Pros: PVP focused strategy, long paced tactics and planning, trade – diplomacy – colonizing and conquering are all viable routes to victory, tiered research stops imbalance
Cons: Very much the same kind of gameplay as previous games, gold gives too much of an early game head start
We recently got the chance to check out New World Empires from Bytro Labs, the development team behind Supremacy 1914 and Call of War, this similarly styled free to play browser strategy transported us to a new era this time round, the age of European colonization as famous explorers embarked on treacherous expeditions seeking out new land to bolster their swelling Empires. Currently in closed beta (but set very soon to enter open beta with a soft release) the game is still a slight work in development, with tweaks and bug fixes actually happening whilst we were playing the game. Fixed up with a new account that Bytro had graced with 200,000 gold premium currency (worth round about $50) we checked out to see what was different with this new title.
First impressions? Not a lot.
The developers have obviously gone down the route of “if it ain’t broke then don’t try and fix it” and so we saw a very familiar game in front of us having already played Supremacy and Call of War (albeit briefly). The GUI had had a bit of a design upgrade to suit the theme a little more, but all our menus and sub-menus were in the same place, the features from Provinces to Espionage were all fairly cut and paste and the map of Europe looked pretty much the shame only with shifting borders and old provinces to historically reflect the 19th century political landscape as opposed to the more modern day iterations we’d seen in their WW1 and WW2 titles.
Our starting country, by chance or localization design we’re not sure, was England and so our first task in the tutorial was to re-take the city of Newcastle with our provided troops, establish a governor and then construct some buildings to make things sweet with our people. We had a good half a dozen provinces under our control and looking around at our Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbours all looked like they would be viable targets for falling under England’s rule. On closer inspection we saw that Scotland was actually a player nation, as players jump into the game for the first time they fill up the larger nations and take over from the AI (with smaller provinces staying in the hands of AI). With our gold we were able to send some spies into Scotland and instantly find out what their armies were, so too were we able to power our way through all the Tier 1 technologies and quite easily could have bought more than enough troops to wipe out this unsuspecting player in a day or two.
We didn’t though, it would take us hours to move the troops to the battle and we wouldn’t be playing the game long enough to see the fruits of our labour, instead just leaving some unfortunate real player with the shambles of a nation and forcing them to start again. The power of early game gold is quite ridiculous, whilst it might dip off towards the end, and is generally no substitute for a good player (unless you are constantly dropping cash on gold) you can easily knock out some neighbours early on and get a very good head start. Gold can be bought with cash, but it can be earned by completing surveys, signing up to websites, even playing other free to play MMOs, which grant varying amounts of gold; we’re not sure how we feel about that type of business plan but if it works for Bytro and is an easy way for players to get some premium currency then why not.
What we are thankful for, and something that was seen in the previous games, is way technologies are tiered; whilst we could purchase all the Tier 1 technologies the Tier 2 only unlocked after 6 days from the new game starting, Tier 3 unlocking at day 12, and so on. It is a structured progression that we don’t mind, it ensures players don’t just bee-line towards the most powerful military unit, instead spread their time across the three main research categories (Military, Economy and Colonisation) and can’t just spend gold to burn through the 150+ technologies.
As far as techs go the Colonising element is one of the new big features in the game, sending out explorers into undiscovered areas of the map covered with uncharted fog, players will find new lands to settle and transport colonies over. It’s an interesting deviation from the previous games as now players can expand in a more peaceful way without having to only destroy other nations and players… although ultimately that’s what the end game is always going to be even if you do want to be a pacifist. Unfortunately we didn’t get to experience this new aspect of the game because, as with everything else, the pace is very very slow.
The pace of the game is something that Bytro have definitely hung on to, it defines their strategy games and whilst it might not be for everyone, and makes reviewing the game extremely hard (because it takes hours and days to get anything significant done), it’s actually a concept we do like the idea of. Having a set number of days until the game ends means that managing your time is as significant as managing your resources; deciding whether you want to commit a large portion of your army to a 2 day march across the map on the chance that your enemy is doing the same and you won’t be able to get those units back in time… it’s an interesting aspect. We love strategy games, Civilization is pretty much our go to game for empire building, but we do feel that the slow pace of Empires is just a little TOO slow, there’s no initial excitement, no early hype, the action only really starts to happen late game. It’s a feature packed game that can be hard to pick up at first, and can be quite off putting for new players due to the lack of things to do; if you’re playing the game you are playing because you are inspired by the concept of a slow paced game, or you love the previous games and want a change of venue and some new features.
As far as new features go, the key ones were the colonizing elements and also the change up of Victory Points. Every province now has victory points, and at the end of the game the player with the most Victory Points is the winner, however, once more the developers have leaned more to an alternate route to victory instead of forcing all-out war. The Victory Points that a province is worth is directly related to its province upgrades, players can make low quality provinces into core provinces meaning they can build up their small empire to be high quality, or pick off lots of provinces and be an expansionist with lots of smaller low level provinces.
These two different approaches to winning the game are probably the thing that has offered the biggest improvement, is it enough though? Hard to say, playing each game feels the same at the early levels, and only diehard fans will really be able to see the nuances of how these changes will affect strategy, but in our opinion it will definitely shake things up a little more and overall the game so far seems pretty solid.
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.