Battle Nations

If you don't want to read further, at least read this: Much of the game is gated behind a combination of paywalls, rng, and significant grinds. It has a wide variety of seemingly incomplete or underexplored mechanics coupled with balancing so bad it makes every other game look better by comparison. I've mostly played this game on mobile, not on steam, because it is a mobile game. I've also been holding my tongue for a while because the devs will, supposedly, fix things; however, recent updates have made me realize releasing the game in its current state only makes sense as a cash grab and highlights many of the game's flaws, many of which are seemingly unlikely to change. I'll talk about the RNG first, considering it's the most egregious, given that this is supposed to be a strategy game (more on that later.) -Training many units, a lot of which are better than similarly leveled counterparts, some of which are functionally or actually mandatory for content, unless you pay of course, requires resources with an often low drop rate, typically around 10%, meaning you'll get maybe 1 per day unless you spend an unreasonable amount of time playing the game and waiting for the fights to respawn, because yes, these resources are both largely random and time gated... -Crits: different units have different crit chances, sometimes against specific types of units, which is... fine, but the crits are 1.85x damage so it matters a lot whether or not a unit lands a crit or if yours get hit by one. (Which can end up costing you some of the random, limited resources mentioned earlier.) -Damage Ranges: everything has a damage range, some small, most enough to matter against some enemies, especially bosses and tankier ones, and some which function as a second crit chance or have an even wider gap than the crit chance. -Random Attacks: The bot will always have a random unit use one of it's attacks, again at random, targeting a random unit of yours. The attacks are often weighted, but not enough to be reliably predictable. -Random Targeting: Some attacks, including some from bosses, will hit random spaces in a predetermined area, which gives a large variance to the damage dealt by these attacks, occasionally resulting in unblockable (more on that later as well) turn one or otherwise shots of your units. -Status Effects: Often have a random chance to be applied, which makes sense, but this, when combined with everything else, can create unwinnable situations with no player involvement at all. An example of this would be against a boss (re-)released in the 13.0 patch, which has a high chance to stun (55%) and hits the entire board. It deals enough damage to every available unit, that poor rng can result in a loss every 5 turns. (Yes the fight will last long enough this can happen 4+ times in a successful run.) This is not the only boss that can do that, as 2 other bosses, one of which is pretty much always 5 turns away from beating you if attacks a certain way, and the other has a chance to delete a unit, this becomes plural as the fight goes on. (Though it does become less impactful in this instance with unit levels.) The "strategy" -Balancing is very linear with little room for niches, as the game progresses, so do all the numbers and abilities of units. Niches like tank and indirect (unblockable) dps start to blur as does every sort of dps. In other words, nearly everything good is the same, tanky, indirect damage, big damage numbers, armor piercing. There are exceptions, but all of those exceptions are mostly only useful in niche circumstances or for grinding units (more on that later.) -While there are some hints of fights being strategic, the best and most reliable strategy is bigger number = win, provided nothing rng and completely out of the players control happens that is (like what can happen with 3/4 bosses in the game). -Indirect (unblockable) Attacks: Early on these attacks are fewer and far-er between and have some combination of lower damage, longer reload times, and fewer targets. As the game progresses, this aspect goes away entirely, and the unblockable attacks have larger ranges, more damage, and often times, comparable reload times, which means the game starts to demand everything be tanky. This is especially true of bosses, as 2 of them have unblockable one shot ability (one of which is a chance to defeat multiple) as well as a boss with an unblockable 55% board-wide stun chance... There is no strategy here because there isn't really anything that can be done about these attacks, especially when paired with high damage from the boss elsewhere and resistance to status effects (often all of them,) making the bosses unreliable, but still big number = win. The boss I've been talking about most this time, the one with a 55% stun chance, it requires about a 26 USD investment in premium currency just to beat with reasonable odds, and functionally requires a 9 USD investment in premium currency just to realistically even have a chance beat. Neither guarantee victory, nor do massive amounts of grinding or further spending. You are at the mercy of rng and hyper-inflated numbers intended to force payment the entire time. The Grind -Every 5-10 levels introduces new and stronger enemies, and with it units the player is expected to swap to in order to beat them... Units that often need higher ranks to be good at doing what they are supposed to and will be replaced in a handful of levels. -Later ranks are often no where near worth the time investment. While they still provide enough of a benefit to make a difference, the later ranks typically give the same or almost the same stats as the other ranks for just as much, if not more time investment than all the previous ranks combined, and you now lose much of the main reward from encounters and raids (Skill Points, the unit XP) as it still gathers the limited SP without doing anything with it. (all ready to promote units do this as well) -Gold: Gold costs are high and passive gold income is incredibly low, often a whole days worth from any source being less than what you'd get from a single fight even from paid and high level sources. The gold cost of most things is also many encounters worth of gold, meaning if you aren't constantly grinding large amount of encounters, you are missing out on a significant part of the game. -As the levels increase, so does the Skill Points needed for units... except the best average SP gain possible doesn't increase and, in certain parts of the game, the SP reward increase is almost negligible despite it's necessity due to everything scaling with you in that part of the game (naval). I am writing this review despite not liking the game because Battle Nations really does have a lot of good ideas and hints of being great, and clearly has a lot of potential, but it always falls short... very short, and lacks close to a good enough execution to do those ideas justice. It really is a shame to see a game with such a high volume of wasted potential. If I were to describe this game in one word, it would be Disappointing.

I like the game, can't lie. Not for everyone. Strong P2W vibes and favors a sweaty playstyle...for now. Dev's are super responsive and are working towards restoring the game to its 'original state'. Community is fun as well.

i only play out of nostalgia. it reeks of old mobile game qualities like long upgrade timers, limited simultaneous upgrades for buildings and units, etc. grinds drop resources at rng, leading to early-mid game progression frustrations. If you gave this to a coughing baby gen alpha player, it would be just as if you handed them a hydrogen bomb.

As a veteran of the original Battle Nations, I honestly find it hard to understand what has become of this game. The real problem isn’t even balance or progression – the real problem is that the concept of a ‘guild’ effectively no longer exists in the game’s current state. Back in the day, there were sieges, crews, weekend events, promotional units, nano offers, double XP, spontaneous activities, shared objectives and, generally speaking, always some reason to play together. All the fun stuff, basically. This fostered activity, interaction and genuine camaraderie. Players would capture resources together, heal one another, field troops, level up together and look forward to events. Fridays used to be real highlights because everyone was excited to see which unit or event would be coming over the weekend. Today, practically none of that remains. Not even PvP. Players currently get together as a guild every few months for a boss fight – and that’s now almost the only thing they have in common. And even when a half-hearted event like double XP is running, everyone basically still plays on their own because you can’t assemble a group to level up with. There is a complete lack of a functioning in-game chat or private messaging system; instead, players are directed to Discord. There, the same few people always try to keep things going somehow, whilst the rest just tag along silently. And that is precisely where the real problem lies: a functioning structure arises from shared gameplay mechanics, shared goals and regular interaction. It is precisely this foundation that is almost entirely missing from the game today. On top of that, almost everything that used to generate motivation and long-term engagement is missing. No regular promotional units. No real weekend events. No castings. No crews. Hardly any incentives. Hardly any surprises. Instead, much of it feels like artificially stretched progress with as little effort as possible. Most players here are veterans. They wanted their old Battle Nations back – not a neutered version from which almost all social and motivational elements have been removed. And that is precisely why the game currently feels less like a vibrant revival and more like a nostalgic shell of what it once was.

In short, this is the very same predatory old facebook/flash game that "got revived" the exact same way but somehow they run it worse than Z2 the original dev. Go play something else that appreciates your time and money. Updates are rare, random and always shadow dropped, there are almost no roadmap aside from patreon chat or rumors from the dev. Events are way worse, despite being a live service game with tons of events back in the day, there's only a handful ever since launch, making it very difficult to get event units or premium currency. Hell there's only an event every 2 months and they don't even gave out nanopods. Upgrades are hard locked one at a time, making it incredibly tedious and painful when you have around tens or twenty of building and units to be upgraded. And of course that can only be skipped if you use the premium currency, they also cannot be cancelled like how z2 did it back then. Weekly bosses and boss strike are even worse, they expect people to grind units like a braindeadass jobless without any sp boost with non limited units. Suuure they can be beaten, but my god even Z2 provides us the solution. The dev kept saying they're gonna improve the game when they only rewrite the code from scratch for years, they also said there's gonna be a 2.0 shenanigans like as if they're gonna improve anything in the game. They have a lot of whale glazers that will defend the game no matter what little they do. It's incredibly baffling that they always boast rewriting the entire code just to make the same game with all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ flaws and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ old monetization practice intact. Till this day I still have no idea what they did better than Z2 aside from changing the resource truck requirement for each res. Lastly they never even address the exclusive units for patreon subscriber even before the game came out since last year. No update regarding it, no idea when it'll come out, hell maybe they thought they can just get away with it since no one even demands it not even the patreons.

one of the worst communities for a video game ever.

Battle Nations! It's back! Sort of. The good: The game has a lot of heart. The characters are fun! The quests are flavorful and keep you doing things while you play. The dialogue is often witty and charming. The art style is endearing. And, for a base builder game, the game gives you (albeit, slowly) enough premium currency that you won't need to buy premium currency as long as you budget and only use what you are given sparingly. The bad (and why I wouldn't recommend it): This is not a new game. If you played this game back when it first released, you will probably enjoy it for a bit. However, there was very little effort put into porting this to PC with all the QOL changes that we expect. It plays exactly how it did on the iPad. Nothing but point and click. Esc does nothing. Right click does nothing. There are no hotkeys, no support for PC. When you level up units, the bonuses are cut off because the game was not made for PC. For all intents and purposes, it is not a PC game, it is an iPad game you play on your PC. On top of this, the game has been out for some time now, and while the devs are adding new stuff (naval warfare), they have yet to fix core parts of the game. There is an entire tab for building "Decorations". In Battle Nations, Decorations are not just cosmetic. They give your buildings stat bonuses (think: being near a road makes a building more productive). There are TONS of decorations which give stat bonuses, and essentially, they are behind all of the city building in the game. At the current moment, none of these decorations work, which essentially means that there is zero reason to build a city, as opposed to a random jumble of buildings. While this isn't the worst thing in the world, it basically removes all aspects of city building in the game. Another major issue is getting bottlenecked on resources. You get bottlenecked on population consistently. Early on, you will get bottlenecked on iron and the only way to get past it is to beeline towards iron deposits over the course of a week or so (each expansion takes a day), or to pay real money. You have resource caps, which would be fine, but a tiny increase in your resource cap costs you perhaps a tenth of your population (unless you spend real money to buy the better buildings of course!). This stopped me in my tracks for WEEKS until I finally broke and used a premium resource. Then, there is the combat issue, and the bottlenecks that arise from your units dying. There really isn't much strategy, you just choose who your minions attack, and the opponent more or less randomly attacks one of yours. It is essentially up to random chance whether you lose your most expensive units. These units will then bottleneck you, as you can't win the later battles without them, but winning those battles will cost you tens of thousands of gold in hospital bills and thousands of iron, while only gaining you a few thousand gold for a win (and sometimes only a few hundred). I don't hate this system, as it forces you to use your worse units, but I really wish that the penalty for units dying, which again is essentially up to random chance, was not so high. I often find myself retreating and retrying battles after the AI randomly chooses to deal 75% of one of my expensive unit's HP. This is bad game design. Also, why the ♥♥♥♥ does the Dust Walker Raider unit, who just has two knives and a thrift-store cloak, have a full range attack that insta-kills everything? What world of unreality do you live in, devs? Tldr: it's not a PC game, it's an iPad game that I would only recommend for nostalgia purposes.

I have extremely fond memories of this game from when I was around 6 years old, and I am more than ecstatic to see it return. A fun turn based strategy game with some of the most memorable character designs I can even remember from the era they're from. While the game is pay to win, as I remember it back in the day, it is still a fairly addicting game to get into and watch your forces slowly grow.

i was having fun till lvl 39 where i hit a wall. you can go through substantial amounts of fight and still get no ressource drops. you fight enemies for your mission with the only troops the game allows you to have and you still lose with optimal positioning and play; aka. play to win ill game.

It's okay, fun if you remember it but really just a gun-flavoured clash of clans if you don't. The game is aggressively pay to win at higher levels, but most of the game's content can be accessed without any payment. Having better currency rates through patreon is A Choice but at least the in-game cash shop does have alright rates as long as you're spending the currency with any sense. Also the community for this game is toxic, the whales are insufferable, don't ever talk in the discord, just use the wiki and community resources to get the information you need.