Kingshot and other Base Building + Strategy Games

So I got suckered by a mobile game ad when I was relaxing yesterday on my Lay Z Boy



It looked like a fun tower defense puzzleish game with mounted combat which seemed cool.


Of course the gameplay is nothing like that but I've never played any of these games so after playing a bit I was still interested.

I don't play stupid mobile games and this game is just as dumb as I feared. It has all the cash shop focus, microtransactions, minimalist upgrades, annoying timers, zero gameplay that I kind of assume all these ridiculous games have.

I haven't gotten to the point where spending more than a few dollars is really that compelling, but I know it's a reskin or some shit of Whiteout Survival which has whales like



So you know the pay 2 win is coming.

Are there any of these types of base building + strategy mobile games that aren't obscene p2w games?

I'm not sure if I've gotten to the grindy stage that motivates p2w but I'm still having fun. The game pushes everyone toward the center, so I think the difference between freeloaders like me and whales will resolve soon enough.

Paying $$$ seems so counterproductive. The "gameplay" is 50% social and 50% resource management. If you just swipe the credit card, you dilute the gains from the resource management making it less rewarding

I'm still enjoying Kingshot quite a bit. The gameplay of balancing resource expenditures and investing them correctly is still pretty engaging and is so much more detailed than PC base building games just because that's the net they ensare you with p2w mechanics. The ~1hr cooldowns on everything that require you to log in and keep everything is obnoxious. There are constantly things to "collect", so it's easy to fall into a trap of "playing" by clicking stuff basically randomly, but you can also just pop in and activate everything in a few minutes and go about your day.

I've been trying to raise my power level to join the top guild or "alliance" on my server or "state" since the server started and finally got in this morning. The difference between a ~$15 player like myself and God knows how much $$$ some of the whales put in is huge of course. In my previous alliance I was one of the strongest forces and now it feels like I'm Chester next to these Spikes.



It still seems a bit crazy that nobody has made a non-p2w version of these games, especially one with more gameplay-integrated battles. It's funny that my #1 wish for Bannerlord is more base building and my #1 wish for mobile base building games like Kingshot is, well, the Bannerlord like gameplay they advertised like one of my vids here:

Intrinsic said:

I only play The Tower right now, because fun is needing 9 spreadsheets and a website to manage things efficiently. Maybe I'll check this out, how many spreadsheets do you have?

View attachment 580281

Click to expand...

I've just got one. It has the "Hero" abilities which are a bit unintuitive but play a major role for strategy.



I probably could create a "todo" list in this game of things to keep on cooldown but the number of things you have to do is only ~15 and the game shows most (but not all of them...) to you in a helpful way.

The real meta of this game is all social. Keeping folks engaged, informed and showing up. Communicating with other alliances to broker peace, etc. My current alliance is so absurdly powerful compared to #2 and below that it would take someone like me who would enjoy literally rallying the entire State against us. Instead I think we're focused on State vs State which I don't know the mechanics of but we seem motivated to build up a decent set of alliances for the state. I imagine that all goes out the window if the other states rally against us.

Phelps McManus said:

Are you still playing this over a month later or did the P2W finally get you? The All Out events that encourage whales to grind on everyone else really kills the community. After each one is a huge reshuffle as alliances die and merge.

Click to expand...

Yeah I'm still in deep. I play optimally and attentively, but am still a super low spender. I'm the 40th strongest is the most powerful alliance (guild) in my state (server). It's a particularly strong alliance, only one alliance in the entire game is both newer and stronger than us, and we are 49th game-wide. My current power is 29million, the strongest person in our alliance is at 99million. For reference, the 100th most powerful person in the game has 102million and my rank is 11,374 overall.

At the top end of the game we have a fairly chill state, though kill events can get a bit rowdy. I pretty much never get attacked even during kill events because nobody wants to poke the bear. I don't know how it is for the mid and lower tier alliances.

The way I think about it, I'm like that career soldier in the background that trains since adolescence for warfare, but am soundly one-shot by the rando hero (the whale...) who goes through a 60 second training montage (credit card swipe). I don't mind, it's kind of a different experience but it's easy to enjoy mediocrity when you're in the strongest alliance and don't have to worry about getting picked on.

Another way to think about it, this is how I think of myself:



But this is probably more accurate:

Phelps McManus said:

I am amazed at what others in the alliance spend. Not just the whales, but average Joe’s who seem like bright adults have admitted to spending over $250 in a single day chasing top rank a bi-weekly event (Hall of Governors).

Click to expand...

Yeah the Hall of Governors is complete $$$ bait. I do enough to earn the rewards but it's pointless to try scoring highly without being a whale. Even if you saved up every resource and speedup you had for weeks to place high in a given HoG, you'd only get enough shards for a mid-rank Hero, which I believe would be less powerful than a maxed out Epic hero.

Crisco said:

Was looking for a new game for my phone and saw this thread. As mentioned couldn't find the game that it showed in the ad. It seems like a generic town builder, build wait slightly advance. Made it to town lvl 8. Not sure what the point is. The fights autoplay themselves and the most interesting defend your base is only once a day? Or when you lvl the town center. If there something I'm missing or is that it?

Tha raids seem like multi-player go kill beast/camp/orange rebels. Maybe someone can fill me in on what I'm missing before I uninstall.

Click to expand...

You're not missing anything. The ads are a complete farce.

The only meaningful gameplay is at the high-levels where events like Swordland Showdown, State vs State, Castle Fights etc are fun strategy gameplay at the top of a p2w grindgame. You could, of course, get much better versions of those events with any RTS or 4X game. The non-event meta is efficient usage of resources and alliance cooperation.

The Swordland Showdown event would be so much more fun if it was modeled more as a real-time strategy game. Even if you could only control one unit (your king and allies) and patrolled around the map. Instead it's just an instanced version of the normal game where you can freely teleport and engage opponents, which makes strategies for it weird.

Finally quit this game after doing my third SvS event, which we won and got our third star for.

This is the first and almost certainly last unashamedly p2w game I'll ever play. As a low spender I still played near-optimally for months and even botted the menial tasks 24/7 while being very active in all the events and achieved something like top 50ish on the state by the time I quit. Despite that, in the major fights I was mostly in the way of the top 20, because the mechanics don't really support an all-out-war.

I enjoyed the experience, especially as a leader in the top guild on a very strong server. The politics and human nature of diplomacy was the same as other PvP games, but the players were so much worse than the typical sweaty PvP nerds.

It's incredible playing a game where the fate of a thousand players on a server are dictated by the actions and temperment of whoever spends the most. Most people who play this game (including me) are kind of weird, but people who spend tens of thousands on the game are going to be crazy. There were three whales on the server:
1.A whale that was extremely active and even had a dolphin alt that just one day completely disappeared from the game and from Discord. Absolutely zero contact and zero information about their handle. I contacted them multiple times on Discord (along with a bunch of other people) for weeks after they quit, completely silent. People said they came from a rich family or something, but who knows.
2. A whale with a good temperment and allegedly owned a business, had a bit of a king complex which was fine, but wasn't in the top alliance and ran the second-strongest alliance.
3. A whale with a diva complex who would pick fights with anyone who wasn't nice to them. Everyone just had to deal with it because so much is hinging on the comfort of whales, and it wasn't that bad. They always showed up and won our wars, so what's a little bit of kowtowing?

I imagine most servers had similar paradigms, likely the deadest of servers having blood thirsty whales that crushed everyone for fun, then quit after everyone else quit. So we were pretty lucky that everyone mostly got along.


If I ever played another game like this, I could see myself having fun by:
1. Waiting for another big p2w game to release
2. After a few weeks, doing some research before selecting a server and try to find one with solid whales.
3. Rise to become an "account manager" that sought to hold or claim accounts of people quitting the game, and finding ways to sell those accounts while botting them to keep them somewhat alive.

It's also weird playing a game where every server is slowly dying, since they just open new servers instead of pushing new players into old servers, since catchup is almost impossible. Few people were really buying accounts, and I think it's basically impossible to truly sell them since people would use their personal accounts to connect to them, and disconnecting is impossible? But maybe if there was some marketing to buy them, it could work? idk. I doubt I'd try that though, it sounds like a second job.