Idle Expanse is a sci-fi themed incremental game where you play the role of the planet's most successful industrialist, whose greed knows no bounds. Your objective is to grow your wealth beyond what anyone has ever imagined, but why do it yourself when you can hire others to do it for you?
Core gameplay revolves around hiring mercenaries, equipping them with the most "state of the bada** art" weaponry and gear, then sending them to remote planets to collect resources.
Unlike most other incremental games where you send teams heroes out and just wait for their return, Idle Expanse allows you to have (in)direct control over what your mercenaries do and how they achieve it. Prior to deploying a squad of mercenaries to a planet, you get to decide what tactics they'll use: Will they all stay together or will they split up? Will they seek out and engage enemy aliens or will they focus on gathering resources?
As your squads of mercenaries explore the galaxy, they'll uncover new technologies, which in-turn will unlock new features. One such feature is the ability to skip forward in time - why sit around waiting for your squads to return from their deployments when you, with the simple press of a button, can jump into the near future?
Despite the galaxy being expansive (64 planets to be exact) it is still finite. Once you've explored the entire galaxy and grown bored with what it has to offer, you'll be able to reset the clock and do it all over again... this time with some impressive perks!
Not in the mood to start over? That’s fine… you can also choose to up the difficulty (and the rewards) of the enemy aliens in the galaxy.
Oh, and did I forget to mention the ability to explore alternate realities? You can explore alternate realities.
In short, the challenge of this game is how to best optimize your use of 4 different mercenary classes, squad tactics, virtually unlimited combinations of weapons, gear, ships, technologies, and other resources to grow your wealth as quickly as possible.