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What are some good idle/incremental games?
I get heavily into Universal Paperclips about a year ago, it really just scratched a particular itch in my mind. It was particularly nice to be able to play it at work and not need to worry about it being open 100% of the time!
What are your recommendations for similar idle/incremental games?
My guilty pleasure is AFK Arena on mobile. I will tell you straight out that it's one of those "Gacha" games where you can pay for ingame "gems", but there's not really much meaningful PVP of any kind - so it's not like you're going to get stomped by a big spender in a way that hinders your progress.
If you ignore the store I think it's fine as-is. The art is nice and the gameplay is simple - you just look at your opponent's team, select a team that you think can beat them considering their strengths and weaknesses, and then see how the fight plays out Autochess-style. When you're not playing, your heroes accumulate resources on your behalf up to a certain time limit and you can use those resources to improve them to be better in fights, which improves their resource-gathering, etc.
There are some "daily quests" that let you gather the ingame gems that let you summon more heroes but they only take a couple minutes to finish - I find it a nice way to kill maybe 15 minutes a day.
As for more traditional idle games, the other ones that come to mind that I personally enjoyed, similar to Universal Paperclips are:
Of the above, my favourite is probably Candy Box 2.
I loved A Dark Room. I got it free on Android through some promotion. It was a great game with an interesting story. It's especially interesting to listen to the developer commentary after finishing the game. This game introduced him to writing software that's accessible to the visually impaired. Hearing him talk about that journey was pretty cool.
The link you have for Candy Box 2 is actually for Candy Box 1, it should just be candybox2.github.io for the second one.
Candy Box 2 and A Dark Room are both good games outside of the incremental game sphere IMO. Both can be can be beaten in a day or two of play IIRC, which kinda changes stuff up from the other stuff in the genre of incrementals. Both are also super nostalgic to my middle school and high school days, which might help my complete love for them.
Spaceplan is great.
These two places may be of interest to you:
https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/top/
https://plaza.dsolver.ca/
For the "not open all the time", I would recommend Potatoz, The Supplier's Complex, and The Idle Class. They all have a bit of an early involvement that vanes the further you are into the game.
not sure if I've misunderstood the request/genre, but the Paperclip thing reminds me of a really basic Cookie Clicker.
http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/
I can't recommend avoiding it enough.
Fun fact: this game actually ruined Destiny/Destiny 2 for me - I now see this as the reductio ad absurdum of most games I try to play nowadays.
Well, Universal Paperclips lasted a lot longer than expected. That took a good 8 hours of time, thanks.
I've been enjoying this one so far - Evolve
Which is reminiscent of Kittens Game. I would say Evolve is perhaps a little... easier? Unless changes in have happened in the last year since I played it, you have to be quite careful where you spend your prestige in order to continue progressing well.
Argh, the bloody Kittens Game. I'm not clicking that link because I know it's saved my game. Months of my life I had a tab open with that damn game in it. I don't want to go back to it.
I played Evolve for a while but it lost my interest a bit after a while. It's a nice concept and I wish they'd done a bit more with it.
Not sure if you've looked recently, but Evolve has had a lot of new stuff added since I began a month or so ago. Change Log
i'm sorry but
HOHO HAHA
On Android I play Idle Zen (and because this is android I need to warn you against Zen Idle which has lots of IAPs, unlike Idle Zen). I've pretty much completed it, I think.
I enjoyed Tower of Hero.
People tell me that Soda Dungeon is good, and I've just started it but haven't really got to grips with it yet.
I seem to remember I spent some time on Inflation RPG, and also BattleDNA2.
Plantera is cute and works well as something to have on in the background.
It's pushing 15 years old, but DEFCON is an interesting one if you can keep a background window open. Gameplay is simple, the strategy can be as deep as you make it, and even against the AI there's a reasonable amount of replay value.
It's a real-time strategy game that can be played in real time: 1 real-world second to 1 in-game second. It even has a specific "office mode" that locks the speed and limits the total game time to 6 hours (it can run 8+ otherwise). We used to run competitive multiplayer games across the local network at one of my old jobs, and checking on the map every hour or so was a great way to break up the day.
Factory Idle is something I just found, but it seems fun. Much more involved than paperclips though.