Tower Wars brainstorming

Alrighty,

Tower Wars is a genre of Tower Defenses, where each player sends creeps to the other players. Those creeps will behave like normal creeps do in any tower defense: they try to reach a goal.

Since ill have to implement Tower Wars in the future, i wanted to ask for some ideas regarding income generation.

The current way to generate income (which will be added periodically to your current gold) is to send creeps to your opponents. The amount of income generated by sending a creep is loosely tied to the amount you have to spend to buy that creep.
This way has a problem: It makes the incomes grow exponentially. The result is obvious: Balancing becomes a mess since you have to match the exponential growth of gold (especially when your balancing is originally made for linear growth, or less high exponential growth).



So ive been thinking of how make the income grow (almost) linearly.

- You could make every creep sent grant nearly the same amount of income.

- You could also make income decay after a certain period of time.

- Or you could untie income from creeps sent and generate income over another way.

Thoughts? Better ideas?

Well a few ideas I thought of for income would be:


Creep Survival (Periodically):

This method would make it that, you get income for the creep surviving a certain length of time, periodically. So the creep would spawn, and every say 5-10 seconds, the spawner will get +1 gold.

Pros: Its quite unique, and while the longer the lasting the unit (hp), the more gold you'll get. You also get to use your spawning much more strategically, like i would spawn a very "meaty" unit to tank the damage and then a bunch of weak ones for income.

Cons: If a player can kill the unit fast enough, you get little to perhaps no income.


Creep Survival (Once):

This method is the same as before, but instead of periodically obtaining income, you would get a big chunk only once, but your creep must survive for a certain period of time.

Pros: You wont end up with needing that last 1 gold to build the tower, or spawning your next creep.

Cons: If your enemy kills the creep before you get the income well... That sucks.


Distance:

This method would make it so the length between the spawning point, and the point at which the creep died would determine the amount of income you recieve. So the closer the creep is to the spawning point, the less gold you receive.

Pros: The meatier the creep, the further it will go. Allows mazers to take advantage of this, and try to maze "backwards", therefore adding much more "uniqueness."

Cons: If you don't get very far, your money was wasted. Flying units will greatly give into the income (unless you have them give much less income).



Well those are a few i came up with real quick :P
I hope they may be of use :D
I might come up with some later.
GL and HF!

Income suck a lot, this is much more better to give fixed amount based on buildings not creep count.

if you have 2 barracks you can swap two times more creeps, but will have less towers...

this allow players to carefully plan tower maze not click spam on summon building.