, utilizing no violence if you wish to be peaceful and yet gaining you trade experience.

Exploration
If you are the type of player who takes pride in knowing everything about the surrounding systems, this play style will appeal to you. Characters will be able to 'know' many things that others don't, such as the exact location of secret military fortresses or obscure methods for manufacturing rare items. Better yet, some of this information can be temporarily shared with friends. Exploring in this manner will gain you exploration experience.

As you discover new objects in space by flying within a certain distance of them, you will be award exploration experience.

Experience Progress

Levels
As your character gains experience in each of the three experience pools, his skill becomes progressively greater. These improvements are reflected in several ways, but one of the most basic is by an increase in the character's level. Each time a character gains a level in combat, trade or exploration, skills can be advanced by allocating earned skill points toward higher level skills. Experience is displayed on the main interface, located on the lower left of the screen, in addition to the skills interface.

If you gain experience in a pool where you're already level 50, experience will be reallocated to the other experience pools that are below 50, with a loss of 20% of the experience. Once you are level 150, all additionally gained experience is sent to the appropriate experience pool, allowing a player to fill their experience pool. One skill point is awarded each time the experience pool is refilled from level 150 onward.

Check out the the Skills Advancement section for more information on advancing skills.

Main Character Page