[Game]Castle Clash

“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.

[Game]Hero Sky

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.

[Game]Orcs vs. Knights

“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.

[Game]Gods of Olympus

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.

Reskins!

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.

Heroes

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.

Gating

Gating is game designer slang for just-because restrictions. Originally it meant adding a “real” locked gate. Suppose low-level players didn’t read the signs and kept wandering into The Forest of Deadly Monsters. We’ll add a fence around it with a magic gate stopping beginners. We often gradually introduce features so as not to overwhelm new players. Also gating. Then we sometimes gate out a game just to be mean. My favorite gating in clash-likes is Gold Vaults.

The goal of the game is getting enough gold to upgrade your stuff. Your Town Hall is the most expensive. You’re looting your way there but … your gold hits the maximum. What? I’ve never heard of a game where you have a maximum amount of gold. Even a role-playing game that tracks weight doesn’t track the weight of coins (it turns out pen&paper Dungeons and Dragons did. Treasure was sometimes in pennies and nickels, just to be funny). Clash-likes convince you that even though you have an entire island, there’s no possible way you can store a single gold piece past 3,000 until you build more shelves.

One of your valuable builders needs to waste 6 hours upgrading your Gold Vault. Then comes next level. Shockingly, your vault is too small and needs another long, expensive upgrade. But now your problems are solved with a second Vault. Nearly unlimited storage, right? Amazingly, not. You’ll need to fully upgrade both vaults to reach the next total. At some point you get a third vault which no longer fools you. You know you’ll need to buy multi-day, even more expensive upgrades for all three. Elixir is the same. You’ll be up to 3 Elixir Barrels, for a total of 6 buildings that need upgrading each level. Just so you can hold more stuff that you already have to work hard to steal.

The really impressive thing is how the games spread out this busywork and make it almost fun. At first your old Vaults are enough for some gun upgrades. A 3 million gold mortar requires just one Vault to be upgraded. Each pointless Vault or Barrel upgrade is enough for one or two more things, until you need to finish them all to get to the next level.

The only drawback is in games where you have wood, stone, iron, and … god no … there’s something after iron! More warehouses than you can count on both hands.

Shields

Being attacked can’t take place too often in a clash-like. You spend time making a strong base to defend your gold, which is pointless if you’re unexpectedly attacked 30 times before lunch. The fix is a simple timer after each defense: “you’re not in the attack menu until 4pm”. That works fine.

But game designers are a superstitious lot, and they like money. The original Backyard Monsters had a hideously complicated set of rules for when you got a “shield”. Clash of Clans didn’t know the secret sauce and just copied everything, including funny shield rules. And shields are good business. They generate more fear. “You’re about to lose your shield” sells more than “the routinely scheduled attack is coming up”.

Variable shield lengths is the stupidest rule. If an attack doesn’t hurt you very badly, the next attack comes faster. That’s terrible. Better base designs got attacked more often, resulting in more gold loss. In response, players learned to build medium-bad bases. That was as much fun as it sounds. But variable shield lengths adds terrifying randomness. Overnight you could expect 2-3 attacks, but could have lots more, losing even more gold than if you’d been simply steamrolled twice.

The next stupid rule is shields vanishing when you attack. If your next scheduled defense was at 6pm, but you play the game at noon, you get attacked as soon as you quit. Why? This has been changed to merely move up the next attack by an hour or two. Again, why? If you should be attacked 3 times a day, why should that turn into 4 or 5 or 6 if you play the game at the wrong time? Money. For free, players can attack every 10 or 15 minutes: close the App, do something else, then come back. Shields breaking ruins that — it triggers a pile of extra attacks on you. You should buy a training time speed-up.

A really crazy thing is how Supercell’s other game is so fair about attacks. Each day a set few people are allowed to attack you. They either win, eventually, or give up, getting nothing. Every day you defend against 2 people, rain or shine. But as you might guess, Boom Beach is far down on the top-grossing charts.

Traps

Traps are what clash-likes call 1-shot defenses. They’re not all that exciting. The most interesting thing is how they don’t count as buildings for percent destroyed or gaining manna. The basic trap is a 1×1 landmine. Many clash-likes don’t use traps at all — what’s the point of a defense that destroys itself? But if you’re going to have them in your game, you may as well think about what kinds.

We have a few types of traps aimed at big, tough troops. The huge 2×2 bomb is obvious. The 1×1 “kill X points of troops” trap is sneakier. It has no radius, and goes off all at once, so almost always hits 1 thing, hopefully something big. It hardy seems worth having. If your game has human and machine troops, you get to use an anti-tank mine which only tanks trigger. That gives weak humans a little boost, so is nice.

For some fun traps, a spring can launch troops a few spaces away. People enjoy these, including picking the direction. Area freeze traps are fun — frozen troops being shot at looks neat and feels clever. A variant is the distraction trap — something tough pops up that nearby enemies must stop to kill.

The last interesting trap is a “kills X” which lasts until it’s used up. Maybe a pit. They’re obviously strong, but there’s not as much element of luck. Still, it’s cool having more and more troops vanish into it.

Visible traps work much better than one would think. They can discourage attacks from a weak side. A fun thing is having area-affect spells also explode visible traps, giving attackers an option waste a spell on trap-clearing. You also don’t need to worry about someone unfairly learning where your visible traps are, a problem with hidden traps.

The most oddball thing about traps is needing to hand-reset them. That seems insane since destroyed buildings come back for free. But it’s done. I think the main reason was sending a notice — “you’ve been attacked. Log in to reset your traps”. A game sending you a phone notice was cool back then. But people got sick of it a long time ago. We can safely have traps spring back to life along with everything else.

I’ve gotta say, Boom Beach-style traps are probably the best. You get a big pile of small bombs, visible, and one upgrade upgrades them all. Traps are fun to spread around, but how many types do we need?

[Game]Rival Kingdoms

This may have been the best clash-like ever made, and then the worst. It was innovative, made every battle exciting, and was managed by a team that that understood how to push events and contests. But the second team didn’t understand clash-likes and quickly ruined the gameplay. First, what made the game great:

They started by clearing away all of the reasons not to attack. All troops are free, not even a training time. Shield nonsense was replaced by you being attacked every six hours. Spending an attack token shows just one opponent. The combined effect was that when you opened the game, all you had to do was push the attack button and think about how to beat the base it showed you.

The new winning-streak mechanic make it exciting. Your opponents start easy, gradually become more difficult, then nearly impossible, then you lose and it starts over. That gives a nice variety of mostly challenging battles. Even the worst player gets a few wins. But even trying to beat the super-tough bases is surprisingly fun. You know you’re supposed to lose, but you could win and sometimes you do.

You can solely focus on winning fights because the game takes care of you. Longer streaks increase your rank, bumping up the difficulty to where you lose more. A problem in there games, but not here. The loot at high ranks is that much better. The penniless enemies problem is somewhat fixed. Your second important resource, rings, comes from wins (again, much more at higher ranks). Beating a low-gold base is worth it for the rings.

They did a fabulous job with your “hero”. Instead of a Barbarian King, you get a flying dragon. It’s pretty much the same except that every 30 seconds you can “sweep” it to a new spot, tailing frost or fire over a swath of buildings. That’s just fun: useful, but not overly powerful and looks beautiful. The game uses real 3D models and particle effects. It feels like a dragon.

The spells are incredibly varied and original. They come locked in preset groups of 3 but there are lots of them. One wizard can give troops a 50% damage boost in a radius, give them heal-by-doing-damage, and freeze one enemy building. With work you can get a combination of the 1st two. Meanwhile another can summon skeletons that explode on death, make 1 target take double damage, and … this needs to be seen to make sense … cover a dozen buildings with a slowing, damaging poison which can crawl to new buildings. That’s not even close to the oddest.

On defense they have the usual, but added one very customizable defense. You can choose to have each spell tower shoot an area blast, or freeze, or slow-acting anti-healing poison. Or it can fire a fast single-target blast. Or it can heal your buildings, or merely create a small destructive aura around itself. Or it can fire a slow but lethal confusion spell, causing the attacking troops to turn on themselves.

Five wall posts making a curved wall

The game also fixed how walls work. Instead of blocks which need to touch, you get posts which grow connecting walls over several spaces, including diagonals. They’re much easier to place and looks great. But the real innovation is making walls weaker. Walls in a normal clash-like are so strong that they dominate your strategy. Weaker ones here let you play around with them (the 1-sided V setup is very clever, and works fine. Some people love it).

Even with the changes, it’s very recognizably a clash-like. A town hall unlocks new buildings. You upgrade defense and offense with your 5 builders. Even your sweep timer is decreased by upgrading the dragon nest building.

That terrific design went downhill fast. Over a few patches the new team flailed with over-buffs and nerfs until the only viable army was damage-resistant soldiers and too-strong healers, backed by archers. Over-buffed spell towers were the only problem, which forced everyone to use the anti-spell-tower wizard. It was a weird slow-motion crash.

They couldn’t figure out a way to fix the problem with winning streaks: what do you do with players near the top? They have no impossible opponents. Streaks might never end. So at high rank, streaks are out and something else is in. At first, top rank players could go into a special challenge mode. You were attacked much more until you were knocked back down, gaining extra-bonus loot for how long you lasted. That was removed and replaced with just picking an easy opponent. The game turned into a sleep-fest.

Then a bug nerfed air defenses. Dragon could sweep without fear, single-handedly winning (the actual trick is complex, but it became common knowledge as players watched their replays). Players loved it. The bug was left unfixed. In fact, a later spell had an exploitable bug which fully healed your troops (it wasn’t a heading spell). Players flocked to it. It went unfixed. Meanwhile they figured out how to import the brutal monetization common in regular mobile games. More and more events required big spending or skipping school for 2 days, for new items unobtainable any other way.

Rival Kingdoms is still pretty good up through mid-game. Some of the underpowered wizards were even fixed. But the best thing I can say about it now is that you can’t copyright general game ideas. At least one other game stole its improved “post” walls. More clash-likes now have events and areas open only on certain days. I’m hoping a new one steals the way Rival Kingdoms did winning streaks, because I’m sick of passing on bases that look really fun to fight, except I don’t want to wreck my army.