After having had the problem in a previous run, this time I avoided one major scaling trap that nobody warns you about: The number of enemies scales directly with the number of combatants in your team. That is especially significant if you let "fun" combatants join your team, like a war horse or a mole rat. Most animals in combat are significantly less efficient than human mercenaries of the same level. So hiring them actually makes combat harder, as their presence causes more enemies to appear, and they are less efficient in killing enemies.

The bigger problem in that scaling of enemy numbers was that one is tempted to hire new mercenaries to try out different weapons and related classes. But if you run around with 20 mercenaries, even simple fights end up taking a lot of time. I limited myself to 11 mercenaries this run, because it is the number of different professions in the game. And maybe some professions I could have done without, like brewer, and gone with an even smaller team.

Scaling enemy numbers to character numbers at least I understand: If you can choose your group size freely, the game basically has to do such a scaling. If enemy numbers were fixed, players could just hire enough mercenaries to make fights trivial, and that wouldn't be good game balance. What I don't understand in Wartales is why they decided to scale xp from enemies as they did: In Wartales, the xp you gain from killing a group of enemies does NOT depend on enemy levels. My group is mostly level 8, but whether I kill a group of level 2 back in Tiltren, or a group of level 9 in Ludern, I get about 50 xp for the fight. As levels now need over 2,000 xp, it is quite annoying to do a big main story fight against a high-level group, and be rewarded with so little xp.

Game design wise, I don't understand this design decision at all. Fights against low level groups for me are very quick now, sometimes my first attacker with a two-handed weapon kills several enemies with his first hit, and the rest runs away directly. So if I need a level, I would "farm" those low-level fights, which isn't very interesting. I can only assume that this is because the game was designed to be played in "adaptive" mode, where enemy levels just scale with your level. They added the "region-locked" mode to be more similar to other RPGs, but failed to scale the xp to that.