That was my conclusion as well, the only arguments might be at certain speeds the distance per move might be such that you would get slightly more if the gold/seeds gained is rounded after every move rather than just a hidden number thats rounded at the end of the map. Then there's potential min/maxing if the rounding is 'always up / always down / nearest whole'. If the rounding exists at all, its also possible that any remainder is just dropped.

So I'm fairly confident to say that slower units don't increase net gains, but there may be a 'sweet spot' for speed to sit, but determining that value is definitely beyond my grasp, and the gains seem like they would be pretty inconsequential.

I'm thinking of something: when you end a map and you have at least one team left turning around trapped in those event map circle. Does the game end based on the number a squad have walked or the number of turn after the first unit reached the final flag?

If you don't know, you can't have a team endlessy turning around. The game will finish by itslef after a time.

So if it's based on the number of turn, actually running high speed is better when you farm those maps. If not that will be the same at the end.

Edit: made a run on ?-4, seems you have a max limit till a team don't get anymore gold/seed. Or maybe it's a map limit.

You get a certain amount of gold/seeds per step and per node you hit, you can see the numbers for some of the maps in the HBC wiki even.

If you want to try to research whether speed affects it or not you should really pick a map without any random tiles and have different speed teams go through it, like the early area 1 maps. Maps like the 80 stamina gardens are just way too unreliable.

well just managed to get spinning around the 25 stam gold for this

got 3175 golds for 2 times in which i succeed in passing all node and reaching the point where walking no longer gives you gold

so yeah there might be hard limit each map or maybe it's just my luck

While I agree a flat map with no random tiles would have been optimal, you'd also only have one data set to compare to another (slow vs fast at distance X) and would never have any (slow vs fast at distance Y) for comparison. Another problem with doing the test one something that level is the level size is so small the numbers on the received items would be smaller, which makes it harder to determine whether there the results is just the RNG of what you've received from a unit's move.

That being said I did some tests on 1-3 mostly to just watch a single units' gains. Watching a 444 speed unit I had numbers ranging from 29-46(coins). Then with a unit with a speed of 239. I saw numbers ranging between 11-26. Given these sample sizes are not huge maybe about 50 (moves) per unit and some of those moves resulted in seeds. So take this as you will.

It certainly seems the random amount you get does use speed / distance as a metric in its generation. Something like { (Distance * RNG) * Difficulty multipliers }. If anything this means that taking full set of slow units with the goal of having more turns isn't going to INCREASE your end rewards, if anything it would only bring your ending rewards to tighter cluster for finding out the average rewards for a given map.

(Just for fun) It can actually have the exact opposite effect. It can cause you to lose seeds, (but not really gold) if you use a slow enough unit on a low enough level. There were more than a few times my 239 speed unit would make moves and get nothing, my guess is that the move - reward being chosen was a seed and { (Distance * RNG) * Difficulty multipliers } < (.5 or 1) -I can't reasonably discern which of those two values it is. And therefor rounded to 0.