Critical Play: The Battle of Polytopia
A Strategy Game Mixing Sandbox Creation & World Domination
The Battle of Polytopia is a turn-based strategy game available on iOS, Android, and Stream developed by Midjiwan, an indie game studio based in Stockholm, Sweden. While the ultimate goal of the game is domination of your opponents and their respective territory, achieving this goal relies on smartly developing and building up your existing territory. The game is quasi-sandbox in that you can develop within limits — limits on your territory, on your resources, and on what are the most strategic thing to build and where. Polytopia blends together the aspects of fun aspects of sandbox gaming and world creation with the competitive spirit of civilization games. It’s certainly not a true “sandbox game” in that creation is not the main driving force; instead, by mixing in the civilization element, it becomes less of a toy and more of a game. Your desire to win is what drives the creation. The creation, however, is open-ended enough that you feel like you’re doubling as a city (or empire) planner.
The setup of the game is fairly simple — pick a tribe to play as (you’ll have to pay a bit if you want a less restricted set of choices), develop your territory, learn new skills, and achieve domination. You can play in single-player mode against a set of computer opponents, or you can challenge your friends via pass-and-play (on mobile devices) or via an internet connection. Each turn, you’ll be given the ability to train and move your forces, upgrade and develop your territory, invest in research, and engage other tribes in battle. Of course, your opponents will get the opportunity to do the exact same once you decide to end your turn.
You begin the game shrouded in clouds. For the first couple of turns, the primary objective is to build up your skillset while exploring the area around you. The game purposefully spreads opponents out on the map so that things can be moderately interesting by the time first contact is made. You can invest in learning how to build ports, roads, mines, and so forth to take advantage of the land around you and achieve other milestones to boost your score. (Yes, there is the additional component of a score — if you’re more interested in playing strictly by number of turns rather than total elimination of opponents, you can determine the winner by using the score.) You are restricted to developing within the realm of your empire, but can expand this empire by upgrading your cities or by conquering cities outside your borders.
As the game progresses, the primary goal shifts to strategic movement of your forces to infiltrate and take over your opponent’s territory. Maybe you have planned your empire to be defensive-minded: built up walls around your cities, invested heavily in infrastructure, and drafted up a standing army of defenders. Or maybe you are more offensive in nature: focused on quick expansion of territory through a brute force army of unspecialized forces. It is now that the sandbox creativity you embraced in the first half or so of the game becomes the dominant strategy by which you engage your opponents.
This creative strategicness is, in my opinion, what makes the game fun. You can play around with how you go about allocating your resources early in the game, seeing how that affects the ways in which you interact with the world later on. There’s also a level of flexibility — you’re not down and out if you perhaps had a misstep earlier in the game. Since the structure of the game is changing (players do not necessarily have to act unilaterally), there are ways to adapt your strategy later on. It’s dynamic, engaging, and beautifully designed.
Unlike other social sandbox games, it’s not incessant with getting you to come back. It is not waving rewards and daily challenges in your face as a mechanism to boost daily users. It incorporates social elements, like a global leaderboard and the option to play on an online server. If you’d like to play on an online server, you will need to purchase at least one expansion tribe (for anywhere from $0.99 to $2.99). You can, however, play on one device with multiple players without upgrading. It’s only a one-time purchase, however, and seems reasonable given the costs of both developing games and running online servers.
The Battle of Polytopia is a take on the classic civilization game. It’s closer to Settlers of Catan than it is Risk, for example, given the sandbox element. I find that the sandbox elements open up the game to a wider range of possibilities and fun. It doesn’t have to rely on attention grabbing notifications and pop-ups because the gameplay is what keeps people coming back.
