Online game "Total Battle"

Total Battle is an online browser-based strategy game where you have to develop your own city from scratch, learn technology to hire more powerful soldiers, and fight monsters and other players on a spacious map to build the most powerful empire. A fan of the genre is immediately won over by the design in the spirit of old isometric strategies such as Age of Empires. Let's find out what else the game is capable of attracting beginners and experienced gamers.

The world of Total Battle weaves together medieval realities and fantasy with elves, orcs, dragons, and magic. At the start you are given a choice of hero - it can be a woman or a man. The appearance of the character has no special influence on anything. On the other hand, the development of the city matters. You are given the keys to it along with the initial supply of resources, and an assistant, who looks like Monica Bellucci in a bra, explains during the tutorial mission, what to spend them better. It's about construction, of course. The basic resources - food, wood, stone, iron, and silver coins - are mined right in the castle. And for each type of income there are different buildings.

Farmers' huts help get provisions for the troops, planks are harvested in a sawmill, stones are mined in a mine, iron is melted in a foundry, and nobles' houses speed up the collection of taxes in silver. The more of these buildings are built, the quicker the coffers will be filled. And the collected goods are best placed in the warehouse, which is built separately. In addition, you need somewhere to train, treat and arm your soldiers - the barracks, temple and forge all serve this purpose. The Capitol, where gold bars are smoked and statistics are kept, towers above the city, and the perimeter of the settlement is surrounded by solid walls. The developers didn't ignore the technical development: you can discover new knowledge in the Academy of Sciences, and in the Engineering Bureau you can order useful gadgets for the army.

Each of the aforementioned buildings can be improved, thereby increasing its efficiency. In short, the development is designed no worse than in any other strategy. Moreover, unlike most representatives of the genre, the interface here is simple and intuitive: it is always clear where you need to click and where what is displayed. However, progress requires not only resources, but also time. Therefore, the development of the city is not the only way to make the world go round. While you are gathering materials for the next construction or upgrade of the existing buildings, the game offers a tour around the global map. At this point you will of course ask: What about security? When the hero departs on a military campaign, taking his army with him, is the city left unprotected? This point has also been considered.

At first, your possessions are covered by a magic dome, which means that no one can attack the city, even when there are no soldiers inside. The dome disappears only in two cases: if you suddenly attack the possessions of another player or gain enough power to participate in user and clan wars (PvP). After all, without magic protection you have to rely only on your own strength and the support of allies, and give both are capable of activity on the global map. In general, outside the castle walls and happens all the most interesting.

The world of Total Battle is vast: it has room for forests, steppes, mountains, deserts, and the sea. In addition to your city on the map you can see a lot of fortifications of other players and neutral characters under the control of artificial intelligence, lairs and roaming packs of monsters, arenas for fighting for prizes, crypts with hidden treasures inside. Of course, not all battles are available at once - you start with a small squad, so the first thing you have to do is to take on weak enemies. Since they're not always around, military campaigns take time - it often takes 6-10 minutes to get there and back. However, the battles themselves are fast and automatic: the algorithm estimates the strength of both sides, takes into account the bonuses and simply displays the result.

Each victory brings a reward, and you can earn more by completing daily and regular tasks. For example, kill five regular squads of enemies in a day, hire a new commander, increase wood production by so many units. By completing the daily minimum program, the player receives a chest with resources and equipment for the hero. Visiting crypts and arenas brings similar prizes. Sometimes such activity even shortens the path to the next enemies. Here is a case in point: at the start the game gives a set of troop movement gas pedals, but after a dozen of quests they run out, so that these "speed boots" can only be replenished in the crypt at first.

Along with the traditional "go to the woods and kill a monster" type quests in Total Battle there are also story quests. Story chapters are revealed daily, and you get a reward for completing them too. You act as a lord restoring a castle after being betrayed and plundered. The enemy conspiracy has also touched your feudal kin: in the first chapter you must go to the hero's sister, who has been raided by brigands. The game even offers a choice of possible actions: help the victims of the attack or immediately rush after the villains? This is not the only such case - for example, during the popular unrest you will also be asked whether you want to try to calm the crowd or disperse people by force. But whatever decision you make, it's better to do the right thing with all your weapons.

You can't go far with the starting infantry unit: you have to add riflemen, cavalry and heavy halberdiers to the lancers, hire mercenaries, and then the turn comes to the fabulous creatures. The game allows you to use griffins, dragons, elementals, giants, riders on huge ravens and even dinosaurs in battles - if only there were resources for all this battle menagerie. Resources alone are not enough - before you can put a mythical creature under the gun, you need to discover the necessary technology. And the academy, located in the city, is responsible for this. "Fuel" for the bright minds are points of valor and points of conquest: the first are accrued for killing monsters, and the second - for war with other players. That is, the more you fight, the tougher the fighters in your army.

The strength of the army under your control depends not only on the soldiers recruited into it, but also on the characteristics of the lord, which are also taken into account when calculating the results of battles. There are two ways to increase the strength and leadership qualities of a hero. First - is the creation in a forge or capture on a mission items of equipment, such as a sword, helmet, armor and a magical ring. The second is the development of abilities, available with each level increase. It looks like this: win a battle, get a skill point and invest it in any of the characteristics at your discretion. There are a lot of options here: you can, for example, increase the amount of health or speed on the march - since the army is always moving no faster than the slowest troop, it's a useful thing. You can invest up to 20 points in each of the branches, so you should distribute them evenly so that you don't get fast and strong guardsmen side by side with frail and slow siege weapons.

Usually in online games, pumping spurs donation - investment of real money in exchange for some artifacts or experience. Here the situation is different: the development of the hero for a fee does not work, but no one prevents to spend money to speed up the process. Since the Total Battle tempo is extremely slow, resource chests and bonuses for fast troops can come in handy. But that's for everyone to decide - kingdom development is available for free.

Considerable attention is paid to the multiplayer part of the game. Almost immediately, even at the training stage, you are enrolled in one of the local clans. Not in the strongest, of course, but the progress in it is clearly visible: literally for three sessions you can move up to 10-15th place in the ranking of members out of 100. In grouping you can give small help to allies, receiving gifts in return, and still pay gold bars into the general treasury, to make alliances, to ask for help in battles and to arrange joint trips to common enemies. The more powerful the clan you belong to, the more bonuses your membership brings.

At the head of each such collective of feudal lords is a king, who manages the common resources and leads the lords in global wars. Kingdom battles are a regular event in Total Battle, where the most powerful clans can participate. However, such battles are held by the general rules: the program simply calculates the strength of the parties and reaches a verdict. The winners get lands, titles and gold - just like in the Middle Ages. Except here magic allows you to move the city closer to the possessions of your party mates to stick together.

Total Battle is a beautiful strategy game with clear tutorials and well-designed mechanics, but it is very slow. It's a game that is convenient to open in one of the browser tabs to check from time to time how the Capitol is upgrading to level 6, whether the enemies attacked the castle and whether it's time to go on a campaign yourself. Also once a day to receive gifts from the clan and pass the next story mission. But the density of events here is not enough to fight incessantly. Maybe it's better, because browser-based action games are now full-packed, and thoughtful strategies are one-two and a few. Also, not everyone has time for long sessions at the monitor. So fans of the genre will enjoy the game for sure, and the rest should at least take a closer look at it.

December 2020