Development Info Sovereignty: Crown of Kings

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Tags: Sovereignty: Crown of Kings; The Lordz Games Studios

The Lordz Games Studios (Battle Academy, Panzer Corps, and more) are offering a sneak peak at their upcoming Sovereignty: Crown of Kings, coming in Q4 2012 - Q1 2013.

There is also this ambitious sounding set of features.

With the proven track record of the Lordz this sounds like it could become a big hit at our beloved tacticularcancer.com.

Unfortunately, no screenshots to show yet.

inb4 skyway

I thought this game is called Dominions?

ah, 100 units rather than 2000+, 100 spells rather than about 1000...nevermind, my mistake.

Battle Academy, Panzer Corps? Never heard of them. Well, PC was mentioned here a bit , but it's not attracted a huge followings, or a particular vocal one, either.

On which planet are you living?

I have reviewed Panzer Corps for tcancer: http://www.tacticularcancer.com/content.php?id=73
It's a very good game, devoid of much originality of course. Only Skyway hates it, because he thinks Steel Panthers should have been remade first, a sentiment which I kind of agree with.

Battle Academy is a simple turn based game with a focus on slick, fast flowing gameplay. Not my cup of tea, but I think the production values are very high, as with all games by TLGS.

They are also working on Commander the Great War, a WW1 game: http://www.thelordzgamesstudio.com/site/games/commander-the-great-war/
I think the release is imminent.

Never heard of their previous games (sorry BB) but this seems quite ambitious. Of course seems like a very early development since they dont even have any screenshots so its hard to tell anything.

Which isn't so bad in this case because until now they have built a reputation for very rapid development.
Panzer Corps for example took less than a year from first announcement to release (I guess at least another year was spent before that), so it is rather likely they will not vastly exceed their Q1 2013 release target.
And none of their games I have seen feels rushed either. They are a perfect example that indie developers can create quality games in 1-2 years.

The Lordz are one of the good indie studios. If you don't want to believe you should try one of their previous games.

Do they really count as indie developers? Wikipedia (heh) tells me that indie games are created without financial support from video game publishers.

They co-developed Battle Academy with Slitherine. Slitherine is a publisher and presumably Slitherine gave them money for this co-development. And Battle Acadamy was heavily promoted by Slitherine.

And Slitherine merged with Matrix games a while ago. Ick.

Battle Academy is also (arguably) the bad kind of turn based game, simplified, streamlined, suitable for play on larger "mobile devices". From what I've seen, the only real saving grace is the multiplayer system.

Panzer Corps is good but it's not exactly an impressive achievement to directly copy SSI's mechanics, make them slightly worse, add pretty graphics and then split WW2 into a huge number of DLCs.

Who cares if they are an indie or a tiny non-indie.

I agree about Battle Academy, I could never enjoy such a primitive games, but there seem to be a number of people who really love this. You cannot deny that the quality is high.

And you can say about Panzer Corps what you want but I played this for several weeks which is much more than I do with most new releases.

The DLCs have also turned out to be a huge irritant to me, selling 837kb updated (text) files in a 300MB file is audacious, but I do not need to buy them, do I.
I would wait until all DLCs are ready and they sell a version of the game with all campaigns.
Or just get the standard version and play that, after 1942 it will get repetitive anyway.
Or simply get one of the old, free versions and stop complaining.

Other than their press release being turd-like, I really do have high hopes for this game and hope it finally delivers the fantasy grand strategy experience I've been hoping for.

I imagine this to be a somewhat more flashy and streamlined, but less deep, Dominions. Art style also seems a bit more generic and high fantasy, while Dominions could get quite genuinely dark and sinister and drew a lot from myths and cultures you don't see very often in fantasy.

Hmm. 35 "realms and only "100+" units.

My math tells me I should be worried about just how unique each realm is from one another. Anytime Risk is invoked I think godawful from a depth perspective, but fine for a non-random strategic game. Which we need more of.

Cautiously optimistic. I think the random element of many games today can be a put off. Being dealt a shit hand or losing to a RNG only goes so far.

The fantasy grand strategy experience I've been hoping for doesn't involve many similarities to the game Risk.

Maybe it's been too many years since I played Risk, but other than rolling dice and drawing cards to act, isn't it just about painting the map with your ever-growing legions? Paradox games always gave me strong feelings of Risk gameplay, what with its abstract battles and diplomacy. I don't know how much else there is to Risk, maybe you can tell me.

Well...

The fantasy grand strategy experience that most people have been hoping for is an updated and improved Master of Magic.

But according to the developers this game is Master of Magic + Risk.

Master of Magic was a very high detail game, where you got to micromanage every individual city and every individual battle and where there were so many strategic options that it was impossible to balance them all and half the fun was finding the next way to break the game.

Risk is very different. It may or may not have a lot of deep strategy involved, I'm not qualified to say. But it has very simple mechanics compared to most computer games. Everything is very abstracted and handled at a high level. For example, there are not any different types of units, there are just armies. There are only a few different types of moves that the player is allowed to make, although he may have quite a few targets for those moves.

So what exactly does combining Risk and Master of Magic mean? It is a mystery.

But I'm thinking that it probably means a "casual strategy" version of Master of Magic, with simple mechanics, lots of abstraction, not much detail and a limited number of moves that the player can make.

Yeah can't say I like the sound of this Risk talk and 100 unique units for 35 civs.

I sort of see fantasy grand strategies on a

[hardcore] Dominions <- Master of Magic -> Heroes of Might and Magic [casual]

scale. Wonder where this game would fit in.