Eldibs

Interesting, because the only historical evidence I found via Google was an old forum thread of a few people citing a level cap. One of them was you. It also had a post of me saying that I had not edited my XP/levels. I don't have to go by memory. http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/1/3117

Either the game checks to make sure your level stops at 50 or it doesn't. You can't have it both ways. If it's the former, that's a hard cap. If it's the latter, but stops you from progessing past 50 naturally (by reducing XP gains as you gain levels), that's a soft cap. It's very easy to check for a hard cap. If there were one, cheating to put your level past 50 (or giving yourself enough XP to do so) would cause the game to drop your level back down to 50. Such a hard cap is easily demonstrated by your food and gold, which, if they go over the cap of 25,000, the game drops them back down to the cap. Since the game doesn't do this to your characters' levels (in fact, the game shows a level up message for all the levels you spontaneously gain, indicating it's going through its normal level-up process), it absolutely does not have a hard cap of 50. Period. Now, whether it has a soft cap of level 50 is still in question, but also testable. Take a level 50 character to the best XP sources in the game and see if they can still gain a level from them. You're going merely by what your memory is telling you. Well, my memory is telling me that I did not manually edit my XP/levels on my old save (there's no point, everything can be gained via skill points), and that the editor bundled with the game utterly lacks the ability to edit your XP/levels. Until you have actual evidence, you're merely arguing by assertion with your word against mine.

I just did some quick testing, and if there is a level cap, it's not a hard level cap. I gave myself enough experience to hit level 51 with a baseline character (4999XP, plus the experience from killing a single enemy to make the game give out the level gains), which the game was happy to allow. Were there a hard-coded cap, it would have stopped at level 50 without additional editing. However, afterwards it stopped awarding experience for killing the low-level enemies I tested on, which would indicate a possible soft cap (eventually you'd be so high-level that all the enemies/quests/nodes/etc.. would just stop giving out experience), though without doing a lot more testing than I want to do I can't confirm that. FWIW, I learned something useful from all this, which was how to set up a virtual instance of Windows XP inside Windows 7, which was necessary to run the game.

My editing shenanigans were with items, not stats, and all my characters had different levels (ranging from 58-73). I won't discount the possibility however, since that file does have edited items and I may have mistyped an address when coding my old editor. Traits affected how much XP you needed to gain a level. The baseline is 100XP, adjusted up or down based on what advantages and disadvantages you took.

No, it's not. I pulled up an old saved game just to make sure, one with every character over fifty. Here, have a screenshot from Exile 2 - http://i.imgur.com/J6Hzt2U.png (Apologies for the tiny image. Uploading kills my connection.)

Something else to note is level caps. I'm not sure about the other games, but I know in the Exile series the level cap is at least above seventy, and that's reachable within the game.

I recently watched the new Daredevil series on Netflix and found it to be very enjoyable.

Exile series for sure, due to the inherent craziness of being the earliest releases. Force Barrier and Quickfire? Awesome. Ravage Enemy, Major Blessing, and a metric ton of Boots/Rings of Speed? Also awesome.

I dislike the concept of a "dislike button" for one reason only - negative attention is still attention, and thus it won't demotivate any attention seekers. Look at that atrocity of a video that is Rebecca Black's "Friday." Near-universally hated, but still incredibly famous. If everyone who saw it would've been silent about their hatred, it wouldn't have gotten so big. Things that are awful should not be well-known just for being awful, they should be hidden in a corner to die silently.

Don't feel so bad about taking so long to hit 1000. I've not even hit 900 yet...

Exile 2 for me as well. Exile 1's engine was too simplistic, and Exile 3's felt like it had been overcomplicated, where Exile 2 had a nice balance. Also, it was hard for me to look at all the bright colors in Exile 3, and Exile 1 was too grey.

I never bothered to name them either. I never had them long enough to get attached to them. Either I absorbed them for something stronger, or they died horrible, grisly deaths. Kinda like naming the cow you're going to have to eat. No sense in getting attached to them if they're just going to die soon.

I hate to revive a dead/dying topic, but anyways: A fix... If you can't get the puresteel from the Purity Workshop, press Shift+D and type sdf 73 10 0 I have no idea why that flag randomly gets set to 1 (which makes the game think you already opened the box), but setting it to 0 fixes it, allowing you to get the puresteel like normal. How you use this information is up to you.

I am reminded of the scene from the second Hot Shots movie, where he runs out of arrows, and has to use the chicken in his bow. Come to think of it, I would probably shape exploding chickens and cattle, and then mix them in with standard livestock. But only once or twice. It would probably get old pretty fast. But a fire-breathing chicken, now that would be entertainment that lasts...

What I meant with that was that your average law-abiding Shaper wouldn't need advanced protections because they'd most likely be making a single, easily-controllable creation (or just a few controllable creations), whereas a megalomaniac bent on conquest would most likely be making lots and lots of creations and would therefore have difficulty controlling them (or would make them completely uncontrollable), thus requiring some way to defend themselves from said creations without outright destroying all of them (which would put the madman back at square one).