Month: May 2017

“Castle Clash” is interesting for its clumsy swerve into a hero-team game. It’s a clash-like where the heroes grow completely out-of-control, and then, out of nowhere, a whole bunch of hero-only features open up. “We’re sorry we made heroes so strong that not only are armies useless, but your heroes can trash anyone’s base without even trying. So how about we give them something else to do”.

It appears to have started as a serious, even original clash-like. Troops are in an interesting-looking 4×3 grid of grunts, tanks, archers and wizards. Defensive towers can be customized at level 10. They put some thought into making it different. On the other hand, offensive troops waiting in Army Camps also defend. It’s your army against their army and their base. So maybe they didn’t know what they were doing. But at first you raise troops, examine their base, and work to get gold and victory. It’s an actual clash-like for a few days.

But the heroes get out-of-control quickly. You get 5 at a time, and they use the full-on collectable system of mega-upgraded Rares. Each even gets a pet. A pet! Then it gets five times worse. By the time I found the game it had “Starter Boxes”. Those things shovel 3 months of gold and “rare” upgrade items at you, instantly creating mega-heroes. The game was over 3 days in. When you attack any base there are a bunch of explosions, then your heroes fight theirs. If you win, you don’t even get any more of the stuff to improve your heroes.

Instead, new hero-only areas have opened up. Lots of them. Your 5 heroes can fight another player’s 5 in an Arena, or 1 giant monster. There’s a 4 player mode where 16 heroes attack an even gianter monster. There’s a dungeon (ultra-tough computer bases) with a Sweep button (the thing where you auto-win against something you already beat, since you need to do it dozens of times for the loot).

You base has one small use. One of the extra missions is a few computer heroes attacking it. Your guns are useless. You cauld make an army of 60 tough monsters, but don’t bother. They’ll last a few seconds. Only our heroes can stand against them. But you can redo your base, mostly the walls, to try and split them up.

I was so sure Castle Clash was a 1-time mistake. But the developer, “I Got Games”, also has “Clash of Lords 2: New Age”. The main difference is getting rid of the troops. Instead, each hero comes with a dozen tiny troops clustered around it. You still have a useless defensive base which anyone can beat, but no one wastes time attacking because they’re doing all of the hero activities, same as you.

Hero Sky has got lots of nice features. As you can guess from the title, overpowered heroes ruin the game. But it has lots of nice features until then. It would be pretty fun until mid-game if the female heroes weren’t so over-sexualized. Clever new, or new-ish things:

• Donated clan troops go into a pool. Requesting troops gets you a random selection from that pool. This allows easy donations at any time (up to your limit). Some people really enjoy requesting “only lvl5+ wzards, plz” and won’t like this. They can bite me.
• Placable water squares, like walls, but they act as slow + poison. They’re somewhat useful, which is the exact right amount.
• Before attacks you can preload a small drop-capsule with a few troops. During your attack it can be placed anywhere. It’s nice. I like to load it with 2 giants to use as an emergency distraction.
• A novel troop, near the end (I haven’t unlocked it): a huge gelatinous cube which paralyzes a defense while attacking it.
• Tapping any two wall pieces selects all walls in-between. This is great, and should be in every clash-like from now on.
• The mode where you defend your base from enemy invasions isn’t new with this game, but it’s improved. Enemies come in 5 waves and you can use your army and heroes.
• Normal attacks use the same old Next-ing. But there’s a new wins-in-a-row challenge.

They worked really hard making a better clash-like. But the hero team worked just as hard ruining it. It uses the fall-on system of leveling lesser heroes to merge them into higher stars heroes to rank up the ones you’re actually using as your slaughter-meisters. Your army watches all of this.

“Heroes of War: Orcs vs. Knights” didn’t really grab me, but it tried some things.

It finally convinced me that 2 different sides doesn’t work. It’s nice they could make buildings just for orcs — the elixir harvesters are terrifically grimy T-shaped oil pumps. But they pretty much copy the clash of clans troops. With only 1 side, they might have had time to be more creative. And it’s not like Orcs against Humans is something everyone always wanted to see.

Pressing the LiveStream button lets you spectate on a match. That’s new. It seems to be the highest level players only, but maybe that was the only battle going on just then.

I think they tried to fix the Next-ing system; the thing where you spend 20 minutes looking for an easy person to attack. In this you can go to a world map and see your neighbors, but you can’t use it for anything. Clicking Attack presents you with 4 possible opponents. But if you don’t like any you can get 4 more. The end result is the same as the old system. I don’t know if they had a plan and lost focus, or what.

This game tries to fix the “raid” problem. The gold you steal is multiplied by the percent of their base you destroyed. If a quick raid destroys 10% of a base and grabs 30K gold, the penalty drops the actual take to 3K. So clearly going for a serious attack on someone weaker is better, maybe. You might get 60% destruction and 60% of their gold, which is, ummm, 36%? While playing I never got comfortable with that math, and always get much less than I thought I would. I think I prefer the rule where you don’t keep gold unless you get at least a 1-star win.

The defensive barracks pop out special defensive-only troops. That seems like it would be pretty cool, but they’re not that much different than normal troops, and you have to upgrade them separately. After using that system, I’m convinced it’s better and more fun to re-use normal troops for defense.

Finally, heroes in this game are a perfect example of what not to do. You use only 1, with a limited selection. The special ability is making them attack a particular building. Pretty mild. Later you notice they can have equipment. One piece is about a 10% upgrade, which seems fine. You can have 4 pieces. Still not too bad. But with grinding you can craft level 2 equipment. That’s a big boost. All 4 pieces can go up to level 4, which is a massive boost. The really dangerous attacks are people who spent gems on hero equipment.

Gods of Olympus stands out for how friendly it is, the original buildings, and for how the gods feel like gods. They tower over buildings, stomping on legions of enemy soldiers like ants.

There’s no waiting to attack. Your 4 greek gods can attack back-to-back until you run out of energy. You don’t steal from the other player, instead there’s a set reward for winning. If you’re not very good at the game, you can choose the Easy attack. But even if you lose, you get 1/2 the prize anyway. People attacking you is good. You get rewarded for how much you hurt them, even if you lost. Upgrading or buying a new building is instant. The whole game is easy-to-play and friendly.

The most distinctive thing about defenses is the endless stream of tiny legionnaires and archers. The buildings making them don’t run out, and don’t have a range. As soon as you start, enemy soldiers swarm out from everywhere. You can eliminate a handful at a time, or more with a special skill. One strategy is to occasionally try around and stomp the horde which has built up. If you need to fallback to crush a huge group, that might work, but more are always coming. You’ll probably be nicked to death or run out of time, leading them around the map as you rest. Athena can summon 30 friendly soldiers, every 30 seconds or so. That seems like a lot, but they last about 15 seconds against the endless horde. If a clan-mate is attacked while you’re playing, you can watch and tap to add your own tiny solders.

Soldiers rushing out of a barracks (right) to be mangled by Athena

Buildings aren’t so difficult to destroy — you are a god. But there are a lot and you have to smash through them to go anywhere. You win by destroying all 4 enemy temples. They work best when spread out. You’ll have to smash a long path between them. Your gods are fully controllable, so you can do that. But more often it’s better to split up for a precise strike at each temple.

Defenses are very customizable. Instead of getting a set amount of each building, you just keep buying more and more on a sliding scale. You can have dozens of weak towers, or a few very tough ones. As you find new gods, 9 total, you not only get their temple, but can build any number of their small houses, which buff nearby buildings. Athena’s give a health boost, Apollo’s gives regeneration. With all of those houses it feels as if your gods are crashing their way through an actual small town.

The biggest drawback, for me, is using the same Gods all the time. They eventually get 2 special abilities, sharing an energy pool, plus a super-special. It takes some practice to figure them out, and that’s fun. You can upgrade your gods pretty much however you want. The bases you attack tend to be different enough. I guess I like knowing I can always tweak the army a bit, or try things that are completely different.

I’ve finally found a pure reskin. Clash-likes have so many things to tweak or add that you’d hardly want to make an exact copy, but “Clan of Heroes – battle of Castle & Royal army” is one. The pictures and names are different — it’s legal — but the gameplay is a copy of the first 2/3s of CoC. It was out in Jan 2014, which seems kind of late for that. Then amazingly Dec 2015 saw an exact copy of CoH:BoC&RA, down to the screen shots. It’s “Heroes Clash – Castle of Clans” by “Xiao Lui”. The publisher page is FaceBook.

To be fair, it’s has one new feature. Remember when cell phone games were first able to show Ads? Today we have a button where you can watch an Ad to get gems. Back then the game just blasted an Ad. CoH:BoC&RA plays an Ad every 5 minutes. Just to be safe, the first is when you open it.

The resources are renamed Ore and Reiku. The Ore is beautiful — the extractor pulls pretty blue slivers out of the ground. Defenses look the same as CoC except for the basic cannon. Those are floating spheres with evenly distributed studs which shoot little bullets. The redone archers are really something. They’re “Neutron Men”. One hand is replaced by a Reiku cannon, and they have one bionic eye. They “attack enemy by virtue of dripping bullet from arm”. I looked up Reiku. It’s Japanese for “spirit ki”, which is like rubbing hands together and laying them on to heal. It’s not traditional — only from about 1900. The giant is replaced by a legless floating rock-golem with an iron sphere core.

There are two new features, sort of. The builders all share a single hut which can be upgraded to get a small increase in build-times. Stuff like that always feels like busywork to me. Feature number two allows you to buy a defense-enhancing rune for one building (not sure what it does). It costs 1000 trophies, which breaks the game. Everyone buys another when they hit 1,000, dropping them back to 0, causing new players to have to fight them. Matchmaking is just junk in that game.

After those two, I found one more reskin, “Era of War: Clash of epic clan” from Vietnam in 2015. The Developer Website isn’t for the game. It’s the front page of some kind of ISP or VPN belonging to the publishers. So you know it’s going to be good.

Gold is changed to wood, which is just weird. The gold/wood storehouses are copied from Boom Beach. Elixir is renamed food. The farms are little pens growing pigs, and the storages are piles of thick ham-steaks. But when you tap it makes the exact bubbly elixir noise from Clash. No oinking.

The only troop that looks different is the Angel. It’s a blue glowing sphere named “Soul.” For buildings we now have: “God of War Altar”, “Goddess of Archery Altar”, “Magic Creator” and “Special Barrack.” The healing spell allows troops to “recover a large amount of blood”.

But even this added something new. The campaign missions all have preset armies. They’re like little puzzles and previews of upcoming troops.

Clash of Clans had a cute idea for a defensive building. What if a really big guy sat on a throne, whacking nearby invaders? It’s like a short-range gun but a little easier to destroy. To beef it up, the big guy can also join your attacks. He’s not great but he’s in addition and free. Combined, he’s an alright thing to unlock.

But there’s more. They realized the Bug Guy could give hardcore players more to do. He’ll only be improvable a tiny bit, and it will take 5 expensive upgrades each time. That’s such a terrible deal that regular players will pass, but hardcores will do anything to be 2% better than everyone else. Then they used him to add another timer: the Big Guy is tired for 15 minutes after attacking, pay to speed that up.

The WarHammer far future clash-like figured out another clever way to use these heroes, as leaders. All troops types are part of the Space Marines, led by Sergeants and such. Those fellows are your heroes. A nice thing is they tend to buff their troops, making them more the star of the show.

Pretty much every other clash-like has out-of-control heroes. Giving players a hero right away seems like an obvious plus. The super-tiny, expensive upgrades seemed too harsh. That meant you’d have an overpowered hero soon enough. You still needed an army, but clearly the hero was doing most of the work. Those games feel more like a Godzilla simulation.

The Transformers clash-like is an interesting story. By that time several clash-likes used 4 heroes at a time. They were collectable, came in Common, Rare, Epic and were highly upgradable. They had destructive special skills, equipment and “star levels”. Players seemed perfectly happy ignoring troops and instead leveling heroes like in a dungeon game. The Transformers team saw this and realized you don’t even need troops. You attack with your best 5 robots, and no troops.

I can see this two ways. A game about picking troops is distinctive and appeals to a certain crowd. Keep heroes weak and you make those players happy. On the other hand, the collectable hero market is popular but crowded. You can sneak into it by making a clash-like that gradually ramps up the hero part. That desecrates the sacred space of a true clash-like. Whatever.