So, the premise of the game is that you have nine grids (that may be extended later) and have to use them to the fullest to deal with the increasing enemy hordes that come from enemy kings.
Unlike what you can originally surmise out this premise, the challenge of the game isn't the limited space, but rather the limited amount of actions you can take between hordes. Excluding the first turn in which you can use three cards, after that you can use one card selected from a draft of three. This is important because it heavily impacts the balance of the game, or lack thereof.
Each king has exclusive faction cards, and those cards are divided into three sections, buildings which have passive effects, units which are going to contend against the horde, and enchantments which can only be applied to one specific squad of your units.
It is interesting that devs made it so your enemies are other kings and therefore you can more or less have preferences as to who oppose with your current build and who to avoid, but while as enemies kings are give or take equally challenging as a player some factions objectively suck.
-The initial faction, King of Nothing, is the all rounder. Units have ranged damage dealers, tanks, balance melee, the enchantment gives a one damage instance nullification which gets pretty good when you start stacking it, the castle ability which is very important in this game is probably the best one, which is ranged AOE that pretty much scales with enemies. The rebellions which is the way the game makes your faction oppose itself (as you are the king) are pretty mild, as nothing doesn't seem to counter itself.
-The King of Blood is objectively the best, albeit the most boring, of the playable kings as of currently. The core loop with this faction is to spread your cards as much as possible through the nine grids and when the next royal decree (upgrade type, occurs every 10 waves or so with the first one being really early) pops, just select "impification" which turns all units in your nine grids into max level imps, a cannon fodder faction unit. This is the equivalent of playing like nine cards, which puts you well ahead of the curve. When you imps start dying because of scaling, their deaths feed the demonic altar (building that spawns special faction unit) which compensates for said scaling. Upgrade demonic altar as much as possible, take it laying back. The devs tried to compensate this absolutely godly loop by filling the faction with garbage enchantments that sound really good, like vampirism or corpse explosion (damage equal to max HP on death) but that don't work on the faction's units.
-The king of progress is probably, no, objectively and decisively the worst king of all. All the units are terrible, deal low damage and have small numbers, enchantments are terrible, pretty much everything sucks because the devs thought that the level up grids abilities were too OP when most of the time they're nighly useless. There's one that destroys a building or unit to upgrade other building or unit, so it does the work of a single card for the cost of two. There's a building that upgrades ALL (in game description full caps all) grids once, once the building itself reaches max level. By the time you actually manage to get two more times that building's card, which is the way to upgrade normally, if ever, most your grids are fully upgraded and the value of the building drastically drops.
-King of stone has the weird combination of having really powerful cards that have zero synergy for the faction itself. When you face King of stone as an enemy, the horde has huge numbers. As a player, good luck getting more than ten units. This is specially bad because the castle's attack depends on your units stalling the enemy (spawn turrets) and the most powerful faction unit has a long firing rate cooldown, like huge. It was funny to strap these ballista units to the hogs, an unit from another faction, and poor hogs couldn't even move, crushed under the weight of the ballistae.
-King of nature is literally just spam units and stall while the mycelium grows and stacks attack power, there's no other viable strategy.
-King of greed also sucks, buying cards at the shop is too expensive to make use of that, and mercenaries are too much of a wild card, their numbers depending on your total coins. I only managed to beat king of greed after five attempts after pulling a few miracles.
Overall I'd say that the game rocks for early access, assuming that the full release will cover the problems with most kings lack of variabilities and balance. I will rate it as if this was the full release though, because often I find that "early access" is just a tag they put there and add few vanity updates to keep the fools spending.
No comments:
Post a Comment