No play session on this one, so let me be upfront about what I actually did: I read the page, the tag list and the devlog, then went and measured where the game currently sits on the shelves it is tagged into. That means I cannot answer your balance question honestly and I am not going to pretend to. What I can do is answer the part you did not ask about, which I think is costing you more right now than the balance is 🦟
Credit first, because two of the things you are worried about are already fixed. The description does now ask for feedback, and you did post a devlog for the update. Plenty of people in your position have done neither.
Now the part I think explains your situation.
Those 250 plays were the newest shelf, and the newest shelf fires once.
Every tag on itch is really four shelves: Top, New & Popular, Top sellers, and Most Recent. Top is unwinnable for a new game because it ranks on accumulated everything. Most Recent is the winnable one, and it is what gave you your 250.
Here is the measurement. You published 19 days ago and shipped a major update one day ago. Mosquitos is not in the first 36 of Most Recent for clicker, and not in the first 36 for incremental. So that shelf is ordered by publish date rather than update date, and shipping a major update did not put you back on it. The initial visibility boost is spent, and no amount of updating re-triggers it.
Which means your permanent discovery is decided by WHICH shelves you sit on, and that is your tag list, not your update cadence. You are at ten tags out of ten, so from here every addition is a trade.
The trade I would make first:
DROP “AI Generated”. Your page already carries an AI Disclosure row, rendered by itch in the info panel, listing AI Assisted for code, graphics, sounds and text. The tag restates something the page is already saying on its own, so it is the cheapest slot you own. (Assuming you added it by hand rather than itch adding it for you.)
ADD “idle”. That is an 8,495-game shelf and for a clicker or incremental it is the closest adjacent audience that exists. You are invisible on it today.
If you want a second trade: drop “Colorful” or “2D”. Both are enormous generic shelves where nothing new ever surfaces, and neither is a word anyone uses when they are looking for this genre. Add “mobile” instead (4,861 games), because you deliberately built for phone browsers and are currently not on the shelf where people go looking for exactly that.
Keep clicker, incremental and management. Those three describe what the game actually is and they are the ones doing real work.
One design comment, and it is the only one I will make without having played.
You said it feels sometimes too easy or too hard, or just boring and repetitive. Separately you said you want to turn the tech tree into a real tree instead of a sun. I think those are one problem, not two.
In an incremental, “repetitive” almost never means the click rate fell. It means the DECISION rate fell. Early on every purchase is a real choice because you cannot afford everything. Later there is usually a dominant order, and from that point the player is not choosing any more, they are working through a queue. A queue with excellent click feel still reads as boring.
There is a cheap test for this that needs no balance pass at all. Ask two different players to screenshot their tree at the twenty minute mark. If the two screenshots look basically the same, you do not have a tree, you have a queue with branches drawn on it, and rebalancing the numbers will not touch it. The fix is making at least one early purchase genuinely exclude another.
That also tells you which of your planned updates to do first, which is the thing you actually asked.
Small thing: the description says “playabke” 🙂