Gold that is saved between rounds generates interest.Towers are upgraded by purchasing copies of the same tower and unlock special bonuses at the highest level.Towers have classes, if you have multiple towers of the same class on the board you gain either set bonuses or global bonuses.Towers can now be bought from a shop that offers 3-5 towers at once and can be rerolled, so the right side tower purchasing thing that gives you access to any tower at any time is removed.The transition from this to an autochess-like is very simple: I think the auto chess formula comes from TD games originally so it makes sense that it would fit better in that genre. The most obvious ones are tower defense games. In any case, here are a few examples of how the formula could be used elsewhere, using existing games as a template because working from something that exists is better than working from scratch: Bloons TD People assumed that autobattles were an important part of the hook so they copied that faithfully, but it’s possible that what was actually important were all these other elements that weren’t explored further because people were stuck in the autobattle mentality, as Baumi says in his video. It’s possible that this is why the autochess rush by so many big companies fell short of the potential it initially seemed to have. This is because automatic combat is somewhat of a divisive mechanic and I have the feeling that most people just sort of don’t like it.

That is, if you have a game with these 5 elements and autobattles, and you have the same game but without autobattles, the one without will likely do better, in my opinion. In fact, I kind of think that autobattles are a negative. So despite the examples given mostly being autobattlers, (Despot’s Game and Vivid Knight are 100% autobattlers while SNKRX kind of is but also isn’t) I personally don’t think that element is necessary. More importantly, automatic battles are not a part of this core set of features. The main thing here is that these 5 elements can be taken anywhere, as they make a set of core mechanics that are really strong and addicting by default. Here another developer states what they consider to be the core elements of “autobattler-likes”, and I would add 2 more for a total of 5: What really is carrying it is the auto chess formula: A lot of people who I see talk about the game sort of focus on the snake part a little too much, and while the snake thing is cute and it works, in my opinion it really is the weaker part of it. I agree with this idea a lot and part of what motivated me to write this post was expanding on this thought a little more. It’s a 4-5 minutes watch and there he’s talking about how the contribution that the game made was sort of taking the auto chess formula and applying it to a different context, and how from there you could really apply it to anything because it’s such a strong and solid formula that it should work anywhere. It’s a very good video overall but the part that interested me the most was the one I linked above.

Games like auto chess