I’ve been really enjoying this demo for a game called epic auto towers, even moreso than I enjoyed super auto pets, which I think is fair to say the same genre. Compared to SAP, this game is PvE, and adds relics and bosses. Ultimately it has a ton of really satisfying combos that can get really high stats, and I’m super excited for more content but am wary they’re probably going to nerf things like the guardian spamming + 1 obsidian tower combo, or the exponential growth of the flower + bee build. So it’s been making me wonder what kind of game could exist in the incremental sphere that would have that same kind of crazy combo finding, but be totally fine with some combos getting to like expoential levels.

To keep the exploration side of things, I think you’d have to have some sort of system where you have parallel “runs”, and towers are more expensive based on how many you have across all active runs, thus encouraging you to find combos with completely new sets of units. Perhaps the main progression would be buying additional towers and increasing the number of parallel runs. Each of these “runs” wouldn’t actually reset when they lose, they just keep playing that last level, forever gaining the currency used to buy towers and increasing max parallel runs. Then you as the player can replace a tower to have the run restart and see if it gets to a higher “last level”. There could still be interesting and unique bosses along the way etc.

My main concern with that implementation would be it not really working with RNG - it’d have to be fully deterministic. But I like the aspects of rolling for units and getting a random selection of cool relics. I’m just not sure how to integrate those into the idea.