Topic: General Gaming /
Game critique- Castlewars
I always wished there was a way to submit more serious and in-depth reviews than the comments section. Sadly, there is not and the comments section has degraded to little more than incoherent lists of complaints and “lol this game r fail 1/5”.
Normally, I just write a short review of what I thought in the comments section and leave it at that. This time, I thought I should actually get some sort of full length thing written, partly to try to convince people to put more thought into their ratings, partly to improve future games, and partly because I’m sick of seeing spammed out comment sections. Regardless of whether or not I achieve any of these goals, here’s my critique / guide to Castlewars.
To start, Castlewars is over 2 years old. When I saw that another badge had been assigned to it, I thought that perhaps the developer decided to update it and fix up some of the problems from before. Sadly, that is not the case. Instead, the badge is there to advertise the “premium content” that has been added. This content consists of cards that you may purchase with your money to improve your multiplayer experience. When will developers learn?
The Basics
You and your opponent each have a castle (30 hp) and a wall (10 hp). You win if you reduce your opponent’s castle to 0 hp or if you build yours up to 100 hp. To do so, you’ve got a bunch of cards and resources to use said cards. Sounds simple enough.
Cards and Luck
The cards and resources are divided into 3 groups: builders/bricks, soldiers/weapons, and magic/crystals. Builder cards are primarily defensive, soldier cards are offensive, and magic cards are supportive. In other words, if you want to make your castle awesome, you’ll want bricks and red cards. If you want to cause wanton destruction, you’ll want weapons and green cards. If you want a bit of everything, you’ll want crystals and blue cards. Makes sense.
One of the inherent dangers of card games is that they rely a lot on luck. Luck based gaming is bad. It takes control away from the player in favor of a random number generator. Don’t get me wrong, randomness is fine, but the player needs to be able to deal with it. For instance, say you drew a bad hand in a round of poker. Ooh, bad luck. I guess we’ll just take all of your money. But wait! You can do something about it. You can try to read your opponents to see if they’re in similar situations. You can try to bluff your way out of it. If those options don’t appeal to you, you can simply fold with minimal loses and hope for a better hand next time. A player needs failsafes to fallback on so that a streak of bad luck won’t do as much damage.
Magic: the Gathering takes a different approach at solving this luck problem. Go through a deck of Magic cards and you’ll notice that just about every card has text detailing its special ability. With specialization, comes weaknesses. Every deck has weaknesses that can be exploited. That’s where the strategy part of the game comes in: figure out what your opponent will do and be prepared.
Back to Castlewars: it lacks both the specialization of MtG and the choice structure of poker. It doesn’t matter if you know what your opponent is planning to do because you can’t answer for it half the time. If you see your opponent hoarding up crystals and discarding conjure or crush cards, there’s a good chance he’s waiting to use Curse. What can you do? Well, you can use Crush crystals, Thief, or Saboteur to prevent or at least delay his move. You can try to push for victory knowing that your opponent probably won’t counter with any blue cards. Failing all that, you could build your economy with Schools, Recruits, and Sorcerers to reduce some of the damage. But there’s a good chance you won’t have any of those cards and if you do, you probably don’t have enough to make a difference (you’ll need a ton of anti-resource cards to really make an impact; like, at least 3). With all this luck emphasis floating around, there’s very little room for strategic play.
Game Stage Analysis
Assuming that this is a strategy game, what would you want to do at each phase of the game?
Early game- This would be when you’d want to build up, preparing for the inevitable combat later on. This means collecting resources and preventing your opponent from doing the same. Unfortunately, you can’t collect resources because you have no control over what cards you get and the chances of drawing a School or related card are slim, let alone multiple “economic” cards. You can kinda prevent your opponent from building his economy with crush cards, but they don’t make a big enough difference unless you can consistently draw the same crush card, which you can’t because of the luck thing. Blue crush and conjure cards are useful here, as are green anti-resource cards.
Mid game- This is when you want to start dealing some damage and while building up your own defenses. Slowing your opponent’s economy also becomes an option here. There’s just so little strategy here though. It’s basically just play whatever cards you have because you can’t do anything else. There’s no way to force your opponent to discard cards or to draw some additional ones yourself. It ends up with both players spamming low cost wall / castle upgrades and weak pin-prick attacks. A well placed Curse can do wonders here, especially as your opponent can’t counter.
Late game- This is when you want to finish off your opponent, be it by building up your own castle or destroying theirs. But again, you have no control over what cards you can play. To make things worse, most of the cards in the game become useless at this point. Both players have enough resources to play very powerful cards, thus rendering weak cards like Archers completely useless (actually, they’re fairly useless early on too). Blue cards lose a lot of value here because of the diminishing value of resources.
Imrprovements
This game isn’t bad, it’s just not good. One major fix that I’d suggest is to specialize the cards more. Get rid of those crappy low cost cards like Base and such. Add more economic opportunities. That’ll take out some of the luck dependency in favor of some more strategy, which is how the game is supposed to be.
Now, if you’re going to flame, please be civil about it. If you think I got something wrong or you simply disagree, do so politely and it wouldn’t hurt to back it up with some some of your own observations, or better yet, some facts.
