Have you ever wanted to sit in your office while filling out paperwork and conquering the whole world at the same time?!  Well, now you can!  Battle Dawn is a browser based strategy game developed by Tacticsoft.  It uses a turn based system that allows players to manage their cities and resources casually without the stress of playing a real time strategy game.  The game allows you to form alliances, create enemies, lay waste to other user-created fortresses, and build your own into a magnificent powerhouse.  I’m sure you’re all thinking that this sounds like a fun and easy game that you would casually play in your spare time, but is it as good as it sounds? Or does this browser game need a whole new direction?  Find out in my Battle Dawn review below!

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Soul Master is an MMO from publishers GamesCampus and developers NPLUTO that mixes RPG elements with RTS elements.  Players create avatars that, like in all other MMORPGs, walk around towns, talk to other players, and can dish out a major punishment to its enemies. The game changes when the player gets to certain missions, in that the player not only controls their character but they can also make a base and pump out units that they can control.

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In addition to the flashy trailer, players can download the full game today. World of Battles is unique in that’s it is a real-time strategy MMO and it is free-to-play. There are nine races to choose from and players will build an army to test against other players. From the trailer, it looks like battles can be truly epic.

If you check it out, come back and tell us if it lives up to the hype.

Publisher GamesCampus has revealed details about Soul Master, their “genre-bending” MMORTS, which is also free-to-play, by the way. Soul Master will combine the character advancement of an action RPG with the depth and gameplay balance of an Real Time Strategy game. The game tries to bring together the best of both worlds, with you being able to create and progress a character, take them on various quests and missions just like in any other ORPG, but you will also be able to send your character out hunting for resources, constructing buildings and producing and upgrading their very own army of units with which to battle the enemies. More information on Soul Master is coming soon, and the game is looking nice. If you like anime styled characters, that is.

League of Legends (LoL), is a Defense of the Ancients (DotA) game made by Riot Games. I have logged in countless numbers of hours into LoL during the past few weeks but not once did I think of it as an MMORPG until I saw this news feature on the League of Legends website. LoL was nominated for: Best MMORTS 2009 and Best New MMO 2009. After seeing this I wondered why people would consider LoL an MMO. Riot Games says that League of Legends is not technically an MMORPG but it does have a lot of similarities that these type of games offer.

So how exactly is a DotA game like League of Legends an MMORPG?
Your character in LoL is a summoner that can summon a champion of your choice onto the battlefields of Valoran. At the start of every match you can choose two utility spells out of a list of thirteen to use during the game. The spells vary from heals, extra movement speed, teleport, etc. At the end of every match you gain experience based on whether your team won/lost and your personal performance during the match. The max summoner level is 30 and for each level you gain you get a mastery point. Mastery points are spent on the three mastery trees which are: Offense, Defense and Utility. This allows you to customize your summoner to your play style. Adding in talent trees makes LoL very unique for a DotA game since everyone will have different mastery builds.

You also get influence points at the end of every match (which can be viewed as currency). Influence points can be used to buy champions you don’t currently own and also to buy runes.

Runes are items that enhance your champions traits and abilities. Summoners have a rune book where you can place certain runes in their respective slots. As you level up you get access to more rune slots in the book and higher tiers of runes. There are three tiers of runes that can be purchased with influence points and four different types of runes. The different types of runes are: Marks, Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences. The runes do various things like increasing attack speed, additional mana, bonus health regeneration, etc.

So is League of Legends an MMORPG? I don’t really think there’s a right or wrong answer. People will have their own ideas and views of what an MMORPG. If you search for “League of Legends MMO” you will find a lot of sites that view LoL as an MMO. Even sites like SK-Gaming (a well known team of professional E-Sports players that compete in games like: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, etc) refer to League of Legends as an MMO and points out that the game has many similarities which are found in MMOs. LoL is just one of those games that could be an MMO while at the same time it isn’t. What I can say is that it does have a lot of things that you would find and expect in an MMORPG like choosing spells, leveling up character, customizing mastery trees and buying items (runes) that increase a character’s stats/abilities.

For the record I personally don’t consider League of Legends to be an MMO/MMORPG. It does have some of the main traits that an MMORPG has but I just don’t consider interacting with nine other people (five vs five games) as a “massive” multiplayer game.

I’m sure over the last week or so you have seen the Evony ads everywhere, I know I have, there’s probably one showing right now.  Well after seeing them a million times or so I decided what the hell, I’m not playing any MMO right now, so I’ll go check it out.

Evony is a free 2 play browser based MMORTS game where you slowly build up your city and try to expand your territory.   The game starts you off with a empty town with only a Town Hall and it’s your job to build it up into a striving city, build an army and conquer additional lands.  Everytime you do anything in the game, build a structure, research a new technology, march your army, a timer shows up showing how long it will take.   So for instance creating a Barracks might take 5 mins, but every additional level will take longer and longer.  Currently my barracks is at lev5 so the next upgrade for me will take 1 hr 29 mins.  Evony Account.

City Building

Evony restricts construction to 1 building per city, so even if you have the resources you cannot construct or upgrade more than 1 building at a time.  I’m actually a big fan of this system as it no longer depends on how long you play the game, instead it’s how often you play.   Checking up on the progress  a few times a day gets you much more than someone sitting there for 2 hrs straight.  There is no building queue, so you need to manually select and build or upgrade each structure yourself.

Each territory you own is split into two parts, the town and the city.  The town is made up of all residential, business and military building, such as the Town Hall, Market, Barracks, Academy, etc, and is protected by the castle walls.  The city is outside the protective walls and contains your resource buildings, farms, lumber mills, quarrys and iron mines.

It basically works like any other RTS game you’ve ever played.  You gather resources to construct or upgrade buildings, research technology, and to build an army.

City & Hero Management

Apart from just gathering resources and building/upgrading things, there is also city management.  It doesn’t get too complicated and you can learn everything you need to know in about 5-10 mins.  City Management deals with your tax rate, making sure your population remains loyal and assigning a mayor to your city.

Once you have created an Inn, you can hire a Hero unit who can either lead your army or become a Mayor.  Each Hero unit has 3 stats, politcs, attack and intelligence.  A hero with higher politcs means your cities resource production will be higher where as a higher attack means your army will have a higher attack rating.  Intelligence shortens the time it takes to research a new technology.  So you can see that some hero’s are better suited as a Mayor than as a General.

Once you have a Hero and army, they will start to eat up resources as well.  A hero must be paid a monthly fee and an army will need to eat so you’ll start losing food resources.  If you’re army is outside attacking you will lose food twice as fast, so you always want to make sure to return your troops as fast as possible once they have completed their mission.

As your city grows you will also gain Prestige points which is basically a rating of how well your cities are compared to other players.  You also have a Rank and Title, the higher the rank and title the more cities you can control.

Combat

Once you have created an army you’re ready to attack, however it’s important to scout the area first to find out the strenght of your opponent.  Once you have scouted the area, you’ll find out exactly how many and what type of troops are located there.  If you feel confident, you can then attack.

In the below image, I am attacking a open field to receive a bonus of 7% to my stone production for as long as I hold that field.

As fun as attacking people and NPCs is, the combat system is completely f*cked up and makes zero scense to the point that it almost ruins the entire game.  Allow me to explain.

Yesterday I attacked the same location twice because I was farming for reward medals. Medals are used to reward your hero or for promotion quests, which I’ll get into more later.  Here is the defending armys strenght on both attacks.

Enemy Army
142 Warriors (very weak unit)
32 Archers
48 Pikemen

On my first attack I had:

Attack 1
115 archers

I won the fight, but lost 65 archers.

Attack 2
25 Swordmen
20 Pikemen
115 Archers

The results?  I lost not only 65 archers, but all my swordmen and pikemen.  WTF?!   That makes no sense, how could a smaller army of only archers do better?  After a few more attacks I realized that melee units are 100% useless, they will only increase your casualties and waste your resources so I have been building archer only armies since.

I’ve also read on the Evony forums that there are major balance issues when attacking castle walls.  As far as I’m concerned the combat system is sh*t and needs to be completly redone.

Special Items & Medals

Evony use the microtransaction business model to make money, so there are many items you can buy, for real money, that will help you along in the game.  Items can range from things that subtract from build times, ranging from 15 min to 8 hrs to 30% reduction in build times.   Other items will boost production or combat effectiveness for a certain amount of time.  There are also medals that you gain from conquering land, these medals can be used to either boost your hero stats or to promote yourself via Promotion Quests.

Quests

There are quests in Evony, however they are progress only quests.  For example, your Town Hall reaches lev 5 or you obtained 10,000 prestige points.   I like to think of them as achievments instead of quests.

Conclusion

After a few days of playing I can say I’m enjoying this game a lot more than I thought I was going to.   Working infront of a computer all day, it gives me something enjoyable to do and doesn’t really take much time to play.  I have a dual monitor setup so I have Evony on one screen and can see when the timers run out so I can pick what I’m going to do next.  This is not a time-sink type of game, it’s sort of like checking your e-mail or Facebook a few times a day, 2-3 mins and you’re good to go.  But they do have to  fix the combat system, it’s retarded and can destroy the game if it’s not fixed in a resonable amount of time.

I’ve had the opportunity to beta test BattleForge, a upcoming MMORTS by EA, over the last week and have to say I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.  Although, I’m not sure that you can really call this game a MMORTS, but we’ll get into that a bit later.

For those of you not familiar with BattleForge it is a RTS game that incorporates cards much like the TCG Magic The Gathering.  Instead of having to construct buildings and gather resources, in  BattleForge a player enters a battle with a deck of 20 cards which they can then use to summon units, cast spells or construct towers.  Much like any online RTS, you start off in a lobby and have the option to either start a game that is part of the storyline or challenge other players, up to 12, in a PvP battle.

Once you enter a battle, you start off with a certain amount of Power Points (mana) which you can use to cast some units.  Once you have a small army, you can take over other areas and capture Power Pools which will build up your mana over time so you can cast additional cards and more quickly.  There are 4 different powers you can use to create your deck, Frost, Fire, Nature and Shadow. However each power requires a certain amount of Power Orbs before you can cast something.  For instance, if you want to cast a Fire spell you first need to capture a monument and set it to fire.  Since there are only a certain amount of these on each map it’s best to build your deck only using only 2 or 3 powers so you can cast some of the more high level creatures later on in the battle.

BattleForge is a near perfect blend of TCG and RTS.  Being a TCG player back in the day, my favorite part was creating my deck and coming up with new strategies.  BattleForge takes RTS games to another level by allowing players to create armies using 1000’s of different card combinations, adding a completely new level of strategy that normal RTS with their fixed units cannot provide.

Once you have created a deck and enter a battle it plays out like any other RTS game you’ve played except you’re not building anything, instead it concentrates on fighting so you don’t need to worry about micro managing as much as other RTS games.

BattleForge will be a F2P game, however EA will be making their money buy selling booster card packs for real money.  While you’ll still be able to play the game without spending a dime, players that do shell out the cash for more cards will definitely have an advantage.  Gamers that don’t want to spend the money will still be able to trade cards and win new cards by completing the storyline or beating other players in PvP.

I mentioned earlier that I don’t really consider BattleForge a MMORTS, mainly because I fail to see where the MMO comes in, specifically “massive”.  Since no game can have more than 12 players, I just don’t see how you can claim to be a MMO.  Yes, you are competing against 1000’s of players in a ladder, however you can say that for many online games, including Starcraft, so if you’re going by that definition then you can say Starcraft is actually a MMORTS, which it is not.

Aside from nitpicking about the MMO aspect, this is a great RTS game and I recommend any RTS fan to pick it up and give it a go.  The game is set to release in March 09, however if you can’t wait you can try signing up for the beta.