EDIT: The version is supposed to be 2.40.0.16, not 1.40.0.16, sorry about that.


I'm currently testing this because I've seen much better rewards for an auto-calc fight than the hunting challenges or even the manual fights. Currently I'm trying this out on a batch of 4 malicious spiders. So far I've done several coin flips using four different options (manual and auto both hunting and fighting) and by far I think the rewards I'm seeing for the auto-calc fights are far superior in general to either the hunting or manual fights. The rewards I've seen for auto-calc fights are 2 silk (1 silk for one fight) and either a decent low tier weapon or armor. Meanwhile auto-calcs for the hunting have ranged from 0-2 silk and (most times) a weapon/armor, not always all that great. Manual hunts I've seen pretty consistent decent rewards, comparable to the fights (though we dropped to one silk plus a bow one test). However manual fights I've seen pretty low rewards 0-1 silk and kinda crappy jewelry, shields, and weapons.

What first clued me into this was after I screwed up a turn, got attacked by two different groups of tier 2 enemies, and auto-calced both fights. The rewards from both made me want to keep the results even though I had two guys likely to die. I hunted both groups of enemies when I reloaded and I didn't get nearly comparable results.

Thus far I've done more auto-calc tests than I have manual tests. Also, all manual tests only last one round and have never went into a second round (though I've seen second phases on both).

If I had to guess about
9-11 auto-fights
7-9 auto-hunts
5 manual hunts
5 manual fights

This could be due to rng, but I'm certainly seeing evidence to suggest that the auto-calc fights give either better rewards or consistently better rewards than any other challenge at the lower tiers. Anyone that has saving enabled and are willing to do a few tests to confirm this, that would be awesome. I'd also be curious to see if wounding has any impact on rewards (I know that if you lose someone odds go up for recruitment so maybe that logic applies to challenge rewards now as well).

Also, my expedition consists of a hunter, a warrior, a crafter, and a gatherer.

Yeah I didn't see any difference about loot with this patch, and I never autofight.
Or maybe there is no added loot in the Normal difficulty I play.

There's been some talk on the Steam forums about this sort of thing. From what you're describing, you're comparing rewards from Hunt challenges to rewards from Fight challenges. Don't expect those to be the same. And, at least in general, it does not seem that auto-calculating battles results in better or worse loot than manually completing them, compared to other challenges of the same rating and type.

Some challenges do give much better rewards than other challenges of the same skull rating, though. Hex, for example, gives enormous amounts of loot. Theodore lies to you in the tutorial when he says that Fight challenges give the best loot. It seems like Fight is roughly average.

When you're attacked, you can only do Fight challenges (except, obviously, for special events). If you're comparing the loot from those encounters to the loot from Hunt or Sneak or Social or Hex, you'll find that there are differences.

I play mostly at about 300%, so if it's different at 350% I don't know. I don't have much fun with the economy cranked up to max difficulty and encounters scaling so furiously :P

Sorry for the late reply to your post.