Must every party member damage monster at least once to gain experience like it was in LOG1?

Yep. Unless you're a farmer, then you must consume food to level! :p

I'm playing on hard difficulty with ironman enabled and so far my farmer has been pretty damn useless.

But the idea is that, in the long term, my fighting party members gain more experience from the fights and attain a higher level that way (2 of them are humans with a 20% experience bonus) while my farmer gets experience from a different source and provides utility spells and skills to help the others.

Not sure if I'm shooting myself in the foot by not using an optimized 4-man killing squad, but time will tell :)

Not entirely true. I have an alchemist in my party that sits in the back and doesn't attack often (pellets are limited, I find) and he gains experience in every battle regardless, to the point where he's equal level and experience-point-progression.

Oh, I guess my alchemist's trailing behind might be entirely attributed to the experience bonus of my humans then. Sorry for the misinformation.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be far less randomness (if any at all) in character advancement. Health and energy increases seem to come in a steady amount instead of being rolled. At least when I reloaded a save game before leveling to see what happened to my hp, they increased by the exact same amount. It might be because my characters' vitality just isn't high enough to make a difference yet, but it looks like a positive change has happened in my eyes.

It no longer pays to invest in skills and attributes in a very specific order to get better stats anyway (athletics doesn't increase vitality anymore, it instead directly affects your HP), so there's less room for min-maxing even if some random factor still exists.


Off-topic: is it just me or are firearms quite weak? The sling does more damage for me because it gains a bonus from dexterity. The pistol I found doesn't get a bonus from any attribute. So it would only really be helpful for low dex characters who still want to use a ranged weapon that isn't thrown.

Do you get new traits as you level? Or are traits locked to those that you choose in character generation?

Traits are locked (2 per character). You gain 2 skillpoints at the start (except farmers, who get 0) and 1 skillpoint for each level after that.

At certain skill levels, you do get additional "traits" associated with the skill you invested in. Like if you spend 2 points in accuracy, you can attack with melee weapons from the back row. Features like this already existed in the first LoG, but I think there are more of them now.

There are also special items you can find in secret chests that unlock unique traits, which can't be obtained in any other way. For example I found a book that, when read, gave one of my characters the Leadership trait. As long as he is alive, my entire party gets +1 to all their attributes. I do think items like this are pretty rare, but since I've only cleared the first large dungeon there's bound to be more.

One other caveat: Ratlings have an unstated racial ability to gain stat-ups by eating cheese. No, I'm not kidding. 3 cheese eaten = 1 random stat-up; 4 more for the second one; 5 more for the next, etc.

This is in addition to the chargen mutation trait and the XP-for-food gimmick if they're a farmer.

Haha! That's pretty neat. Will have to keep it in mind.

Something I just discovered by chance: lizardmen gain bonus attribute points from eating eggs.

I'm not sure how many though. Probably 3-5.

People have looked in the game code and confirmed this:

A ratling's favorite food is cheese.
A lizardman's favorite food is eggs.
An insectoid's favorite food is horned fruit.
Mintotaurs and humans do not have a favorite food.

After eating three of the favorite food (it doesn't have to be at the same time), the character gets +1 to a random stat. After four more, another +1, then five more for a third +1, etc, to a maximum total of +10.

Like to the ratlings' Mutation trait, these random stat-ups are set by the game seed, so you can't do a save/reload to get different ones.

There are nowhere near enough of these food items for any character to hit the cap during the standard campaign on the island. (There's a lot more cheese than eggs or fruit, but a ratling still won't come close.)