Since the conductor tool already knows:

1. the release channel
2. the candidate branch

It can determine the correct way to increment the version for the next release. The algorithm would be:

1. if the tip of the candidate branch is also on master, that means this is the first release on the branch; compute the version from the candidate branch (this would fail if the candidate branch was named wrong) and tag the branch point, then increment the n for the actual release
2. else if the channel is stable, the increment should be z (the tool already has logic to "increment" to 0 if this is the first stable release)
3. else (i.e. channel is beta), increment the n

In the case of 1, the user would have to double check that the tool is tagging the branch point correctly, as it would be dependent on the branch name being correct.