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In the field of PC stand-alone games, strategy games have always been an important game type, from the traditional turn-based SLG such as Civilization, The History of the Three Kingdoms and Heroes Invincible, to the once widely popular RTS games, to the Total War series which combines turn-based strategies and real-time strategies, and the "four cute P clubs" which are highly praised in the circle. Under this game category, there are a large number of branches, and the corresponding player group is extremely broad.
It is precisely because of the profound accumulation and huge audience of strategy games that since entering the era of online games, manufacturers have been hoping to replicate the success of strategy games on online games. For example, Microsoft’s Age of Empires Online and later Civilization Online, but they have failed to be verified or have been difficult to produce. These products can’t solve many congenital problems of strategy games in the online game environment, and with the "idol burden" of stand-alone IP itself, it is even more difficult to adapt online games.
Age of empires Online
On the contrary, in the field of web games in the same period, we went into battle lightly, focusing on the mass netizens who were not covered by the single machine, thus giving birth to a simpler rule, but also a different strategic model, and continuing this traditional artistic ability into the era of mobile games. Different from the gameplay in which single-player strategy games defeat the enemy through delicate calculation, the strategy games in mobile games/page games often greatly simplify the local strategies of individual players, and put the main challenges on the socialization and struggle between people, tribes and alliances. If you don’t understand this, it is difficult to understand what these players are playing.
Nowadays, friends who know something about the domestic game industry may know that SLG has become an advantage project of China’s games among the products sent overseas by China game manufacturers. According to a list of overseas income of mobile games in China in May this year, five of the top 10 are SLG, and the 11th is SLG, which is very exaggerated.
Interestingly, the performance of domestic SLG at home and abroad sometimes presents a distinct state. At present, the most popular in China is the country and the Three Kingdoms, while the most popular overseas are Awakening of the Nations (second only to PUBG Mobile for a long time) and Mafia Storm (both very popular in Japan and Russia), with unrelated themes and extremely low overlap.
The reason for this is not only the cultural differences, but also the version number. As the name implies, this kind of theme obviously can’t get the version number in China, while "The Awakening of All Nations" is relatively lucky. It was launched overseas in 2018, and just got the version number in China a while ago. Recently, the news that the national service will be launched on September 23rd also makes people wonder whether this product can bring foreign achievements back to China at that time.
Generally speaking, it is counter-common sense that the strategy game, which seems to be very slow and heavy, can achieve this result on the mobile platform, but it is also a reasonable result of seeking differentiated development under the changes of the times and platforms. If we want to explore how the current strategy mobile game model was born step by step, then we should go back to 2002, when web games were just emerging …
Preface to the era of web games
In 2002, OGame, the first web game with strategic play, came out. It relies on simple graphics to build a space world and immerse many players in it. In the game, players can collect resources, build and upgrade buildings, study technology and build a fleet to fight against other players, and players can also join alliances, which constructs the basic system of strategic web games.
In 2007, Ogame opened a Chinese server and became familiar to some domestic players. The picture shows the traditional Chinese version of the interface.
After OGame, Inno Games, a German company, launched a game called Tribal Wars in 2003, which gained greater popularity with a more graphical interface and medieval settings. One year after the launch of Tribal Wars, Travian, published by a German college student, separated resources from the former system and introduced three different nationalities, thus laying the foundation for this model.
In "Tribal Wars", each player started to control a medieval village. By upgrading to obtain more resources, building various necessary buildings and training the army, different players can also trade through the market. The game map is composed of a fixed range of chessboard squares, with the center as the quadrant, and each player’s village can be located by coordinates. Players can plunder and occupy other players’ villages, and they can also form tribes to jointly attack and defend.
The classic village interface of Tribal Wars, the original version is more crude.
The map composed of grids in Tribal Wars is used for reference by later strategy games.
A year later, Travian borrowed some systems from Tribal Wars, separated the fields outside the village from the buildings in the village, and set them up as a separate system by imitating the classic board game Catan Island, thus laying the foundation for strategy games in the era of web games:
On the construction level, players develop and grow by upgrading the level of buildings and resources in the main city; On the strategic level, it is a war between players and alliances.
Design of Resource Plot in Travian
"Travian" has also added Rome, Gaul and Teutonic three ethnic groups with their own characteristics in terms of resource utilization, military capabilities and defensive values, as well as oasis, heroes, equipment and other systems for plundering and occupying resources. The interface is also more beautiful and friendly, and it is very popular in Europe and other places. Around 2007, the Chinese version of Travian was introduced into China, which attracted a considerable number of gamers and brought a new direction to the domestic game development team.
In 2008, Hangzhou Legong launched Hot Blood Three Kingdoms, and announced that the number of registered players exceeded 10 million at the end of that year. The system of the game is mainly borrowed from Travian, and the theme of the Three Kingdoms, which domestic players are most familiar with, is selected. The system of military commanders, equipment and strategies, and the PVE battlefield with the romance of the Three Kingdoms as the background are introduced, which makes the system more functional, and the theme of the Three Kingdoms is undoubtedly more attractive to domestic players. In terms of marketing, with the rise of the mode of joint operation, "Hot Blood Three Kingdoms" also gained more players and became a representative product in the initial stage of China’s web game market.
The original version of "Hot Blood Three Kingdoms" interface
During this period, a large number of strategic page games appeared in Europe and America, such as "Imperia Online", "Ikariam" and other games with different themes, and some remarkable new systems such as family and public opinion were introduced into the games. In China, after the rise of Hot-blooded Three Kingdoms, a large number of strategic page games have also emerged in the market, such as adding Thirty-six Strategies, A Thousand Troops Breaking, and Seven Heroes Fighting for hegemony to the big map, and Proud of the World, which has brought great changes to the domestic page game market.
The World Map in "Proud of Heaven and Earth"
The significance of "Proud of Heaven and Earth" lies not only in the VIP rating system used by online games later, but also in the change of the game content itself: PVE’s main push-picture gameplay has brought a lot of stand-alone content experience to players; The cooling mechanism that executes first and then calculates the cooling time and can accumulate makes the player’s game experience lighter; Jiugongge’s combat play makes the presentation of war no longer just a text, but also brings real combat strategy thinking to players …
Jiugongge Battle in "Proud of Heaven and Earth"
This attempt to expand the gameplay has also been reflected in some overseas games since then. For example, in the subsequent game Forge of Empires, urban construction elements similar to Sim City were introduced, and a large number of PVE maps were added. At the same time, strategies and chess games were designed, and the overall content richness was greatly improved.
Urban Construction of Forge of Empires
Battle scenes of Forge of Empires
The continuation of the era of mobile games
On the occasion of the development of strategic page games, social platforms at home and abroad such as Facebook and Renren have also sprung up, and after the gradual development, they began to operate web games to increase their income, which brought more opportunities to the page games market, including strategic games. Not long after, the rise of smart phones brought a real explosion to the strategy game market.
The first team to seize the opportunity of stopping the tour was mainly the team that had made achievements in the page tour market before. For example, Kabam, a big strategic page tour player, launched the mobile game "Arthur Kingdom: The Battle of the North" in 2011, which once occupied the forefront in the best-selling list in Europe and America, and was authorized by Warner for its market achievements, and launched the mobile game "The Hobbit: The Middle Kingdom" with the theme of the Lord of the Rings, but the gameplay was basically the same as "Arthur Kingdom: The Battle of the North", such as.
The Kingdom of Arthur: The Battle of the North
Another mobile game, Empire: Four Kingdoms, which was adapted from a page tour, has also achieved great success since it was launched in 2011, and its products have long been in the forefront of the best-selling list in Europe and America. Compared with the previous page games, the overall systems of these two games are not much innovative compared with the traditional mode of Travian, mainly adapting the screen and operation to the characteristics of smart phones, but also meeting the needs of gamers in the early stage of the mobile game market.
The mercenary camp system in Empire：Four Kingdoms has a unique artistic style.
The games that really brought great changes to the strategic mobile game market came from the smart phone platform, including Clash of Tribes and War Game in 2013, which brought new vitality to the game mode of Travian. The mode of Clash of Tribes is of far-reaching significance, but it is relatively special in strategy mobile games, so this article will not discuss it too much.
The main system of "War Games" has not changed much compared with the previous strategic online games. The main change comes from the great strengthening of the alliance system. In the game, if players don’t join the league, it will be difficult to continue after the initial stage, but joining the league can get a lot of intuitive benefits, such as helping each other to speed up construction, technology and training, and all other members can get gift packages when one member in the league recharges. Coupled with the automatic translation system provided by the game, players from different countries can communicate smoothly, which also brings great help to the operation of international service.
Game Interface of War Game
Another obvious change is the user experience. Construction, research or training can be completed instantly for free in a short period of time. At the same time, the task will also be given a large number of acceleration props, and with the acceleration of alliance members, the construction and development of players in the early stage of the game will be very smooth, which is also very helpful for retaining players. Coupled with the success of online rewards, task rewards, gift package discounts and other activities, the game has achieved great success in the European and American markets, and therefore it has been widely imitated by domestic game teams.
The domestic strategic mobile games that have been successful in overseas markets, such as The Disputes of Kings by ELEX, The Age of the Kingdom by IGG, The King of Avalon by Funplus, can all be regarded as the successful works of the war game ike. Compared with the war game, they have a better experience in artistic quality and detail optimization, and some new systems have also been added, such as the card system in The Age of the Kingdom. In the domestic market, Tencent’s "King of Gone with the Times" and other "war games" have also appeared, but the theme has been changed to the Three Kingdoms that domestic players are more familiar with.
It is Netease’s "The Coast of the Land" that really opens up a new road of strategic mobile games in China. Although the strategic level is also a sand table battle on the grid, the most important resource in the game is not the safe construction and production in the main city, but the player needs to occupy the corresponding land on the big map in order to obtain the continuous growth of resources; In combat, unlike the traditional strategy game, which relies on the strength of the army, the number of troops of all players in "On the Coast of the Land" is the same as that of a single unit, and it relies more on the combination of military commanders and tactics, which also reduces the gap between players with different consumption levels to some extent.
In "Land of Rate", players need to occupy the resource land on the map to increase the hourly resource output.
The design of occupying resource plots originated from Sega’s Kingdom Conquest.
Through the season, The Coast of the Land strengthens the social interaction in the game, and increases the uncertainty and freshness of the campaign. Players can choose different States of birth and join the league to compete for the world. The ultimate goal is that the league will occupy Luoyang and end a season in a limited time. Whenever the season ends, the game will start a new season, allowing players to inherit some data, reset the campaign on the map, and add some new military commanders and systems. After multiple servers enter a new server, the power of the original server will also be re-integrated and divided, so there will be different situations in each season, bringing more freshness and expectation to players.
The combination of military commanders and tactics plays a vital role in the battle.
Exploration of strategy game in the new period
"War Game Like" and "Land of the Land" both have great vitality, but their social design is slightly different. In the "war game Like", the initial alliance can bring a lot of intuitive benefits to the players, including speeding up the game behaviors that need to wait for time, such as construction, research, training, etc., and the players do not need to invest too much time in the game. In the middle and late stage of the game, the alliance formed by players will become the basic unit of the game process. When the territory of the alliance continues to expand, there will be conflicts and contradictions between the alliance and the alliance, and then some staged goals will appear.
In the mode of "Land on the Coast", in the course of the game, there is no direct benefit reward for players to join the alliance except for the resource bonus of occupying the city. The main benefit lies in the achievements of phased goals, such as the expectation of conquest and separatist regime at the end of the season, or better being a leisure "farming party" under the wings of the big league. In the end, the number of places that can be rewarded with conquest is limited, and the management needs to allocate the performance of the players in the game. Therefore, if the players want to achieve better goals, they need to invest more time in each stage of the game from the season.
These two modes have their own advantages and disadvantages, but naturally they are not the ultimate form of strategic online games. After solving the basic design and basic interaction, people will naturally pursue a more "real" battlefield experience. For example, in the past, in order to simplify the system and balance, the marching of players’ troops on the map could not be adjusted freely. The troops marched in the form of a line. After the player set the goal, the troops could only March in the past and then come back automatically-naturally, there was a game that could "March freely" later.
In 2018, when "Awakening of the Nations" just entered the market, one of its major selling points was to March freely, and the process of fighting was more intuitive and immediate, instead of giving results in one second like the previous strategy mobile game.
Map battle between marches
You can zoom to the world map directly from the city interface.
This setting, combined with playing cards by heroes and arms, allows players to achieve operations similar to those in traditional real-time strategy games. For example, in a battle, troops with unfavorable operations can be separated from the battle, or enemy troops can be intercepted by teams with more advantages or restraint, and even multiple troops can attack an enemy army at the same time, which brings more space for players to operate. Therefore, the official propaganda game is "Age of Empires" with hundreds of thousands of people playing together for thousands of hours.
The Alliance Battle in The Awakening of All Nations
Therefore, players can see such a scene: the tactics of "encircling the points to fight for help" that have been verified countless times in the war are vividly displayed in The Rise of Nations:
In the 1922 suit of "The Rise of Nations", there was a war of "Chinese Alliance vs. Arab local tyrants". At that time, there was an Arab tycoon who rushed to 12 million troops after five days of service, which was very high-profile. In this regard, under the leadership of "eunuch Zhang Fei", the Chinese League gathered 44 players and divided them into 4 pairs to besiege the big brother. At this time, other members of the Arab League tried to reinforce the local tyrant’s main city, but it was exactly what the Chinese League wanted. The latter divided troops to stop the reinforcements, so that the opponent’s main city could not get reinforcements. Waves of unorganized reinforcements became "refueling tactics" and were broken one by one. The Arab League, which was thought to be a "central flowering", was restrained by the encirclement of the Chinese League, which led to the final collapse of the whole alliance.
Of course, a large-scale war like the one mentioned above can’t be encountered every day, but on a smaller scale, the game has arranged a challenging "Egyptian War", which requires an alliance of 30 people with the most outstanding combat power and other alliances to defeat their opponents with tactical strategies in an hour of confrontation. Although the number of participants is small, it involves the elite of the alliance, so there are often long tactical discussions and resumption of the battle report before and after the start of an Egyptian war.
The operational ideas summarized by overseas players
In the overall game experience, the game also added some interesting PVE content, such as the initial fog exploration stage. The huge map where the game is located is covered with fog. Players can send scouts to explore in all directions of the map. In the process of exploration, new villages and caves can be discovered. When you enter the village or reconnaissance cave, you will have the opportunity to discover resource treasures, regional maps or initial technologies. This sense of exploration has a strong driving force for players at the beginning of the game.
The Exploration Fun in the Early Stage of The Awakening of All Nations
In addition to fog exploration, the game also provides a lot of PVE content, including a large number of expedition checkpoints against famous historical figures, as well as various daily tasks and some limited-time scene battles and activities, such as the crisis in Cerro, the City of Gold and so on. In PVP, there are also sunset canyons similar to self-playing chess and the Egyptian war of alliance PVP. Players’ participation in these activities often does not result in actual loss of troops and resources, but they can all gain considerable benefits, so even if they can’t participate in the competition between powerful alliances in the later stage, they can still have enough content to experience.
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Since the initial Ogame and Travis laid the network strategy game mode of construction plus war, it has experienced more than ten years of development and exploration by developers. While the picture quality has been improved, this kind of game also has more new ways to play in the system, and it has also accumulated a large number of players for strategy games around the world. The overall scale of these players may not be large, but the time and money invested in the game far exceed other game types, which is why more and more game teams begin to develop strategy games.
The market potential of this kind of game is very huge. Last year’s "Three Kingdoms: Strategic Edition" helped Ali, who had long wanted to enter the game, to gain a firm foothold in the game industry. Because this game has repeatedly taught you various selling points through Gao Xiaosong, I will not go into details here.
In the strategy game, when the construction and development reach a certain stage, the process of war is actually very similar to the national rise and national development in history. Different from the strategy game in the stand-alone era, the biggest difference of online strategy game is that it is not a simple war between players and NPC forces, but a competition and confrontation between players and groups of players, which provides greater complexity for the game.
Therefore, for the game team, under the premise of meeting the strategic growth and fair competition of the players, it is generally designed to encourage or promote the players to socialize, and at the same time give the players freedom within the framework, so that the players naturally establish various rules and form an ecology. Therefore, in successful strategic online games, players will stage various wonderful stories on the stage built by game planners.
For example, some players infiltrated the enemy forces as spies and played an important role at a critical moment, or some players reversed the situation of the alliance through diplomatic cooperation with Lian Heng, or produced the content full of cultural breath like the essays in Land of the Land, or the unity story of Chinese players spontaneously organizing alliances to confront alliances with other countries like Awakening of the Nations, which are also the biggest changes brought by the network to strategy games.
Although players have been able to interpret real strategy stories in the game, the strategy online game in this era is naturally not the final form, and this game model is still evolving and developing. What kind of innovation can similar games bring later, and can players who like strategy games get fresh experiences? I believe this industry will give the answer with constant product competition.
