This app was mentioned in 8 comments, with an average of 3.50 upvotes
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Ninja Village - it has building but also character development
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kairosoft.android.ninja_en
Dungeon Village is an earlier version of Ninja village. Different theme and lighter on the building.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kairosoft.android.bouken_en
There are some other free games (sky force, beast, high seas) that you might like but they are like PL2 and can feel $$$ heavy.
Grand Prix Story 2 should be coming out soon if they keep on track. I would guess next week (based on recent comparisons) but there is no given time frame.
You can try KairoSoft games, especially Ninja Village, both of its city building and army/hero building are great.
Cool, if you like that, they have a couple other games like Ninja Village and Epic Astro Story that I also enjoyed. There are free "lite" versions, of most of their games if you wanted to see if you liked any others.
Kairosoft had a couple other games you might like:
Ninja Village has a similar town building as Dungeon Village. Premium game, no ads, no IAP. There's a free, time limited, Lite version if you want to try it out.
Epic Astro Story has you colonizing a planet instead of a town. Premium game, no ads, no IAP. There's also a free, time limited, Lite version of this game.
From other devs:
Clickpocalypse II, doesn't have the base building but there's a lot of upgrades you can choose from. It's an incremental/idle game where you make a party and send them off to fight. If you want to, you can watch them fight and help by casting spells from scrolls. If you'd rather just check back on the progress, you can even close the game and come back later to level up your party. Lot of replay through different unlocks earned by playing. Game is completely free with optional ads that give lengthy party buffs if you want to watch one. It's not necessary to watch the ads to play, though.
Soda Dungeon has you upgrading a tavern instead of a town. You hire heroes, make a party, send them off. Very quickly you unlock an auto combat option. Unlike the last game, this one needs to be running for you to progress. There used to be a couple bosses you had to manually fight as the AI couldn't handle them, but you can idle away the game for the most part. Free game, you can choose to have an ad banner displayed during the dungeon to earn extra gold, there's IAP to unlock things faster - although I reached a point where I felt I'd beat the game without needing to buy anything.