CastleOn

I'm enjoying this one a lot! A lot of my experience comes from the demo, so my playtime is about 13 hours higher than it says here. [h1]Overview[/h1] It's turn-based instead of an RTS, which means you can take your time in planning and building your kingdom how you want. I feel like most strategy games nowadays try to rush you to the action, but this one lets you sit and plan for a good while before you start getting attacked. Each turn you only have a limited supply of Resolve and Morale, to build economic and military buildings respectively. Higher difficulties will reduce these amounts, whilst certain religious perks will increase them. After a certain amount of turns (unless in the economic campaign) you will start getting attacked by hordes of enemies from all directions, and you have to start balancing economic growth with defence. Fortifications offer huge bonuses to range and sight, but are expensive to build. At time of writing, there are a total of 55 skirmish maps, 35 missions in the military campaign and 10 in the economic campaign. There are also 104 technologies to research, 24 criminal abilities, 25 religious perks distributed across 5 religions, taxation mechanics, and a diplomatic layer... the amount of variety on offer is honestly really impressive. [h2]Economy[/h2] You have a great deal of freedom in how you build your kingdom, with buildings only locked behind simply having the resources to build them, rather than having to research them on the tech tree. This lets you take whatever approach you want, and choose which resources you want to skip over and just trade for, for instance. If you want to build your keep in a purely mountainous area with no trees, and sell stone to trade for wood, then that's a perfectly valid approach. A lot of games make trading costs so steep that it's essentially non-viable to use for anything other than tiny amounts, but CastleOn lets you trade in bulk no problem, you just have to build for it. [h2]Religion[/h2] You can also select from one of five religions in the skirmish maps: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Paganism, and Dualism. These offer quite significant bonuses, like Dualism gives you a constant per-turn reduction of Corruption gained from committing crime, which lets you build around constantly using the criminal abilities which you would usually be very limited in because of the corruption debuff. You activate religious perks by building up enough Faith from certain buildings, and the amount that you need increases with your population. [h2]Crime[/h2] Criminal abilities are something you can use at any time, without being limited by Resolve or Morale. They give you instant bonuses like spawning bandit units for you to control or an amount of resources. They also incur downsides, like reduced housing capacity or turning some of your units against you, as well as all giving you increased Corruption, which makes some of your stored resources disappear and reduces gold gained until you get rid of it by building gallows or or stakes, or the Dualism perk mentioned above. Gallows and stakes also reduce the happiness of your citizens, making the whole thing a balancing act of pros and cons. [h2]Diplomacy[/h2] There is also a diplomacy layer where you can see all of the different rulers active in the scenario. These rulers are not physically present on your map, but if they dislike you enough then that increases the difficulty of the attacks you receive. You can use Honor on this screen to increase relations with lords, trade with them (somewhat confusingly, this is a different system of trade than mentioned above), or go to war with them and try to force them into vassalhood, after which point they will send you resource tithes. This part of the game is a little vague, and I'd like to be better able to see which lords are contributing to my attacks, and how much, to help decide who to focus on in the diplomacy screen. [h2]Combat[/h2] The combat is essentially a tower defence where you get attacked from all sides every few turns. On the higher difficulties, the attacks come so often that you're essentially in a perpetual siege. Your units will automatically attack targets within range when you end your turn, and when you have many troops in range of the enemy they're smart enough to distribute their attacks so that the maximum number of enemy units gets killed, which is a big plus. In the demo I found ranged troops [i]far[/i] more useful than anything with melee, because Morale is used not only for placing troops and military buildings, but for moving your units as well. This means that if you have to spend Morale moving your cavalry around so that it doesn't get overwhelmed by the hordes you cannot also be growing your army at the same time. Ranged units are also able to take advantage of the very significant bonuses granted by fortifications, which not only give you extra range and sight, but also extra attacks per turn. It's hard to see what the reason would be for melee troops would be after taking this into account. Maybe sniping certain siege units? But we have trebuchets for that. Perhaps I'm missing something and their use will become apparent to me later. [h2]Misc[/h2] The game also includes a map editor, [strike]except currently when I click "new map" or "load map" my game crashes, so hopefully that'll be fixed, I'll update my review if it is.[/strike] Fixed! One thing this game could really use is versus or cooperative multiplayer, but that's probably a tall order to implement so I get why it's not there. tldr, at this price it's a steal. If you like strategy or tower defence, get this game.