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[E. Albright]

Had a game that's been playing out interestingly. Main thing of note is no minors or majors near me - just strong lizards (with good guns) and free folk. It made my first war with a major 1) fairly late, and 2) initially very threatening. OTOH, I'm sitting on the biggest ruin cluster on the planet, so even though I'm tiny pop-wise I've found like 10 artifact sites all in my starting zone by turn 100. I kinda regret doing partial FoW, but it's too late to fix that now. Anyway, here's a starting save link if anyone wants what's felt like a somewhat different setup than what usually seems to crop up.

(Aesthetically, it's cloud forests with a mostly-cherry-blossom color palate and red oceans.)

https://easyupload.io/caykt5

[Il Palazzo]

Does anyone know how leader experience works? That is, does playing stratagems they roll on (e.g. diplomacy for foreign affairs leader) somehow increase their experience, or is the per turn gain (or expenditure on skills) the same regardless if they do something or not? And if yes, does it matter if they succeed with the relevant rolls?
I.e. can you help train your leaders by giving them tasks, or do they improve all by themselves in the relevant skills just by the virtue of being assigned a position?

[E. Albright]

Experience Points (XP)
When you first meet a Leader, he or she will already have some Experience Points. These are the points that have been spent on his or her Skills. As your Leaders are involved in decisions, combat or just doing their regular work their XP will go up. New XP will be spent on improving Skill Levels. The Skills the Leader will improve with these points will usually be the ones he has been using. Advisors continue earning XP, but normally less than the Leader they are embedded with. In Combat, successful attacks or successfully holding a Hex will give more XP than failed offensives and losing Hexes to enemy attack.

SHQ Commanders will benefit less than OHQ from XP gain through Combat on a Combat-per-Combat basis, but once you’ll have a big army with lots of OHQs the SHQ Commander will be involved in many more battles than each of the OHQ Commanders and it is highly probable your SHQ Commander will quickly become very experienced. Other XP sources include Skill Rolls.

So yes, doing things gets them XP, and if you want to push them in a direction, making them take particular skill rolls will encourage them to use those skills. As such, they'll usually work on the skills they take checks on every turn b/c of their jobs, and if not that, then whatever "class" skills they have (which can be found by looking at the part of their history from before they joined you).

(No clear answer on whether non-combat leaders do better when they succeed vs. fail, but signs point to yes. This would be pretty easy to test with some quick savescumming, though...)

[Karlito]

If high capacity leaders have a lot of xp in the pool, you can see them buy like 15 skill levels at a time. There's some strategems that just give xp which can be good for very rapid growth.

[Salmeuk]

on the topic of Kaiju:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[E. Albright]

I wanna say I had a game where there were 30m+ land squids. I remember that as being unpleasant.

These are the most notable messy things crawling/leaping/flying around my current game. I kinda suspect there's some varieties of the last species I haven't seen given how far into the game I was before I saw the dragons. None of these are nice, but Absorption & Reflexor is a nasty combo on the Rats and Ferrets: fair chance to ignore attacks less than their HP, but then also have a 45% or 30% chance to avoid deathblows...

Spoiler: So many fire-breathing worms (click to show/hide)

[Il Palazzo]

I especially like when a 15m tall top predator rolls swarming and reproducer.

[E. Albright]

So, uh. I decided to roll some different world types and was testing one with these things. I'm not sure I'll be able to live long enough to find the 25m intelligent lizard regimes...

Spoiler: Ouch... just... ouch (click to show/hide)

[Edit: I probably should have included the Longbeasts as well; fixed. They look so innocent and harmless until you consider what 8 attacks per round and Toxin V means. I lost a full battalion in one round to these things too...]

[Il Palazzo]

Can I has this world?

[E. Albright]

You probably won't like the geography, but sure. Be warned, those things are if anything worse than they look. I've got very nice 125SD infantry, and a group of those wiped a full battalion on the first round of an ambush. That's a really nasty combination of fauna feats. I'm planning on trying anti-tank guns against them but I'm not sure it's gonna work.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RFjDe1FFzaKpL4zWKIwwW39T2Kq5iMdS/view?usp=sharing

[Dostoevsky]

There's a few good kaiju examples that have gone around the reddit, too

Example 1
Example 2 - 82 meters!
Example 3 - behold, Burrower Cow

Some folks on the discord tried to figure out what was key, and found that the main aspects were length of evolution and planet class (not Siwa, mainly?), while game difficulty has an affect on feats the kaiju may have.

[E. Albright]

The Burrower Cow is something you could co-opt by sucking up to aliens? Eek.

I'm curious what exactly they decided. I basically never roll Siwa and I have trouble getting over teens for fauna size.

(I have a vague memory of rolling a 44m squid before we had creature variants. That's the nastiest I ever saw, but its feats were probably a lot less awful b/c back then I didn't play on the harder levels.)

[Dostoevsky]

The most reliable way was to pick Medusa class and look for the long evolution length, but even then getting kaiju was quite rare. While the first reddit post there mentions air density, they couldn't find a strong correlation. (That said, high air density for super-efficient prop planes is pretty fun on its own.)

Edit: I picked a 5B year medusa with a modest atmosphere and could relatively consistently roll 20+m, with a mid-30s (and sentients!) high.

[E. Albright]

My suspicion is that it's the low gravity moreso than thin atmosphere, but I could easily be wrong.

I generated some Medusa planets and got a...43m apex predator, I think? plus 25m lizardmen, but the start zone was entirely surrounded by humans, sentinels, and spiders, so I have no idea what they look like and got tired of playing after 15 fairly uninteresting turns.

[Dostoevsky]

My brief foray into one of the worlds looked unremarkable, until my scouting forces, moving into a seemingly-empty square, bumped into a 30+ meter tall sheep shooting laser beams at them and promptly routed with casualties.