Warpath offers Insights into why Lilith is Killing it!

One of the hardest things for game developers to do when analyzing a hit game is to figure out what works well for the hit game and what doesn’t. Game companies will typically be tight-lipped on the secret sauce to their game’s success, so game designers like myself will need to resort to educated guesses at best as to why a game succeeds.

So when a Hit-Making Game Developer launches a game that takes influences from their previous games, it creates a golden opportunity to get insight into what the Developer believes has and has not worked in their previous games. Enter Warpath. At first glance, Warpath looks like a clone of Rise of Kingdoms but with a modern warfare setting. But pretty early in the game you will begin to see designs heavily influenced by AFK Arena. Warpath would not be the first 4x game to incorporate RPG Systems (look at Lords Mobile). However, it is the first game that I can recall that has utilized designs from the Developer’s previous games but in a whole different genre. Because of this, Warpath shows us what Lilith believes to be working from both Rise of Kingdoms and AFK Arena.

In this Article i’ll go over some designs in Warpath that were taken from AFK Arena. In the future I’ll do the same for Warpath and Rise of Kingdoms.

Upgrading a Unit’s Level

Upgrading Army Units is not a new thing in 4x Games. What is particularly interesting in Warpath though is both the number of Levels, number of currencies, and leveling structure used in leveling Army Units.

Hero Leveling in AFK Arena uses Hero XP and soft currency to Level up Heroes normally. But at certain level thresholds (20, 40, 60, etc.), the game requires Hero Essence in addition to Hero XP and soft currency to level up. Now Hero XP is pretty common in AFK Arena, but Hero Essence is much harder to come by. Thus, when players hit those thresholds, they are tempted to spend to buy the Hero Essence necessary to continue leveling the Hero.

Warpath follows a very similar leveling structure. They require only Unit XP (very common) to level a Unit except for when the Unit is at a level that is a multiple of 10 (10, 20, 30). At those levels, the Unit needs both Unit XP and a much rarer Bullet Currency to level up to 11. After that, leveling will continue to only need Unit XP until the next multiple of 10. The design is too close to AFK Arena to not be deliberate. The fact that Lilith not only used the same design, but also compressed the level thresholds to every 10 levels (instead of 20 levels in AFK Arena) suggests that this leveling structure works very well for their monetization. Their decision to also require research for certain thresholds suggests that requiring players to engage with research to upgrade their units further should also work.

Unit Assembly

The Research Center in Warpath doubles as a building used for “assembling” units. When the Player selects an Army Unit to be assembled, they must also select Fodder Army units to be crafted into the selected Unit. After the assembly is complete, the selected Army Unit has increased their star rating by part of a star and their stats jump quite a bit.

The funny thing about this is that some Assemblies require the exact same Army Unit as the selected Army Unit, while other Assemblies require two Army Units of the same tier and type as the selected Army Unit. Sound familiar?

The Army Unit Assembly system sounds just like the Ascension system in AFK Arena. There are some minor differences — whereas AFK Arena relies on Rarity as the upgradable system through Ascension, Warpath upgrades Tier (star). The fact that Warpath breaks stars into multiple pieces for the purposes of expanding the depth of Army Unit Assemblies shows that adding this depth is just as important in Warpath as it was in AFK Arena.

Hero Ascension is the crux of AFK Arena’s Hero Depth. So having that depth (even in star form) shows that Lilith highly values Hero depth and wanted to make sure that Warpath had it in a way where Rise of Kingdom’s Hero depth was lacking. It also ties into Warpath’s decision to make Army Units more like Heroes than Troops.

Players control 5 Army Units in combat, similar to the 5 Heroes Players use in AFK Arena. Going with Heroes versus the traditional Troop Model from Rise of Kingdoms suggests that Lilith thinks they can make up for any lost Monetization from Troops with Hero systems and depth.

Idle Rewards

In Rise of Kingdoms, Lilith had daily rewards that the Player could collect that were based on how far along the Player was in the campaign. They also had a store that allowed you to purchase things with currency earned through the daily campaign rewards. AFK Arena had none of that, just the idle rewards that helped define that type of RPG.

Warpath combines AFK Arena’s Idle Rewards with Rise of Kingdom’s Campaign Store. Again, reading the tea leaves you can see that both the Idle Rewards of AFK Arena and the Campaign Store of Rise of Kingdoms were important to Lilith when making Warpath. If Idle Rewards weren’t important but the Campaign Store was, Lilith would have just used the Rise of Kingdoms Daily Rewards. If Idle Rewards were important but the Campaign store didn’t move the needle, Lilith would have just used the Idle Rewards. The deliberate changing of Daily rewards to Idle Rewards while keeping the Campaign store is informative of how Lilith viewed the importance of those designs.

Idle Rewards generally are better than a Daily Reward system in that they reward Players who come back multiple times a day. As we generally want players to engage with the game over multiple sessions a day, having a large chunk of Army Unit XP to come back to so that you can make your Army Units stronger before fighting again is the better design.

Is there More?

I’m still fairly early in the Warpath experience so there may be more influences from AFK Arena that I haven’t found. But I am honestly very excited by what I see so far. AFK Arena’s designs solved a lot of problems that other F2P RPGs faced, from Hero depth to session length. Seeing that Lilith incorporated some of the Hero Depth features into a 4x game is fascinating. At the same time, AFK Arena struggled with Elder game, guild-based events. Rise of Kingdoms excels in their alliance-based activity, which definitely has been retained in Warpath. Warpath just went live a few weeks ago, but I expect stellar performance from it at the minimum, and I will look forward to what else they put into the game.