Mastodawn

The three main difficulty options are loot, glory, and death. In loot mode, you don't lose if your squad wipes, it just subtracts 10 victories but you keep all rewards up to that point. That lets you push as far as you want because the only "lose" condition is retiring. So, right out the gate you can power through to explore areas, get powerful items, and defeat bosses without metaprogression or knowing what you're doing.

In glory mode, you lose if your squad wipes. The big thing it teaches you is when to retreat because there is no penalty if you do so. So, you can still try to fight harder enemies when under geared or after pivoting comp, as long as you run away if things go south (though, be careful because fleeing takes 4 seconds and you absolutely can get wiped that fast if you aren't careful). But there's a neat interaction with the rune system here. Glory gives 2× as many runes if you end a run by retiring but that halves (back to 1×) if you end a run by wiping. So your only penalty for losing the risk/reward game is not getting as big of a bonus. You can't do worse than if you were playing on loot mode.

The hardest difficulty is death. In that, if a dwarf dies, they stay dead. Rewards are 3× loot mode to make up for it but it's a pretty radical departure in gameplay. Some of the optimal strats in other modes involve glass cannons but you just can't risk it in death mode. On the other hand, it does teach you about how much stronger you get by frequently retiring dwarves and hiring new ones. If you retire a dwarf, their XP is either divided evenly among the squad or 90% converted into beer which you can target who gets. That means retiring someone when you see a good recruit in the shop is great because you can quickly level them up—potentially with better per level bonuses since you've got better late game gear and those bonuses aren't retroactive.

You can play each of these difficulty options in regular mode or eternal mode. In eternal, you don't return to the shop between waves, they keep fighting until you flee. That adds another risk/reward layer to gameplay because dwarves who fall in battle don't get any XP but there are some buffs (like Berserker that gives +5% damage per kill) that stack like crazy but reset on battle end.

I normally wouldn't go into the details of difficulty settings in a game, I'd just play on easy and not care. But I'm impressed that the dev makes all 6 combinations play differently so you have legitimate reasons to play on all of them beyond wanting to challenge yourself. And there's no need to number buff enemies to do it the way most games do.

I'm regularly using 3 of the clans (save slots) to play different styles because I crave different things even though the basics are the same. I've got one loot (eternal) to push end game content via AFK grinding. Another is set up on death for efficient gem farming. The last is for experimenting with different builds on glory.

Dwarves: Glory, Death and Loot - Apps on Google Play