Kingdoms at War

I've been seriously contemplating development of an iPhone game for the last few weeks. Now I have an idea and have been playing a few iPhone "MMOs" to get a look at the competition. Mostly, games like Kingdoms Live, and other identical "click" games, suck. The strategy is so dirt simple that it amounts to get income first, by sitting around and buying it, then start playing when everyone is essentially in the same boat. Not for me. A few days ago, I downloaded a game some of the players claimed was a better experience. It is, but it's still very different with what us "real" gamers are used to. It's called Kingdoms at War. I find it quite addictive. Like all of the games, it's meant to be played for a few minutes at a time, possibly as many as 15-20, many times throughout the day. It's a capital building game, where you explore land to build buildings to build troops that allow you to attack other players to get more money to explore more land... you get the picture.

Unlike any other game of its type I've played, there's no fixed income. You can get money from doing quests or attacking other players, which costs troops. Troops are a renewable resource and the max number and regen rate comes from the buildings you own. There's a very similar but parallel system for spying, which can get you info, knock down opponent troop numbers, or steal money directly. The only other way to make money is to hire allies. Allies have stats and add to your own. When another player buys your allies from you, you make a 4% profit. Buying allies, and having them bought from you, can be fast and furious, but it really amounts to some strategic fast mouse clicking and picking allies that are likely to be repurchased from you. A bit like day trading, but you don't have any control over sales.  Since there's no bank, this is the best way to accumulate capitol which is safe when other players attack. It seems to be the heart of the economic engine. You can also buy one-shot items which add to your attacks and defenses. You can resell those for 70% of what you bought them for, so that can work as inefficient banking as well. Another function allies serve is to add to your "plunder" when you attack another player. That factor is simply based on how much you paid to hire the ally. Every player in the game, including you, has a "hire" number, which is how much it costs to hire them. This number only goes down when someone "drops" them from service, so good allies get more and more expensive as they get hired.

Initially, you explore a piece of land for very little, but each pieces gets exponentially more expensive. You can build one building on each piece of land, and the basic buildings are cheap. You get money only from questing, early on, and setting up your first 3-4 pieces of land with basic army and spy buildings is cake. After that, you hit a wall. You need to start buying and selling allies to build enough capital to buy the ever more expensive land and eventually to upgrade your buildings. At that point, you also need to start attacking other players. Currently, my next piece of land is 1.5 million (started at 3k, I think) and upgrading any f my buildings starts at 1.5M. I keep around 11 allies at about 250k each, and when/if I ever have half or so of them hired away from me when I wake up, I'll upgrade/buy something else. Tough treading at the moment, but I keep building my allies value. It's not my kind of game, but it's pretty fun and addictive, if a tad frustrating.