ZNGA: EMPIRES&ALLIES,"FUN,STRATEGY,GAME,MAY,5,2015
Empires & Allies on iOS and Android today.
Zynga...reinvent itself with a new smartphone strategy game
By Andrew Webster
on May 5, 2015 09:00 am
In 2008, Mark Skaggs joined Zynga in hopes of making real-time strategy games even more popular. He had spent the previous six years at Electronic Arts, working on games like Command & Conquer, but with Zynga he saw an opportunity to introduce RTS games to a whole new audience. That never happened, though. Facebook turned out to be a poor platform for the genre, and instead Skaggs spent his time working on social gaming hits like CityVille and FarmVille. But now that mobile has emerged as a suitable platform, he's finally doing what he was hired to do with the launch of Empires & Allies on iOS and Android today. "The idea was to take the classic RTS experience and bring it to mobile," he explains.
And for a struggling Zynga, Empires & Allies is an important step in its quest to reinvent itself as a mobile-first game company.
On the surface, Empires & Allies looks a lot like any of the glut of military-themed strategy games on mobile, like Boom Beach or War of Nations. (It also isn't connected to the Facebook game of the same name, which Zynga launched in 2011 and shut down two years later.) It features a base-building component, where you can collect resources used to build new defenses and add new units to your force.
""The idea was take the classic RTS experience and bring it to mobile.""
It's the typical timed system: resources generate at specific intervals, and new buildings take a pre-determined amount of time to complete (unless you spend premium currency, bought with real money). It’s a system designed to keep you coming back. Other players can attack your base, and vice versa, so the trick is to build a camp that's both efficient at generating resources and one that's tough for invading forces. From there you can venture out to a map to complete various missions, which involve scouting an area and then figuring out which units to send in.
This core concept isn't at all unique, but Empires & Allies differentiates itself in a few ways. For one, it looks significantly better than its contemporaries, with a gritty 3D art style reminiscent of classic RTS games like C&C. Once your base gets relatively large, it's fun just to watch the little animations play out. "We start with the look," Skaggs says of the focus on production values. When it comes to the actual gameplay, Empires & Allies is still pretty simple — your soldiers and tanks will fight autonomously, so there's no need to micromanage — but you can do things like call in air strikes to destroy turrets or drop flashbombs to confuse soldiers. It's a far cry from the nuance of Starcraft, but it makes you feel much more involved compared to most mobile strategy games.
Soource:
www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/8545093/zynga-empires-and-allies-rts
Zynga Launches Military Strategy Game, Empires & Allies
By Angela Moscaritolo
May 5, 2015 11:40am EST
Starting today, players can team up with friends to form alliances and put together the best army. Your army can consist of troops, tanks, helicopters, warplanes, and other military technologies of today and tomorrow. You'll need to craft your base to guard against onslaughts from other players, and pick up resources along the way in your quest "to save or conquer the globe."
"Empires & Allies delivers all the fun, action and excitement from traditional [real-time strategy] games to players on their mobile and tablet device," Skaggs, senior vice president of games at Zynga, said in a statement. "For us it's all about the 'BOOM' — explosions, fun and strategy built on top of the modern military weapons of war."...
The game is now available to download for free in the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, and in Google Play for Android. It's available in 13 languages, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian), and Turkish.
Source:
www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2483697,00.asp
