itch.io

Glad to hear my feedback was helpful! As for the snowballing issue, the two main ideas that come to mind of what might be worth doing to address this is:
A. The simple option- just make it so that if you lose a fight that it ends your run, and you just go back to the start. Basically the roguelike approach.
B. You could flip the system on its head somewhat. Essentially you could have a strong negative feedback loop and a much weaker positive feedback loop that eventually becomes stronger than the negative feedback loop. The benefit of this is that you can still have momentary comebacks, while still rewarding/encouraging the player to try to win even when relatively outmatched. One of the primary issues with negative feedback loops that are too strong is that all that really matters is the end (e.g. in mario kart games the early laps aren't that important since it's relatively easy for someone behind to catch up and it's harder for people in the front to maintain being ahead of the pack). A practical example of what combining a positive and negative feedback loop in your game might look like might be something like:
- you keep your units between fights, even if any (or all) of them were killed, and they are fully healed
- You have some sort of 'economy' stat. If all of your units are eliminated you will lose some of your economy, but you will gain something that makes you fairly significantly more powerful.
- The economy stat can effectively be tied into making the player stronger between fights. Whether that's upgrades or more units, etc. The point is that the longer you can keep your economy strong, the more benefit it will provide. The main trick here is how strong or weak this feedback loop is. Ideally you would probably want it to be strong enough to counteract the problem of a too strong negative feedback loop but not so strong that the outcome of the entire game essentially boils down to how well the first one or two fights went.