Order Matters
Fusing two towers isn't a sum. The one you keep decides what the result is, and the one you give up decides what it does.
A short one on fusion, since it’s the part of Project Alchemy that gets asked about most, usually in the form of “so it’s just an upgrade?”. It isn’t.
Two towers go in and one comes out. The tower you keep is the chassis: it sets how the result aims, how it fires and what it’s for. The tower you give up changes what all of that does when it lands. Swap them round and you get a different machine from the same two ingredients. A + B ≠ B + A, and the lab has the scorch marks to prove it.
Some quick arithmetic. Take five cards into a run. In most tower defence games, that’s five towers, and the maths stops there. Here, towers can be fused, in either order, so the count climbs well past five. Exactly how far is harder to say. Not every pairing will agree to it, and roll the right tower at the right moment and the sums get considerably less tidy. The lab has stopped counting and started taking notes.
That makes every fusion a small decision about identity, with a cost attached.
What the combinations actually produce stays in the lab. Half the fun is finding out, and it would be a shame to spoil the reaction before you’ve mixed it yourself.
Next: more on what’s coming, and what you can do to it.