I was looking a the warrior's sword swing and noticed that the Recovery Time was 0.0100 and the Recovery Time Experience Delta was 0.0100 too. In the fear documentation it states that the Recovery Time Experience is "the amount that is removed from the Recovery Time every time a unit scores a kill". So if the recovery time is 0.0100 and the recovery time experience delta is also 0.0100 does that mean once a unit makes just one kill 0.0100 will be taken away from the recovery time making it 0.0000? I don't understand exactly how this works. Could someone please explain? Also I want to make a unit that you more easily notice get better with kills. How much would I want to increase the Recovery Time Experience Delta would double the amount be good? 0.0100 to 0.0200? How sensitive are the values and how do they work?
A recovery time of 1.000 = 1 second real time.
For simplicities sake, I'll give you an example of growth rates for melee attacks.
Give a Warrior a 1.000 Recovery time. This gives the Warrior 1 attack per second.
Now let's give him 5 kills, and a 0.400 Recovery Time Experience Delta.
This makes his attack -2.000 with 5 kills(default). Which gives him 4 attacks per second.
Using this information we can safely say that 1.000 of Recovery Time is equal to 1 attack per second. 2 attacks at 0.000, 3 attacks at -1.000, and 4 at -2.000. The reason I started at 1.000 is because at 2.000 Recovery Time, a Warrior would have half an attack per second, which doesn't make much sense.
You cannot attack faster than an animation will allow. So even if you made the experience gain continue beyond 5 kills, it would eventually cap at the animation rate. However, you can adjust the RTED lower, so that a 10 kill experience cap holds some value. Which can be very useful for single player maps, and less useful for multiplayer netmaps, because you don't want the units to cap too early and become top dog with just 5 kills each, so the scale of attack speed and accuracy improves marginally over the course of the map, rather than exponentially. With this method, you can retain the same gain over time without capping so soon.
Example:
(Warrior 1) RT = 1.000, RTED = 0.400 @ 5 kills = -2.000 RT
(Warrior 2) RT = 1.000, RTED = 0.200 @ 10 kills = -2.000 RT
As you can see, both warriors will cap exactly the same, but Warrior 1 will cap much sooner after only 5 kills, where it would take Warrior 2 twice as long to cap.
RTED always goes down, so with your example of 0.100 RT, it will become 0.200 after one kill with an RTED of 0.100, 0.300 after 2 kills, and so on.
I have also devised a formula for calculating the percentage of gain per kill, and at the experience cap.
[RTED x EC] / RT = Maximum ASI percentage (experience cap)
([RTED x EC] / RT) / 5 = ASI percentage per kill
RT = Recovery Time
RTED = Recovery Time Experience Delta
EC = Experience Cap (Bungie default is 5 kills)
ASI = Attack Speed Increase
For those of you who aren't into math, I'll give an example that should help in understanding the formula.
For my example I'll use the RT and RTED from one of my custom units, the Executioner. Experience cap is based off Bungie's default setting.
Executioner
RT = 4.000
RTED = 0.600
EC = 5
[0.600 x 5] / 4.000 = 0.75 or 75% increase in attack speed at cap experience gain, which is 5 kills.
([0.600 x 5] / 4.000) / 5 = 0.15 or 15% increase in attack speed per kill.
(0.600 times 5 = 3, 3 divided by 4 = .75)
(0.600 times 5 = 3, 3 divided by 4 = .75, .75 divided by 5 = .15)
Now where you see 5 in the formula, that is the experience cap that you have assigned, Bungie's default cap is 5 kills.
So if you increased the cap to 10 it would look like this.
[RTED x 10] / RT or [0.600 x 10] / 4.000 = 1.5 or 150%
([RTED x 10] / RT) / 10 or ([0.600 x 10 ]/ 4.000) / 10 = .15 or 15%
As you can see, the experience gain per kill remains the same, however at maximum experience cap he will have twice the increase in attack speed at 10 kills vs 5 kills experience cap.
It should be quite obvious now that you can provide for a much greater challenge to a map by increasing the experience cap and lowering the RTED overall, especially for large maps with lots of enemies.
The general rule would be if you double the experience cap, like we did in the above example to 10 from the default 5, that you should also divide the RTED in half. So if you increase the cap, be sure to do the opposite to the RTED by the same value.
Example
5(default EC) x 2 = New EC of 10, RTED / 2 = New RTED
5(default EC) x 4 = New EC of 20, RTED / 4 = New RTED
I hope I didn't make too many brains bleed with this post. Enjoy. I hope it helps.