Time-Based Enemy Scaling

THE CONCEPT

The usual enemy scaling is the most annoying feature of the offline single-player games for me. I hate it when my enemies get stronger as soon as I level-up. What's the point of getting experience if it makes your enemies stronger as well? Unleveling the game actually makes things even worse. Yes, you stop "sharing" your progress with your enemies, but is it really a good idea to play a game where you have the most OP advantage: you can get stronger, but your enemies can't? It's like playing a strategy game, where you can develop new technologies, you can improve your cities and armies, you can conquer new territories, but your enemies can't. Doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Even if in the beginning of the game your enemies are challenging, all you need to do is spend time in the game, and eventually you are going to "outrun" your opponents. Boring.

The Vanilla Scaling System

Advantages: Have hard time finding any.

Disadvantages: "Self-improvement" becomes pointless at some point or even detrimental. You share your progress with your enemies.

The Unleveled Game

Advantages: The absence of the disadvantages from the previous system, challenging early game.

Disadvantages: Boring late game. Spend-time-to-win mechanics. Hard-to-make, often incompatible mods that overhaul almost EVERYTHING to make the game unleveled.

Location-Based Enemy Scaling

Advantages: If it's not too extreme, can be successfully used with the other leveling systems.

Disadvantages: If it's extreme, turns an open-world game into... well, not so open. "You can go there, but not there"

The Time-Based Enemy Scaling System

Advantages:

- Both the early and the late game can be interesting and challenging.

- Like in the PVP games, you and your enemies become stronger independently of each other, but you have the same amount of time, and only your superior gaming skills and strategy will let you outrun, "outfarm", outperform and win the game.

- Time becomes an important resource, which by itself introduces an interesting new game mechanics to the game.

- It makes the game endlessly replayable (If you consider this an advantage)

- Uses the existing game mechanics, doesn't require too much "overhauling". Super-compatible (at least, my implementation of the idea)

- and so on...