The nerf to the gold rewards from the low numbered tiles has made it to the point that gold earned is lower than gold spent now that the mercenaries cost so much to hire. Can we get this addressed please?
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@Loutre @Nugget could we please soon get a fix so that the mercenary costs raise with the same scaling as does the gold gotten with fights?
Because… indeed… if there isn’t a +800% bonus on hiring a mercenary twice, it’s handicapping players and losing them gold.
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I am not aware of what you guys are referring to. I don’t see a change in the price of mercenaries, it has been half of their power for a long time. Is it possible this is an issue only for the S1 servers?
We’ve got mercs in the 60-80 million range. Clearing the top tiles gives negative gold unless there’s a good bonus (4 heroes, no x color, etc)
Well. Gold gotten for each fight got reduced scaling.
But as you say merc always cost half the power.
You don´t have to be mathematician to calculate that…
(reduced scaling) - 1/2 the power < 0 gold per fight.
I’m not seeing this personally on S1. I tend to hire mercenaries for every Surge battle, and I always finish the Surge with a fair amount more gold than I started with. 
If people are hiring top power mercs to defeat low powered tiles, this could happen, but that’s generally poor Surge strategy anyway
It really depends though
If the cost is half the power of the hero, that means it can go over 50M now. It won’t happen often but 30M+ is very common and still much higher than the rewards
Without bonuses, which are limited, I’ve never seen a district give over 20M
I just hit district 17 and got 10M gold, with the bonus (most guilds should be approaching or over +100%) that’s at least ~20M, which is much more than the cost of a suitable merc hire for a 100M power tile
That really depends… in fact, the guilds where most of players are whales aren’t obviously the most affected ones, usually. It’s the one with evenness of player power.
idk, my guild isn’t very whaley at all and we’re lucky if we get 20 people make a single hit in Surge, but we still tend to get at least +80% and sometimes up to +120% or so. I feel like that should be the minimum for most semi-active guilds.
Evidently some players are experiencing the problem, just saying that I haven’t experienced it myself as my gold only seems to go up
I don’t really have a massive problem with gold - like yes occasionally I run out but in general it doesn’t really slow down my progress - especially since I can always sell skill chips if needed.
I don’t hire mercs however, never unless there is the bonus for hiring them (and even then I go for the cheapest one and work around it with the other 4 slots)
Do you know average player power in your guild? Team Power.
180M ^
Anyone know the exact formula for how much gold we get per battle? (without bonuses)
It is something like a square root of the millions of power. I know 200M power gets just above 14M gold. 90M power is about 10M.
It kinda sucks but eh…
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Yeah did some testing myself. It does seem to be around square root if you have the VIP6 perk, or square root * 0.6666 if you don’t. From the few partial kills I had it does feel like this is calculated individually for each hero in the lineup, so 5 low-power heroes will give more gold than 1 high-power hero even if their total power is the same.
Where X is the power of 1 hero at the current cap, and Y are the gold modifiers:
Mercenary price scales linearly: X*0.5
Gold scales at a square root: sqrt(X*5)*Y
Regardless what modifiers the gold has (+X% from surge levels, +50% from VIP6) the current formula will eventually, 100% guaranteed, make mercenaries obsolete.
Since X (power) grows exponentially with each cap raise (or at least x^2) this problem will get worse exponentially. We will get exponentially closer to the crossing point with each cap raise. S1-14 are probably already close to the crossing point and S21-25 are rapidly getting there.
I presume that is why I stopped buying mercenaries recently, I make much more gold if I don’t use them. This does make the whole guild tokens system suffer.
@Loutre @Nugget can the team review this? Given how power grows this will get out of hand for S1-14 within the next few cap raises. Its better if we address it earlier. Given how the sqrt graph works this system was really generous when it was first introduced (the start of the graph), and it seemed to work well for a long time (the middle), but now it is degrading really fast (close to the crossing point). No amount of flat modifiers on any side will save it, the sqrt needs to be removed (or applied on both sides). If the team doesn’t have time a flat reduction to the 0.5 modifier on mercenary price can buy you time.
If our math is wrong, please call it out.
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S1-14 are already past the point.
Consider this… you can have 570M lines tops in Surge in S1. That means at max 23M-ish Gold per fight. And the top mercs casting 55M Gold.
S21-25 tho?
Power is 8x lower at max, meaning around 70M. You get therefore tops around 8M Gold per fight (that’s “square root of 8”-times less).
Top mercs cost 14M/2=7M so less than you can get in a fight.
While in S1 top mercs can cost 2.5x as much as you get for fight.
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I have stopped or severely limited hiring merc 
as the cost is too high. And ever since that, my gold has stably increased again…
I suggest you do the same until Perblue changes something (which I highly doubt)
I used to have 20B gold some patches ago and it wouldn’t go down no matter what. Now I’m down to 3.5B. Surge has gotten insanely hard, to the point that you can’t defeat any district with 2 heroes alone.
The merc cost is also insane and even if you manage to defeat the district, the gold barely compensates the hiring cost. Now, if you don’t manage to actually win you lose a lot of gold.
Every district in Surge…even the easier ones have heroes that need niche counters like Mary (Lo), Mad Hatter, etc and it’s getting insufferable at this point.
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