Category: Games

Browser Games: Tribal Wars

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Third in a series on browser-based games. First post here.

I initially checked out Tribal Wars because I saw a few people mention it, and was skeptical because of it’s rather amateurish UI. After giving it a fair shot, however, I have to say it’s probably the most balanced web game I’ve seen to date, and I’m still playing it.

TW is fairly generic in its setting, I’d say loosely medieval. It is very combat oriented, as it’s name implies, and your struggle is not only to stay alive but to expand and improve in a congested world. You can grow somewhat fast if you forgo defending yourself, but that’s rarely wise. The world expands, with new players being added to the outside. Over time this makes the distribution form a kind of donut, with dense areas of newer players on the edge, and sparse areas of powerful veterans inside, often hours or days from the newest players and therefore unlikely to steamroll them.

The UI is useful but not very refined, and there’s a premium (paid) option that makes it even more useful and a little less refined. Combat is predictable and errs on the simple side, not quite RPS, but close. Income gains from expansion are proportional to their cost, and both escalate rapidly, which gives a nice sense of progress.

TW also has the option of playing in a “speed round”, where the game is sped up by a factor of 100-400. This effectively turns the highly diplomatic/political game into a brawl that can be more exciting than I expected a text-based game would be. You can build a town up to completion in hours rather than months, and you can also lose it in minutes if you make a mistake or tempt a more powerful player.

I’ll give TW a big thumbs up and recommend it to anyone looking for an involved, strategic game.

Browser Games: Ikariam

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Second in a series on browser-based games. First post here.

Ikariam is a strategy game, with Roman themed artwork and an ancient/medieval setting. As of this posting, it’s in version 0.2.7, so I guess that means it’s beta/still in developement. I’m still technically active in the game, though active is an overstatement since I basically log in each day to see that it will still be many days before I can grow again.

It probably has the nicest art of any of the browser games, it’s even better than many installable games. Ikariam starts out strong, with fairly rapid build times and cheap expansion, but what might be its fatal flaw develops later on. Expansion costs are exponential, typically doubling or more, while the returns on that investment are meager, 10-20%. This makes the game slow to a crawl after a few weeks. Combat is slow and relatively simple, and there really isn’t any reason to fight someone except to pillage them, which is barely worth the effort.

I’m not sure what the designers were thinking, perhaps there is some unreleased feature that will open the game up, but for now, I’d have to say its a dud.

Browser Games: Intro

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Lately I’ve been exploring the not-new-but-maturing area of BBMMO (“Browser Based Massively Multiplayer Online”) games. They have some cool aspects that drew me to them, and I figured I’d talk a bit about some that I’ve tried in my first-ever series of posts.

These games largely fall into two categories: strategy and role-playing. The role-playing ones are all about you building up a character, typically to compete with other characters. The strategy ones are usually about building up cities and armies and warring with other players or guilds. Both types can be found for all of the standard gaming genres: medieval fantasy/sci-fi/cyberpunk/sports. They also vary widely in terms of competitiveness and social aspects.

Persistence and asynchronicity are defining attributes. They are designed to be played casually, whenever you want. You can attack someone who is not online, or assist a friend on a completely different schedule. This is more like the old play-by-mail games than games like World of Warcraft or Starcraft. Active players often log on several times a day, typically for just a few minutes, and read messages, read reports, launch attachs, issue build orders, etc.

These games typically lack the flair of a downloadable/installable game, or even that of a flash game. Some of them are even almost entirely text-based. They seem to be heavily focused on game mechanics rather than interface, not unlike a board game, and this has a noticeable effect on the type of gamers you’ll encounter. Those lacking patience or the desire to dig deep typically become inactive quickly.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands of these games out there, many with active playerbases in the tens of thousands, yet they are largely ignored by the mainstream gaming community probably because of their lack of commercialization and blockbuster titles. Over the next few days I’ll be discussing some of the ones I’ve tried, including Ikariam, Tribal Wars, Travian, Duels, and Baseball Boss.