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.