Role of gold in late game

[sourdust]

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, I'm a relative noob in the forums...

With around 150 hours under my belt on the game, I've completed all the main tavern quests, nearly all the puzzles, the first triple quest, all the silver challenges, and working in to the gold challenges soon.

I can already see once I have finished all these tasks, I'll start doing silly things that other perfectionists do, like getting rainbow borders on all the dungeons, and trying to top the daily charts.

One thing that I've noticed is the changing role of gold. In the early bit of learning the game and unlocking stuff, gold was an interesting resource constraint. It forced you to make some choices about what to unlock, and encouraged you to think carefully before over-spending on dungeon prep.

Now, with most content unlocked and a certain confidence in my understanding and skill in the game, gold is a whole lot less interesting at the kingdom level. It doesn't operate anymore to force interesting choices, since everything is unlocked. Every once in a while you get a very expensive, tiny incremental bonus (+1 gold for adventurers). But all that gold scarcity (again at kingdom level, not in individual dungeon runs) does now is prevent you from experimenting and doing multiple gold-intensive runs on hard things, like rat king in VGT or whatnot.

So instead of being an interesting kind of scarcity, gold is now an annoying kind of scarcity that might force you to do boring runs to generate gold.

I wonder whether a solution would be to have an ultimate "sandbox mode" unlock, where you no longer have to pay gold for dungeon prep, but also can't take any gold out of dungeons. Within a dungeon, of course normal gold rules would apply.

Maybe this is a toggle that could show up in Bezar... sort of like him underwriting the cost of adventures, on a 100% contingency recovery basis! This would allow advanced players to focus solely on their insane completionist goals without worrying about kingdom finances.

The unlock should be available once a player finishes all quests, puzzles, challenges, and triple challenges, and has unlocked all content in the encyclopedia thing.

[choongmyoung]

I'm currently at
- No triple quests yet
- 3 Viscious dungeons left for Rainbow
- Unlocked everything but 1 veto

Whenever I want, I farm gold from a flaming dungeon with VT Bet on boss TT goblin assassin Titan Guitar prep, brings me 1000G under 5 min, enough for a lots of run. No problem with the finance at all.

I don't think the game design about the gold is bad. The main part of the game is doing a dungeon run and it essentialy means completing dungeons or so is the main goal of the game. The veto / locker slot or bank upgrade above a certain point is optional, and you can skip them. If you want them to unlock you have to earn money - which makes perfect sense.

Recently I always tried vicious dungoens (NC, NL, DL) with heavy preperation (~200G for each run), and my kingdom gold seems not increasing nor decreasing. I'm pretty sure if you win 90% of the runs you will not have any finance problem. If you can't, unless you are doing VGT or so, the main reason is the player's skill. And if you lose runs because of your skills, you have to earn money - which makes perfect sense.

[Tinker]

[sourdust]

[choongmyoung]

[Darvin]

The game gives you way more gold than you'd ever need. It doesn't feel that way when you're starting out and lose a lot of dungeon runs, but once you've gotten your rainbows across all the hard difficulty dungeons you'll see what I mean. You're over the difficulty hump, you're going to win most of these runs (and without too many expensive preps), and that profit adds up very quickly when you aren't losing runs very often.

This is about the time when all those jokes about transmuting gold into lead should start making sense. Gold really isn't as valuable as it first appears