—In game prompt regarding Experience Points in A Girl from the Plains.
Experience points are a game mechanic in the Fire Emblem series.
Mechanics[]
Experience points, often abbreviated as EXP, are the mark of a character's growth in a Fire Emblem game. As characters participate in battles, they gain experience over time, eventually growing as a unit, becoming stronger and more capable. Every 100 experience points a character gains results in the character Leveling Up, increasing their stats as a sign of their growth.
Gathering experience takes various forms, the most common being participating in battle. Character innately gather experience points just by entering a battle and surviving it. However, characters gain more if they defeat an enemy. Units that heal like Monks and Clerics gain experience whenever they use a Staff on an ally. Some games even give experience for unique actions such as Dancing.
Experience points scale in proportion to certain factors. The most common is the difference between levels of the two units. Defeating higher level enemies reward a character with more experience. Likewise, higher level character earn less experience for defeating lower level enemies. The larger the gap between levels, the higher the scaling. Promotions also account in scaling, with base class units gaining higher experience for defeating a promoted enemy and opposite for promoted units who defeat base class enemies. Some games also scale experience from using Staves when used repeatedly on a map to prevent healing abuse or significantly reduce experience gain in general when healing in order to encourage more combat. Some games also have hard caps to how much experience is gained after a battle, generally allowing a character to gain upwards to 100 experience points after a battle, though most games do not allow more than a single level up after a single battle. However there are a few exceptions to experience point scaling as some pre-promoted units are coded to scale normally with other characters such as Marcus in Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
The Tellius Series features Bonus Experience after a battle that can be freely distributed to units between battles. The amount granted depending on factors specific to the chapter in question. Bonus experience is saved in a pool and can be distributed to any of the player's units from the Base Menu, save for characters that have reached the level cap of their highest-tier class.
Experience Stealing[]
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Subjective: The following part of this article is based upon the editor's personal experiences and opinions, and therefore may not be applicable for all readers.
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Experience Stealing is a fan term for the poor distribution of Experience between units in the army. Since units with very high levels relative to their opponents gain much less EXP than units with more comparable levels to that opponent, some players have argued that this results in a large drop in overall army performance, though this has generally been disregarded by more experienced players, who argue that pre-promoted units are the most powerful in their respective armies due to their ability to "snowball" easily.
Overview[]
While not a debilitating problem, it is worth considering Experience distribution when it comes to training units to maximize army strength.
Overleveled Experience Stealing[]
Overleveled Experience Stealing occurs when a character of a level far higher than the enemy it is fighting kills the enemy. Due to the way experience in the majority of Fire Emblem games works, a character of a much higher level will receive a lot less experience from killing the enemy than a character of a comparable or lower level than the enemy. This is not necessarily a bad thing however, as a lot of the time the lower leveled character is worse than the one who "stole" their experience, and killing bosses will award a large amount of experience to any unit.
For example, from the opening chapter of Eliwood's Route on Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
- Killing the brigand closest to the start of the chapter with level 2 Cavalier Lowen gives Lowen 30 experience points.
- Killing the brigand closest to the start of the chapter with level 20/1 Paladin Marcus gives Marcus 3 experience points.
Unique to The Blazing Blade, it is possible for the reverse situation to occur, where a character who is higher level gains more experience compared to a character who is at a slightly lower level. This situation only occurs in the Normal modes of Eliwood and Hector's tales.
For example, take a Level 9 Archer from Chapter 23 of Hector's tale:
- Killing the Archer with a Level 9 Hector nets Hector 44 experience points.
- Killing the Archer with a Level 8 Eliwood nets Eliwood 33 experience points.
Here, 11 experience points have effectively been lost. This phenomenon occurs whenever a character's Level is close to (or slightly higher than) the enemy's level and has a greater effect for higher Level enemies. It can perhaps be thought of as rewarding players for keeping characters close to the average enemy Level.
Another kind of Overlevel Experience Stealing occurs when a character who cannot gain experience makes the kill. Because either they're at max level, or not allowed to promote for story purposes, no experience is gained at all from the action, attack, or kill. Similarly, the experience is often stolen by allied units, and units marked as 'Other', who generally cannot gain experience even if they are recruitable.
Wasteful Experience Stealing[]
Wasteful Experience Stealing refers to supposedly diminishing returns of giving Experience to a less optimal unit or a unit not likely to be used in the long run. This often occurs during recruitment chapters where the player is forced to field or use a specific character and, either by player's choice or the sub-optimal engagement patterns of the enemy, experience goes to an otherwise unintended target.
In several games, starting with the original Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light, the player has only so many chapters to build and train their armies, thus every battle may count in the grand scheme of the overall gameplay. In these cases, even if intending on recruiting all characters, players may opt to immediately sideline or otherwise put characters on the field that they do not intend on using in the long run out of enemy ranges to prevent unnecessary battles and thus less chance for valuable EXP to be given to a unit that is not going to be used.
Wasteful Experience Steal impact has diminished overtime, especially since Fire Emblem Awakening, where periodic in-game, time generated, optional battles and occasionally player-generated battles exist to allow players to train any and all units before entering story chapters at their discretion.