Indie Dimepiece: Super Tribes
Sid Maier's Civilization is hands down one of my all-time favorite games. The strategic turn-based strategy with massive research trees and random maps offered almost endless replayability - and caused countless sleepless nights as I was caught conquering the world in front of my PC. But above anything, I loved restarting a game of Civilization. There's just always something captivating in the beginning of the game of Civilization when you're nothing more than a little village and the unexplored world around you is full of opportunities and threats.
Midjiwan's Super Tribes taps on to the same player emotions than Civilization. Each game, which is a set amount of turns, starts by the player selecting his tribe. Each tribe differs from one another visually and by the starting technology, they posses. The winning condition is simple: gather the most amount of points in a set amount of turns. Points are rewarded for gameplay actions such as researching a new technology, growing a city or capturing one from the AI.
Just like in Civilization, the gameplay is turn-based. Every turn rewards the player with Resources, which is the one and only currency in the game. The amount of Resources player receives at the start of his turn depends on the amount and the size of the cities player has.
Resources are spent on researching new technologies and training units. To increase the amount of Resources player receives they can either conquer more cities or grow their existing ones by spending Resources to build farms, mines and lumber mills next to them. In other words, you have to spend Resources to make Resources.
What makes Super Tribes so great is that it has been able to strip down the immense complexity of Civilization without losing the essence that makes the game so captivating. What I mean by this is that Super Tribes feels much like restarting a game of Civilization. You start off as the small village in a big world with no technologies and each decision you make truly matters. Are you going to spend your
Resources on a new unit and explore lands in hope of capturing a village or finding ruins with loot? Or are you going to invest your scarce Resources in researching a technology, that will allow your village to grow into a town? And what happens when you encounter another tribe? Are you going to wage war or are they going to attack you first?
Sure, it's not the super grossing 4x strategy game likeKabam's Kingdoms of Camelot orMachine Zone's Game of War. But it's a great example of a game that has reduced gameplay complexity without losing the ability to give player meaningful choices. Just like Hearthstone has reduced the complexity of Magic the Gathering without losing the elements that made Magic such a phenomenal game.
If you're a Civilizations fan I suggest you give Super Tribes a go. And make few in-app purchases as you play. The guys at Midjiwan truly earned it!
