I built a simulator to balance the game without playing it for months
First: I have heard your feedback, and thank you for it. The notes about progression stalling, and about builds that feel either unstoppable or stuck, all landed. Rather than guess at fixes, I wanted to see the whole game the way you actually play it.
So I built a simulator. It is not a spreadsheet guess. It drives the real game engine, the same code that runs when you play, and plays entire runs from the first wave to the final overlord. It does this thousands of times, as different kinds of player, in minutes instead of months. I pointed it squarely at MechMaxxing, because that is the system doing the most to shape how a run feels.
Two findings that matter
If you play fair and do not chain your boosters, you hit a wall. Wire your amplifiers in parallel, one power tap each, the safe and tidy way, and your damage adds up but never compounds. Around the seventh overlord it simply stops keeping pace with the enemy, and no amount of grinding gets you past it.
If you chain your boosters aggressively, you destroy the game in no time. Run those same amplifiers in a series, each one feeding the next into a single weapon, and the multipliers compound. The wall vanishes. The simulated min-maxer cleared all eleven overlords in about a week of calendar time and a couple dozen hours of actual play, far faster than this game is meant to last.
What that tells me
MechMaxxing and booster chaining are not a side trick. The chaining is the thing that lets you progress smoothly instead of slamming into a wall, so it needs to be there. But right now it is all or nothing: chain and trivialize the game, or do not and stall out. That is a cliff, not a curve.
The work ahead is tuning chaining into a sweet spot, where building a strong series is rewarding and skillful without erasing the rest of the game. I am going to sit with this over the coming days and come back with a solid plan rather than a knee-jerk nerf.
In parallel I am taking a hard look at the currencies, and at how different play styles can stay inside the timeline this game is built for. The goal is a real balance between being on the grind and being able to make meaningful progress when you come back for more, an experience that rewards you whether you push hard or check in casually.
See it for yourself
Here is the report the simulator produced, so you can see the difference between nuking the game and hitting the wall with your own eyes. It is a snapshot of the current build, before any changes. Three playstyles, measured against the intended timeline: the aggressive chained build runs the table, while the fair parallel builds stop at overlord seven.
Nothing in the live game has changed yet. This is the measurement that comes before the tuning, and I wanted to share it openly. Keep the feedback coming in the Discord; it is shaping exactly this.