Dynamic starting gold scaling

[WoodenGoblin]

Hello folks. First time posting here. I am making my first UMC campaign (well, the first one I can hope to actually complete, at least) and I am thinking about the old problem with feast-or-famine gold imbalance, when after a few scenarios good players swim in gold and bad players struggle to hire two spearmen. Now I'm thinking, is scaling enemy's starting gold for each scenario a viable design principle? For example, in a given scenario I'll set enemy gold to 1.5x player's actual gold (carryovers and all) on easy and 2x on normal. The pros and cons I can think of:

1) Every scenario has approximately the difficulty it should have, regardless of how well player did in previous ones. Of course, there are many other variables (most notably player's recall list) but this alone makes balancing (and playtesting) scenarios way easier.

2) On the other hand, it can be argued that adjusting gold robs the player of sense of accomplishment after finishing previous scenario in a perfect way. But I don't think having enough gold to steamroll any opposition is a good reward, anyway.

3) My biggest concern is that gold scaling effectively makes quick finishing bonuses irrelevant, and if players understand it, they can wait until the end of turns and milk enemies for experience. I think it's weird and not a desired behavior.

So, do people here use gold scaling in their campaigns? It's mostly about easy/normal difficulty, of course, on hard too little gold means you have to replay last scenario or two and too much gold is almost impossible. Oh, and I have to mention that I only plan to have 6 scenarios in my campaign so maybe I'm overthinking it and players would not accumulate any great imbalance (but honestly I don't know).

If this topic was already discussed before, I apologize. I've searched but I didn't find anything.

[sergey]

Hi! I am pretty sure this topic was already discussed a lot of times. For example, mainline gold system was changed from 80% carryover to 40% carryover on top of minimal starting gold. However, there is always a room for improvement and experiments. In this topic I started similar discussion https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=51034

Regarding your questions. I know at least one UMC campaign (Antar, Son of Rheor) which uses such scaling system for several latest scenarios (and it works pretty well). One of the drawbacks are edge cases. E.g. 100 gold vs 150 is significantly different experience comparing to 500 vs 750. It is also true that players may abuse the system if they know how it works.

I would not recommend to use the scaling system as the only mechanism to balance your campaign. However, having several such scenarios looks promising. First of all, it will serve the balancing purpose. Secondly, you will experiment and gather player's feedback.

If you have 6 scenarios, I think it will perfectly work the next way:
- 2-3 scenarios with the scaling system
- 2-3 scenarios with lowered carryover percentage (e.g. 10%-20%)
- 1 scenario without gold carryover

Here are the balancing ideas I can think of:
- more difficulty levels (e.g. 5)
- lower carryover percentage
- reset player's gold with a zero carryover scenario
- reset player's recall list (or control it somehow) with a special scenario where they loose their veterans (which is frustrating to be honest)
- alternative early finish bonus, which is fun but doesn't give significant strategic advantage (like a slight upgrade of main characters)

Please let me know if you will find any other balancing ideas.

[WoodenGoblin]

Thanks sergey! More difficulty levels is an interesting idea, at least with a short campaign it hopefully wouldn't take too long to test it. I guess I'll have to download your campaign and look at how it works. Other your ideas also can be useful, although purging recall list is probably better to use only in very long campaigns (and even then, players won't like it).