Ogre Wars Review

This is a relatively simple game at the moment, with not too many options, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t interesting. Players of this game are divided into nations, and can work together on making a nation grow, or other nations fall in a battle for supremacy. They can do so by defending their players from attacks from opposing nations, allowing them to grow, or by attacking opposing nations together.

There are several ways to make a player’s own village stronger in this game. For example, a player can recruit more troops, which gives it a basic increase of attack and defense for the cost of 4 turns. In order to further increase attack or defense, gold can be used to purchase weapons for troops, which will increase village’s attack rating, or that very same gold can be used to purchase armor for village’s troops, increasing defense rating of the village. Those ratings can further be enhanced by training village’s troops in the village barracks, where a one time sum of gold is used to permanently increase village’s attack or defense ratings, depending on the chosen training.

Another aspect of this game that should be considered is spying. Normally, when a player looks at villages of other players, they’re only able to see their troop count, but not their attack/defense ratings, nor the amount of gold they posses. In order to see this, a player need to conduct successful spying operations at the cost of a single turn.

Spies are special troops that don’t count in overall troop count of a village, which are recruited for a small amount of gold, and which also cost a little bit of gold each turn. They are used both for spying operation and for defense against opposing players spying operations. It should be noted that spies can bring inaccurate information as well in case when they manage to overwhelm defending spies, but not by a big enough margin.

Opposing villages can be attacked by simply clicking on attack raid button. When this action is performed, game calculates the outcome of the battle based on the attacker’s attack rating, and defenders defense rating, and a bit of random factor (the actual battle attack rating can be anywhere between 50-150% of attacker’s attack rating, and actual defense rating is 50-150% of defender’s defense rating) . The one with the higher rating wins the battle, and in case of it being the attacker, gold is transferred from defender’s village to attacker’s, in the amount of troops that attacker has. In case of defender winning, no gold is transferred. In both cases, both sides are going to lose in between 0-20% of opposing side troops, the exact number depending on the outcome of the battle.

Nations provide bonuses to attack, defense, income and spying, and are ranked according to 3 parameters. Main one is the overall troop count of all villages in the nation, while the other 2 are the overall amount of gold, and number of villages(players) in the nation.

Although there are two ways to rank players, according to village size and gold amount, the nation ranking is by far the most important, as this is a team game. In order to be victorious in it, your team (nation) needs to be victorious and achieve supremacy, by the time season ends.

Overall, ogre wars is a good game, although quite simple in design, limited in options, it’s still able to provide a good amount of entertainment to players, whether they’re forum regulars or not, which has room for further improvement, and therefore potential to become even better than it is already at this moment.

Current rating – 8 out of 10

The main objective of the game is for your nation to have the most number of troops, which is considered as the nation’s dominance. The number of troops of your nation is equal to the summation of all troops owned by each and every one in that nation.

The mechanics of the game is pretty simple. You have a total of 75 energy (which is similar to many Facebook games like Mafia Wars). Energy refills by 1 every 15 minutes. It is used to train more troops, getting more gold, or launching an attack. You need 4 energy to hire troops. The increase of troops per click is 1% of your troop count. On the other hand, you need 5 energy to acquire gold. The increase of gold per click is 10% of your troop count. Lastly, you can launch an attack to kill enemy troops and possibly loot gold, or launch a spy attack to get intel, which costs 3 energy.

Gold in this game is used to buy weapons and armors. Weapons increase your power when you’re doing the attack, while armors increase your power when you’re defending against an enemy attack. If you notice, the attack power of the more expensive items are better than the combined attack power of cheaper items of the same price. It’s kind of hard to explain but once you see the prices and the corresponding attack power, you’ll understand what I mean.

Another thing that you can do with your gold is to recruit spies. By using 3 energy, you can send your spies to an enemy territory to get intel like number of troops, amount of gold, etc. The more spies you have, the higher the success rate and the more info you can obtain. Hiring spies also help in preventing enemy spies from gathering info about your town. Spies are pretty cheap, but they take one gold every 15 minutes. Thus, if you have a lot of spies, they eat up a lot of gold every 15 minutes.

Lastly, here are some tips that I would like to share.
– The more troops you have, the higher your income will be when you use your energy to get gold, since as mentioned, it’s 10% of your troop count. However, higher troop count means you are more prone to attacks. As such, balance your troop growth by getting gold every once in a while to buy weapons and armors. If you have a very high number of troops but with no armor, the number will easily dwindle down when you are attacked by an enemy.
– Check the “largest villages” and “richest villages” tab to get an idea of who have a lot of troops and who have a lot of gold. This will give you some prospects on who to attack.
– Weapons are needed if you are attacking and armors are needed for defense. As such, if you want to play a defensive game but still contribute to your nation, you can generate troops, which adds to your nation’s dominance, and invest on getting armors to prevent your soldiers from dying.
– There is a forum section for ogre wars. In particular, there are sections per nation, which is a good way to communicate with your allies.
– You can keep a low profile and not talk too much so that other enemies may not even know that you’re contributing a lot to your nation.

Ogre Wars appears very basic up front–players can raid each other, purchase items, recruit for their armies, hire spies, and train their ogres. However, the game isn’t about just the one player–it’s about working with the other members of your nation in order to gain dominance. There are also many different strategies implemented, ranging from pinning down smaller armies to staying strictly on the defensive to fend off attacks. In order for one team to reach the top, all of the players must cooperate and work off each others’ strengths and cover each others’ weaknesses. The number of players is growing steadily, too.

Also, the game isn’t like other online games that require hours of time. Ogre Wars’ turn system keeps people from over-exploiting resources and options; as a result, players can log in, use up their turns, and log out in a timespan as short as five minutes.

Currently there are three nations to choose from, but (I pose this to older players) whatever happened to the fourth?

good:
simple
easy to sign up
good community
15 minute turns keeps the game changing

bad:
needs new graphics.
can be too simple

Plus, you can really play this game in your spare time, like just a few minutes a day. The only con is that it has a tiny community (about 20 people currently), though personally, I consider this a good thing.

Ticks are only 15 minutes so the action is fast. You can build up an impressive army in no time! I play it a little bit everytime I come on GameOgre. You can play it in your spare time and talk to other villages in your nation.