So per the leveling mechanism and how it operates like Personal Upgrades:
AA3 wrote:
... its level doesn’t actually increase until you spend the time and effort training it to match your new, greater degree of expertise. This requires you to pay credits equal to the cost of buying a new creature companion of the creature companion’s new level on the Creature Companion Statistics table, minus the cost of its previous level...```
So this would make you assume this follows the same exponential curve as weapons, and you'd be mostly right. But there's a bit of weirdness with the costs, and I cant figure out why. Here's the chart for reference <https://thehiddentruth.info/player/equipment/companions/creatures>
To go down the line of the cost for a creature companion for every level, compared to the total cost, it exposes some weirdness: 100, 400, 700, 600, 900, 2200, 500, 3000, 3600, 5k, 6k, 8k, 15k, 17k, 31k, 50k, 62k, 109k, 155k, 240k.
There's some other weirdness in the chart, but to focus on level 1-7, it appears that the scaling is off from normal mechanics, with level 5-6 costing as much as the previous three levels combined, and level 6-7 being cheaper than even level 3. This is really the only major element of concern, and I feel like someone mixed up the scaling of the numbers during the design phase.
There's some other strangeness of such small increases between some levels and much larger increments between others, as well as weirdness of other stats (such as most levels being +1 attack, but a few being +2, while only 12 and 20 get no benefit), but those are more minor complaints.
