Planar Conquest

Planar Conquest is a huuuuuuge iOS game that just dropped this week. I checked the trailer and it looks awesome. It's something between Heroes of Might and Magic and Civilization. It ain't cheap at 12.99, so if you are all about FTP forget it. But early reviews say this is the closest thing to a PC game to ever release for iOS and could portend things to come if it goes over. It certainly looks like something that will easily be worth 12.99 if it isn't filled with bugs.

I dove in and bought it. It's downloading now. Will report back soon.

Initial thoughts:
Took tutorial and played about 15 mins of a game.
It is huge and it is an updated Heroes of Might and Magic essentially. The 12.99 only buys you half of the 8 races, and 3 of 7 possible terrains (planar worlds?). I think I will get my money back even being given a third? of the game possibilities. If I am digging it I can buy the rest. I predict I will be digging it.

The first thing you have to do is setup how big a game you want to play and on what terrains. I have no clue the impact of various terrain at this point. Then of course you can set how many AI opponents and degree of difficulty etc. Choose a faction and you can then build out a sorcerer. You get 12 points to spend and can take on negative attributes that penalize you long term in order to have more points to assign other ways, For instance, choose Butcher you get +2 points to spend, but every time you conquer a city you kill 100% additional population. You spend the points to get any number of bonuses in production or efficiency in different kinds of magic. And you spend points to learn spells from a dozen different magic circles. Won't be long before somebody makes an online guide with tips on how to build out the various races.

I played a game for about 15 minutes and attacked some kinda resource cache that was average difficulty to beat. Not knowing WTF I was doing I got TPK'd by a Hill Giant and 2 oozes. I think if I had turtled and magic missiled them at range things may have gone better.

The game eats battery life like no other.

Conclusion:
It's good. I wholly recommend it, BUT.... if I was you wait a few weeks so it can be vetted by all the pro critics. Then check it on metacritic

Thanks for pointing this game out. I'll be keeping an eye on it as I was a fan of Master of Magic back in the day even as buggy as it was.

You had me at "Heroes of Might and Magic" but I'm guessing it won't run on my iPad 2.

metalface13 wrote: You had me at "Heroes of Might and Magic" but I'm guessing it won't run on my iPad 2.

Time to upgrade! The wife and I just upgraded our iPad 2 at Christmas and bought ourselves an iPad Air 2. One of the perks of waiting so long to upgrade is that the improvement is hugely noticable.

My God, I love Heroes of Might and Magic. Coincendetally, getting a new iPad has made it possible to starting playing the iOS version of HOMM 3, which never worked very well on the old iPad. I hadn't played HOMM 3 in probably like 15 years or something, and I instantly remembered exactly how each unit moved, and what their special abilitles were. It's like those brain cells were just lying there dormant, waiting for the opportunity to be reactivated. Combat is a little wonky on a touch device, but once you get the hang of it, it's fantastic. Love, love, love this game.

Thanks for pointing out Planar Conquest. I'd never heard of it, but you have me intrigued. I'm curious to hear more once you get a chance to dive into it further.

This is more Master of Magic than HoMM, in that you are a sorcerer-lord who can cast global seplls, and there's a Civ-like empire-building component. Apparently its based directly on Worlds of Magic, a PC game from the same dev which I backed on Kickstarter. Worlds of Magic is AWFUL, so I'm curious to see if they somehow pulled a decent game out of that train wreck.

Please someone tell me it's a good MoM descendant. If it's more of a HoMM, it's a big turn off for me since I really hated the "weekly pickup" mechanism resulted from the HoMM recruitment (and netural building resource generation... come back next week my ass!) system.

I think you would be happy Sejev. It looks to be a MoM descendant.... Not that I ever played MoM.
To me it's as if Sid Meiers made a Magical Civ game. The problem is it really needs a guide. The tutorial goes over some basics and then you are left to figure the rest of it out. So many of the spells I have no idea when I would ever use them. I found a forum on pocket tactics where they discussed the game and someone left a link to a MoM guide. (Gamefaqs.com Master of Magic) It's kinda helpful actually. I must have started half a dozen games and then aborted because I was doing suboptimal stuff. It's heavy, it's long (playtime to finish one game). It's definitely PC game experience on iPad.

Thanks for the confirmation, I'll get it once it comes to PC.

I wouldn't be surprised if the guide is Dan Simpsons'.....

MoM has the best city worker management. That is, almost none. Each citizen simply produces the same number amount of resources, and the city gives % bonus to resources acquisition based on the terrain types around the city. Really streamlined.

Jason Lutes wrote: This is more Master of Magic than HoMM, in that you are a sorcerer-lord who can cast global seplls, and there's a Civ-like empire-building component. Apparently its based directly on Worlds of Magic, a PC game from the same dev which I backed on Kickstarter. Worlds of Magic is AWFUL, so I'm curious to see if they somehow pulled a decent game out of that train wreck.

0 interest with HOMM, then had to go and mention Master of Magic? fuuuuck.

Hi,

I'm one of the developers.
Just wanted to jump in for a while and leave a link to the manual:
planarconquest.com/Planar_Conquest_Manual.pdf

One of the Users on Touch Arcade is also making a series of guides, but I'm not sure is it allowed to post links to other forums.

doomtrader wrote: Hi,

I'm one of the developers.
Just wanted to jump in for a while and leave a link to the manual:
planarconquest.com/Planar_Conquest_Manual.pdf

One of the Users on Touch Arcade is also making a series of guides, but I'm not sure is it allowed to post links to other forums.

Whoa... I haven't read it all, but it seems that's pretty close to Master of Magic.

The difference I see is in the combat system, which is a pretty drastic change. In MoM, attacker rolls d10s and has 30% chance of success. Defender also rolls for its shield. This means against a multi-figured unit, the further the attacker gets in, it becomes harder to crack the defender. In short, this creates an interesting dynamic between single & multi figured units.

While Planar Conquest's method of rolling d20 against defender AC brings little difference on single/multi figures attacker/defender.

Haven't done the math though... so may be PC's method has its merits...

Sevej- let's hope that developer can come back an answer your question.

I just wanted to acknowledge how crazy it is that when we are discussing a game, more often then I would ever predict, the designer/ developer comes from the vast reaches of the interwebs to jump in on the conversation.

How does this keep happening?

The power of internet is awesome.

In Planar Conquest we are simply using the D20 OGL system for battles (slightly reworked but still).

RISE FROM THE GRAVE

I just started playing this and thought I'd report in on it. I had one of those "bored at 1am, want something new" moments of weakness and bought it.

My #1 concern is that it would not be playable on the phone. I'm on a 6s, and it is small of course but totally playable and without undue strain. The UI is really quite smartly designed for mobile devices. So it cleared that check, which would have resulted in a refund request- I just don't get the iPad out much these days.

As for the game, after a couple of WTF am I doing start up games and the tutorial, it seems like it is really good. It is definitely far more detailed/rich than most IOS games even in this space. It feels like a full fledged MoM/AoW/HOMM style, but it also kind of feels more like Civ5 than those games. The combat and exploration is very much like HOMM, the magic is more like MoM. It's a pretty cool mix so far. So you get a sense of adventuring and squad tactics with an off-board wizard shooting magic stuff to help your dudes.

The tutorial is semi-helpful. But it is also one of those that are like "OK, now go play!" right as you start asking questions in your mind. There's a lot I'm still not sure about (like crafting) and I couldn't get the manual link to work.

City management is pretty much what you expect from any post-Civ2 game in this field...and it's done pretty well for the format.

Worth $12.99? Yes, I think it may turn out to be. I don't know about the additional purchases, I don't feel like I need them yet but if you really hunker down with it you'll probably want all of the races/realms.

Between this, Atlantic Fleet and Warbits lots of good old fashioned strategy gaming going on with my phone these days.