I hadn't played in a while. I just tried a new game (v1.32) with the full quest loop strategy. It is still OP.
@azunai I still seem to be able to attack more the 1x per season. Is that a pending change in some upcoming patch or something?
Money is much tighter with the 100gp cost. Before I had money left over for other things. Now I don't have enough money to buy all the quest maps I would like. The tireless march change forces an all horse mount build for a net stack move of 5, which due to insufficient funds I'm not able to make the most of.
They could slow the looping down by increasing the map cost even more to say 150, but I'm not sure that would be enough. Optimal use of the strategy calls for making henchmen with shieldwall, potential and bard. Getting rid of any of these as starting traits for henchmen would slow it down. The game also counts these starting traits differently than the random traits so you can end up with:
starting-trait-shieldwall + random-trait-shiedwall + starting-trait-potential + random-trait-potential(leveled up to level 3) + starting-trait-bard(+10% stack xp) + random-trait-trainer(+% stack xp leveled up to level 3)
This is a funky result that pretty much counts as a bug as far as I'm concerned.
counting the starting traits as the same as the level 1 random traits would also reduce the power of the tactic.
The final component of the strategy is the use of the lightning hammer (for the +per level damage mod). Moving this mod 1 or 2 tech levels higher would probably put it out of reach for the early game. Alternatively the per level damage could be capped at +10 or +15 which is still a respectable damage number but doesn't go into the ridiculous +20 or +50 when you get really high level characters.
All that said, making all those changes would still leave it a very powerful strategy. My previous games where the cost had been 50gp weren't even using all these tactics. I think I used full regular hero stacks (for the tireless march stacking) with the accompanied horrible divided xp. I avoided the potential trait trees, and didn't use the lightning hammers. All of these nerfs I suggested wouldn't add up to my previous self inflicted strategic nerfs- leaving it plenty powerful.