Idle and incremental space games

Swarm MMO has the three parts an incremental game is built from: a rate that grows, automation that removes the clicking, and a reset that pays for itself. It also has other players, who can take what the rate produced. If that last part is a dealbreaker, this is not the game, and the rest of the page will not change that.

The rate

Every planet you own produces probes each minute, at its level: level 1 makes 1, level 10 makes 10. A level costs 100 × level² probes, so 100 for level 2, 400 for level 3, 900 for level 4. There is no capacity limit and nothing decays, so the pile only ever goes up unless you spend it or lose the planet.

Growth comes from two places at once: more planets, and higher levels on the ones you have. Suns add a third, paying energy that buys technology up to level 100, at a cost of 33,835,000 energy for a full run.

The automation

Clicking is optional past the first few minutes. A planet can be set to upgrade itself as soon as it can afford to, and to ship its probes at a threshold you pick between 100 and 10,000, either to the nearest friendly sun or to a target you choose on the map. Suns do the same one step up, feeding super-probes to their galaxy's black hole.

The Command Center applies one of those settings across an entire empire in one action, in slices of up to 200 planets, which is the difference between running fifty planets and running five hundred. It costs 150 credits for 30 days, or 10 credits for a single day.

The prestige layer

A collapse is the reset. Hold every sun in a galaxy, capture the black hole at its core, stockpile 1,000 megaprobes on it and collapse it. The galaxy is destroyed, your planets in it included, and every sun you own afterwards permanently produces more energy. Prestige, energy, technology levels, credits and skins live on the account and survive every collapse.

The conversion chain is what makes a collapse a project rather than a purchase: probes become super-probes at a sun at 100 to 1, super-probes become megaprobes at a black hole at 100 to 1, and anything under one full unit arrives as nothing. Crossing a galaxy border costs a share of the swarm that falls as the target galaxy ages, and raises both floors along with it: everything for a spawn galaxy's first 3 days, which is how long the players who spawned into it have before anyone outside can reach them, then 10 per cent less each day until the border is free by day 13. One galaxy always has no border at all, so there is somewhere to attack at full strength.

Where it stops being an idle game

• Your rate is contested. Planets can be taken while you are offline. Automation defends and expands, but it does not guarantee anything.
• The reset needs a whole galaxy. A collapse is gated on holding every sun in it, so prestige is a conquest rather than a threshold you cross by waiting.
• Numbers stay small. Production is linear in level and there is no exponential scaling to watch, so if the appeal is watching a counter reach 1e30, this is not that.

What it does share with the genre is that time spent away is not wasted, and that an empire big enough to be tedious is an empire you can automate. Play in a browser, no install, no account.