Is there a limit to pet dragon level gain per battle?

[TinyMage]

I've been trying for a while to level my pet dragon from level 2 to over 20 in one battle so I could grab astral strike ( or whatever it's called ).

My hero is level 8 and my pet dragon starts the battle at level 2. I get a huge amount of experience ( like 60 ) per mana ball. Using some cheap tricks that involves sacrificing goblins I can put down like 50 mana balls in one battle. So after the battle I should get like 3000 experience right? Well apparently not, although the results screen does indeed say my pet dragon earned over 3000 experience it only gives me like 800, getting my pet dragon to about level 8-9.

So is there some kind of hard cap to dragon experience gain during battle and is there anything that I can do about it?

[the benevolent adversary]

there is no hard xp cap but there is a soft one.
the xp you get for using your dragon is basically in relation to how many enemy are left and how many troops you have.
to find out better details search for it; there are many great threads here dealing with this issue.
800 xp is a great number my best was 1000 and some odd from a tough elenhall battle.
dragon dive seems to give the best xp for single use, while crushing blow gives the best xp to rage ratio.

[Fatt_Shade]

Just to add some more info on this :
Pet dragon exp is connected to relation of your and enemy army. SO if you start battle with X total leadership (example 1 paladin , 10 bowman, 3 inquisitors = 1020 total lds), and enemy have Y lds (10 black dragon = 25000 total lds). And if you use some pet skill that say you`ll get 10 exp final gain is 10*Y/X. Meaning more enemy units bring more exp. During battle you kill enemy and lose some units also, so total leadership ratio decreases bringing less exp each turn. And in the end you`ll probably get 0 exp, when enemy army is almost destroyed.
There is cap for this, but i`m not sure what value it is. So you cant start battle with 1 unit cast invisibility on it and kill whole enemy army with rage for 1 million exp. But for lvling pet dragon, you must take in consideration whole battlefield leadership ration enemy/you.

As for your question, first turn in battle mana ball gain is lets say 60, but each turn after you get less, and less. So it`s not 3000 for maybe 50 turn, but 60+50+40+30+20+10+...+1+0. So 800 exp per battle so soon is great gain.
In the end, i`m still on old patch 1.3. Maybe in latest patch is some change making you stop getting exp after certain number of turns. Like for medals, spells counted toward medals are just first 10 battle turns. Check exp on turn 9 , 10 and 11 in battle without killing any enemy units, to see if there is some difference.

Have fun

[TinyMage]

Well I guess I should have stated earlier that the screen told me I was getting 60 experience per mana ball all throughout the battle. It even displayed the correct amount of experience after the battle ( something like 5000 ) but then it had in parentheses only like 800. So It seems the game mysteriously reduced the amount of experience I got based on something which is mentioned nowhere.

Yes I know that the experience your dragon gets is based on your leadership vs enemy leadership and all that, but the whole time I had far less troops then the enemy and the experience displayed was always 60 per mana ball.

Basically I had a group of orc shamans and 2 stacks of goblins hiding behind a pet wall. I killed all the enemy stacks but 1 stack of slow moving troop which was still much larger then my army total. Then I just ran around with some royal snakes ( I think ) and sacrificed goblins and put down mana balls. I did this about 100 times or so until the display started glitching and I could no longer see the mana balls and had to quit. But the game always told me I was getting 60 exp per mana ball, at least until the very end where I started killing off the enemy.

So beyond the your leadership vs enemy leadership factor ( of which I was well aware of ) there is apparently some other limiter that is not mentioned anywhere.

[Fatt_Shade]

Hm ... what patch you have ? As far as i know in 1.3, this is only thing that can change pet dragon exp. Maybe something changed in 1.3.1
Sry for not giving any solution

[TinyMage]

1.3.1 build 6171.

The whole idea here was to see how fast I could cheese through the game with a warrior using high level pet dragon abilities like astral strike. I figured I could get my pet dragon up to level 23 in one battle while my warrior was still only level 8, thus being able to break through the guards to Montero and then beating that one lizard lady so I could get the flying ability, then making the rest of the game far easier to kite. It looks like this isn't possible unless I can figure out what the holdup is here. I can find no info on this game that mentions this at all, kind of frustrating.