Economy buildings are degenreate.

[heh]

No, not in that way. In the way that the best strategy is to make as much economy as you can. Which means the start of every run is pretty tense for the first few days, until you get to the point where you flip from spending money on building your economy to spending your built-up economy on empowering your character, and from that point on the win is a ~100% thing, which means that playing it out to its inevitable conclusion ends up being really boring. Even spending the money quickly becomes boring at that point, since you go from every other item being a big upgrade to every tenth item being a super tiny upgrade.

Econ buildings should be removed.

[Samseng Yik]

No disagree.
I hope money reward each night is bigger, but remove gold mine.
Let player decide use gold for what focus (material, weapon, shop, production).

The worker spam on gold mine strategy get old...... and this strategy mostly is first few nights harder until the gold income snowball settled all other situation.

[Fringehunter7719]

The current system isn't perfect, but it does create interesting choices for about 7-8 of the 11 days (on Lakeburg), where you balance how much of your resources to put into long term growth and how much into surviving the immediate night.

I don't think either removing economy buildings (which creates no choices at all, interesting or otherwise) or removing gold mines (meaning optimal economic strategy goes from harvesting ruins into building gold mines to harvesting ruins into building production buildings) would improve things at all.

Some sort of economy, with a balance of short against long term gains seems fundamental to the whole point of having town management, to me. And this is definitely part of the game that I currently enjoy.

If anything looks suspicious in terms of balance, for my taste it's the insurance policy of 1 item per night and guaranteed choice of many weapons from the shop, which insulates the long term strategy (i.e. entirely pump economy for 3-4 days) from the drawbacks it should have a bit too well. Given how integral to the game design this has been it might be hard to tweak it without damaging player's ability to mitigate bad RNG on starter weapons though. Perhaps starter characters could be given a choice of 3 randomly generated weapons.

The nightly rewards structure also pushes players into a win harder/lose harder snowball as well, which amplifies the underlying effects of the current economic balance.

The very slow meta progression and incredible power it provides once you eventually get a fair chunk through (like 50+ hours into a fresh save) are also an issue in the current build in my opinion.

[just.dont.do.it]

Yes, the game definitely should do with less ways for rewarding you for "winning harder".
Gold mines are a more touchy subject (they DO apply a reasonable risk/reward ratio), but things like night rewards aren't.
Currently the game very heavily punishes you when you start losing (you're bound to lose walls, buildings, heroes; and also you'll lose night reward item in the process), so the optimal strategy is to win every night cleanly. Things like mage circle upgrades are horribly irrelevant, strategies around stalling are less beneficial than strategies around simply killing enemies with massive damage, etc.

However, I would also very much dislike if the game would actively "rubberband" the difficulty, letting me recover after losses and not allowing any breaks if I'm not having such losses. That would be rather bad design too.

The right way out, I think, is to simply reduce amount of rewards (and punishments) associated directly with "winning" or "losing".

As for the gold mines and other "economy" buildings, I think some slight balancing could actually achieve pretty great results. E.g. what if gold mine income would depend on day # rather than being flat value? Early gold mines could be made slightly less beneficial than they are now, and late gold mines could be more worthwhile.

[Leiraion]

I like this idea!

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

...bad RNG on starter weapons though. Perhaps starter characters could be given a choice of 3 randomly generated weapons.

Sounds really cool tbh, start the game and immediately you'd be prompted with 3 rolls, one for each hero's weapon and you must choose one. That would be neat!

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

The nightly rewards structure also pushes players into a win harder/lose harder snowball as well, which amplifies the underlying effects of the current economic balance.

I think you should receive the Night Reward no matter what. If you didn't lose, you get it. Past that, maybe add some luck to the rolls if you obtain a higher rank. For example you get increased chance to roll higher quality with better rank for the night:
Panic 2: +10% magic, +5% rare, +2% epic
Panic 0: +20% magic, +10% rare, +5% epic

Something along that line would be better because you don't outright lose the reward just because you got messed up that night. Associating the luck with panic scaling would be good imo.

I've only played a few rounds since the patch yesterday, but it seems like they already buffed the item level scaling on the night reward so that's good. Prior, it would still be rolling tier 1-2 items on the 10th day..