Rethinking the Concept of Experience

Shaking the Foundation of PG2
Rethinking the Concept of Experience and Experience Bars

 For those of you who have been "out of the loop," so to speak, there was a major revelation in regards to PG2 earlier this year. Whether you are a serious student of the game or a simple fan of Panzer General II, you should be aware that there has been a significant re-examination of some of the game's most fundamental aspects regarding experience and "experience bars."


First a few words about experience and experience bars for any new players reading this.

Experience is gained through inflicting and receiving combat damage. The more combat damage a unit gives and takes, the more experience it gains. Each time a unit passes a "century mark" (multiple of 100 experience), it gains another "experience bar". These bars are shown in the upper left-hand corner of the unit's information panel. A unit never shows more than 5 bars on the information screen, but if one clicks on the unit's picture (while in the information panel), a more detailed information page is displayed. In the upper left-hand corner of this screen there is a number underneath the experience icon. This is the unit's total experience.

In a campaign, a unit can be overstrengthed (made larger than 10-strength) between scenarios. Each bar of experience allows the player to overstrength his unit one more strength point. So a unit with 200 experience can be made 12-strong. A unit with 500 or more experience points (often abbreviated "XP") can be made 15-strength. No more than 5 experience bars are ever shown, and no unit can be overstrengthed beyond +5.

However, it has long been thought that the game continued to display experience beyond 500 (which it does) because the unit continued to gain more and more experience bars. You can't overstrength the unit further than +5, but you can continue to groom an increasingly better fighting unit by gaining increasingly more experience. And it was assumed that every time your experience jumped to the next hundred, you continued to gain invisible experience bars that made your unit fight better than it had before.

So a unit with 800 experience has 8 bars, even though you can only overstrength the unit to +5 and you can only see 5 bars. And a unit with 800 experience was thought to fight better than a unit with only 700 experience. As you read further, you will see that we were both right and wrong about these concepts.



For all of us, this is a lesson that we all should have known anyway: none of us is immune to learning! Few people anywhere knows more about the inner workings of PG2 than Lasse Jensen, creator of the PG2 Builders Paradise web site and forums. But as we found out, Lasse is human like the rest of us.

Years ago Lasse ran a set of experiments to learn more about experience. His tests were perfect as far as anyone could tell. As it turns out, his test were about 99% pure. There was only one factor none of us considered.

I'll let the key players in this saga tell their own stories, since I couldn't put it any better than they did...




This past April, our very own Michael "MJP" Pucci dared to bring up a topic which had been discussed to death over the years. He started the topic in our PG2 Technical Library. The topic was called Core units never gain more than 5 bars of XP.
This topic can be found at pub24.ezboard.com/fjpspanzersfrm4.showMessage?topicID=139.topic.

Here is MJP's initial post which started the topic:

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I know this topic is probably going to cause a lot of controversy but I have some facts to back up my theory. I've been thinking about this for a while and decided to do a little testing. I first became suspicious of this a couple of years ago but never gave it a lot of thought until recently.

This phenomenon is most noticeable with air units, particularly fighters. While playing Craig Millers Blitz I was always amazed that no matter how much experience my FW 190A-3 fighter had the odds predictor for combat resolution would always be the same when engaging 5 bar enemy fighters. This is immediately noticeable during the Tunisia Counter-Attack scenario. My 1256 XP FW 190A-3 couldn't get a better odds prediction against the Spitfire XIIE than my 700 XP FW 190A-3. It didn't make any sense which is why I decided to find out for sure.

Here is how I conducted my test.

Game version: PG II 1.2 (US)
Equipment File: WK 4.02
Test units: FW 190A-3 15 strength vs. Spitfire XIIE 14 strength. (this best represents what I experienced during the Tunisia Counter-attack scenario)

I created a test scenario using the PG scenario editor and added in the two units listed above. I then exited the game and loaded up Lasse's scenario editor. I gave the Spitfire 500 XP and 5 bars and gave the same for the FW 190. Then I loaded the game and checked to odds predictor. The results were 7/5 in favor of the Spitfire. (note these are the same results I get during campaign play with my 1256 XP FW sans leader). I then loaded up the scenario editor again and gave the FW 190 1200 XP but left the bars at 5. I loaded up the game again and checked the results and they were still 7/5 in favor of the Spitfire. So, I exited the game again and loaded up Lasse's editor. This time I gave the FW 190 1200 XP and 12 bars. Now the odds predictor shows 1/9 in favor of the FW 190. Also, when I attack the Spitfire the FW causes the predicted damage and takes no damage itself.

Conclusion: Units in campaign play will never gain more than 5 bars of experience. The experience counter will still go up but they get no more bars. I know this is going to cause a lot of people to raise their eyebrows (especially Lasse) but my tests don't lie. I ran them three times using different combinations of units. Like I said earlier though, it's most noticeable with high quality air units. I suppose it's possible that this is an anomaly when using the WK upgrade but I seriously doubt it since it doesn't change the game engine at all.

Ok, now you guys can flame away... I just thought I would share this info.

Michael Pucci
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Understandably, Lasse initially defended his former position on the subject. He had covered this topic a million times, so it surprised no one that he thought the long-standing beliefs were correct. However, to his credit, MJP never gave up, and continued to press Lasse on the subject, eventually convincing him to try the experiment himself one more time.

The results of these experiments were posted in this thread in Lasse's Builders Paradise Forum:
Shaking my foundation! – Might take yours too!

Lasse's initial post in this thread reads as follows

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Well this scares the @#%$ out of me. Have you ever had someone hit you with something, that states that everything you know is wrong! Well MJP from JP's Panzer Forum just did.
Not only do I owe him an apology I also owe him great thanks for setting me straight.

So here we go, many thanks for being so persistent, showing me that I was wrong. Thanks for pulling me from the dark side over to the light, were everything can be seen so much easier. It is somewhat ironic, I show him how to definitely get the answer, and he uses it to show me I am wrong.

While I am at it, I want to apologize to Whoppycat also for filling you with some horse crap.
This is from my latest conversation with Whoppycat.
……”I understand why the 5 bars syndrome exists, because there are other 5 limits in the game. There is the overstrength, even though depending on the bars they are not related. The designers choose to limit the overstrength to max 5. It’s a limitation like any other found in the game. You could have 50000 bucks, but if you have 100 units already, you could not buy a single one. Like bars you could have 200 of them, but the game limitations says you can max overstrength by 5, so you cannot overstrength more regardless of actual bars as you cannot buy more units after 100”…….

Even though that about 100 unit is correct, you can forget the rest, cause this is just some deluded man's writing. The rest of the post should be correct (well!)

There are in fact more people to apologize to. One I know of is Jorge Gabitto, with which I also month ago had the same conversation as with MJP. Not only did I manage to fill him with BS, I also managed to get him out of the thought that MJP did not want to leave. I am sorry Jorge Gabitto you where right, I was wrong!


Now so what is this about? Well I have seen the light now, and its been a hard conversion, believe me! – Now it’s your turn to get converted.

MJP started a while back, on JP´s Panzer Forum, a post about units not getting more then 5 bars in campaign play. I did not believe him.
I have a good reason too, as I myself looked into this years ago. I looked directly in the savegame to physically see how many bars a unit really had. I told MJP too, and Jorge also month back.

Now MJP looked in the savegame, after I told him how to (goes to show how clever I am :-). He found that units does not gain more then 5 bars, as the bars byte does not show more even though it might have 2000 XP.
Yeah yeah right!, me pulling up a hex editor, look, look and look again!!! – What the hell is going on here! These are exactly the same bytes I looked at years ago.
Well there is only one solution to this – I have been a fool!, because after looking though several savegames, MJP is definitely right. A unit does not gain more then 5 bars, regardless of real XP.

Not only can I pinpoint the exact second my foundation was shattered, I can also immediately see the huge consequence of this.

To start with the post from Whoppycat and my conversation.
Why cant you overstrength to more then 5 bar? It is true, as I said, that there is no more graphic then for 5 bars in the Panzer2.dat file, however the rest I said, regarding this, is bull. The simple fact why you cant overstrength to more then 5 is because your units does not have more then 5 bars!

After a simple test of assigning the real bars for a 3000 point Panther, that would be 30, instead of the 5 that is in the savegame, I could overstrength my Panther by 30 clicks!
I have been such a fool!!!!!!

Well the weirdest thing is that just days ago, it tried it, with a one-scenario campaign. Drove a panther up to 3000 XP and watched it act like a 30 bar unit. But here comes the pitch, when you save your campaign and reload you lose you strength! It's reset to 5!
When I played my one-scenario campaign I played it strait though to 3000 (30bars) without a single load or reload.

When you normal play a campaign you maybe play 3-4-5-6 scenarios at the time, save and load it up some other day. In such cases (which would be the normal case) every unit over 500XP (5 bars) gets saved as only a 5 bar unit in the savegame. The XP get saved, as they should however the bars get a max of 5.

Well that is not really true, as any unit that already has more bars from the beginning, like if you have an enemy unit set to, for example, 8/800, it gets saved as an 8-bar unit. But your core units in a campaign normally don’t start out with more then zero bars. Once they reach 500XP the experience points continue to go up, but the bars stay at 5, as they always get saved as 5.

Why can't you get a leader over 500 XP? - well, because you don’t get anymore bars. Why can't a unit set to 20/2000 get a leader? - well, because it does not get any more bars, it stays at 20.
Once you are over 5 bars, there is no more movement in them, ergo you never have the chance to get a leader!
I am such a fool!! – Thanks for helping and old blind man on the right path, MJP!

Well what does it mean? It means that your 2500 Panther is not a 25 bar unit, unless you did not save and load along the way. It means if you play the Blitzkrieg strait tough in one go, you have some pretty strong units. However just one save and load along the way – for whatever reason – you got a 2500XP, 5 bar Panther.

The worst thing in all this, it that I HAVE looked at this long ago, but you need a Corporal from JP´s Panzer to kick you in the head to realize that you obviously did not look at it correctly. Thanks for the kick! Kick me again if I seam to be unable to change the music I am currently hearing.

I seriously need to reevaluate the way I play, as I normally am pretty fast getting my 5 bars on most units. Now that I come to think about it, how many user campaigns have you met a, say, 15/1500 enemy unit in? (that would be real 15 bars) Not many ha?
I can think of a 700-800 or so in Steven Browns British Western Desert Campaign, but that is about the highest I can remember. Wonder what a real 20 bar enemy unit would do to your best unit. :-)
This campaign design gets better and better.

MJP. For outstanding determination in search for the truth, I here by promote you, on the spot, to Captain and reward you the Knight Cross to the Iron Cross.

 Lasse Jensen

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So you can see how easily Lasse could have become convinced of this so long ago. He created a test and found the results -- as your units gain experience, they gain bars. He was right. And a unit with 1500 experience has 15 bars. He only forgot one thing in those experiments long ago: his test campaign was completed in a single sitting. What he didn't think about (who would have thought about it??) was that a campaign is hardly ever played this way. Most people save their campaign numerous times along the way, playing a scenario or two at a time, and reloading later to play another scenario. Well, every time you save and reload, any units over 5 bars (except those that began the campaign over 5 bars) gets reset to 5 experience bars.

The point of this is not to make Lasse look foolish. To be honest, I doubt anyone would have noticed the flaw in his earlier experiments -- in fact, no one did notice -- NO ONE! Who could have imagined that something to do with experience bars would be reset every time a game is saved?? Furthermore, who could have been more gracious when proven wrong than Lasse was in the above post? It takes a big man to admit when he's been wrong, and to do so as openly as Lasse did.

No, the reason I posted all this today is two-fold.

First of all, we have a lot of players who have been playing under the mistaken assumption (well, ALL of us, actually!) that our 2,000-experience units are somehow better than our 700-experience units. This is only true if you play from the beginning of the campaign, straight-through without saving or reloading -- obviously not something any of us would normally do. We have a lot of players who come and go from this community. Several of our founding members only recently rejoined us after a prolonged absence for one reason or another. Plus, we always have an influx of new members and new PG2 players. I wanted to make sure all of our PG2 players had a second chance to see all this and read about this remarkable turn of events in the way we look at PG2.

The second reason I posted this is to make the point that, if Lasse Jensen can be wrong about this, any one of us can be wrong! The next time someone proves me wrong about something (happens all the time, actually! LOL) I hope I will be as gracious about it as Lasse was about this. Good job, Lasse! And a GREAT BIG well-done to Michael as well, for showing us the error of our ways.

Isn't it kind of exciting to realize that we are all still learning about this game all these years later! That may be the single thing I love most about Panzer General II.


If this topic is of any interest to you at all, I highly recommend you read the entire threads listed above. They are quite educational, and not without humor, in hind-sight. This chapter in the history of PG2 will remain an important one for a long time, I think.


May all your Victories be Brilliant, Herr General!

  Joel "Whoopy-Cat" Illian

    15 July 2001, v10-2