How does leveling occur?
Any favorite strategies?

Level up your skills.

As you level up your skills, your level increases. This includes training your skills by paying gold to training NPCs as well as performing specific tasks to raise your skill yourself - like sneaking around enemies to raise your sneak skill or hitting things with a fireball to raise the destruction skill.

Your level will increase more when you level skills that are higher level. So increasing sneak from 50 to 51 will give you more level experience than increasing your sneak from 10 to 11.

as your level increases, do mobs get better?

kk
It says in the manual, "To raise your level, increase any combination of your skills multiple times."

so if I level all my skills at once then will I level more slowly than if I level a small subset of skills?

One issue that does arise though, is that there still is some "light" scaling of enemies (dragons become more difficult, etc.). If you allow yourself to be leveled by abilities used outside of combat (lockpicking, speachcraft, pickpocket, etc.), you might find yourself in a bit of pain, needing to turn down the difficulty.

You level up by repeatedly doing the same things.

This includes stuff like:


Sneaking near enemies
Swinging your weapons at enemies
Shooting arrows at enemies
Getting hit by enemies
Casting spells
Picking pockets
Crafting items
Enchanting items
Picking Locks


...the problem, however, is that most enemies will level up with you. You could level yourself up using 5 or 6 non-combat skills. Well, that means you enemies will level up too - but their combat skills will be at your level while you're combat skills are still lower level due to you focusing on non-combat stuff.



So, it's important not to spend too much time on non-combat stuff in this game.

Oblivion had a similar system, but it was even more punishing. You could accidentally level yourself up just JUMPING in place for 30 minutes or SPRINTING too much.

So then you're like level 10 with a really high JUMP skill - LOL

Unfortunately, it meant all your enemies were now level 10 too - only they are level 10 in COMBAT SKILLS and kicking your butt.

2 words.

It svcks.

From what I've read so far the answer is yes, though i'd like a more definite answer to really be sure.