War of Dots

Summary: Red dots fight against blue dots - doesn't matter who started the war. You have light units (infantry) and heavy units (tanks). Positioning matters - heavy units hit heavy against other heavy units and light units but are weak and vulnerable when positioned in forrests. Also they are expensive. Light units deliver less punch but are flexible in most terrain types and are cheap to produce. Captured cities provide money which you can either save up or spend immediately on production of new units. Be warned: If you have not enough cities that provide money you can not supply your troops and they degrade. To counter this you can balance out the production rate of units (this happens automatically) to save up some money instead. Good if your strategy is to give up on cities that are harder to defend and you need to stay afloat for a while with less income. Now the positives to me are: - It's free. Download and play. - No pay to win. You can buy the plus version of the game entirely to support the developer (props for creating this game on his own) - Relatively active player base - you'll mostly always find somebody to play against in a minute or two - Easy to learn and get into - hard to master - Strategic freedom (ofc depending on the map - you can't move units over mountain areas which sometimes limits your strategy) - It scratches a certrain Hearts of Iron itch but without being to complex and bloated - You can either micromanage or give orders to multiple units at once Now the negatives: - As said in the positives you can either micromanage or give orders to multiple units at once. But the game does neither of it well. Selecting multiple units is yanky and drawing a circle around them not always includes all units and they move relative to their current position meaning they won't form a line but move to the destination in the exact way they were positioned to begin with. If you decide to micromanage each units - well the game is too fast paced to do this efficiently and by the time you went through all units half your army is already weakened to half HP or dead. - The UI. Some parts look OK. Some parts are horrible. Now i believe this is due to the engine and programming framework being limited. Especially the menu while playing a battle is not very intuitive. - Replayability. You start playing for the first time. You lose most battles but then you kinda get the hang of it and start winning. Well that's it. There's a campaign but about halfway through after you understood the game you just steamroll the AI. In multiplayer matches it's 50/50. You either steamroll your opponent if you're good enough or you get just stomped. I wish there was an inbetween. Maybe a timer that runs down and depending on objectives reached you could get a stalemate. This would also add more strategic depth. - Battle time. I know the theme of the battles should be short and fast paced. But as said at this point the management of units is just badly controlled so it just feels hectic and rushed all the time and you can't really embrace a strategy. Maybe this could be resolved by making the game slower. Give the units some more HP. Let units entrench. Something like this. Just give us more time to get a strategy going. In singleplayer battles you can pause and get a look of the map and units that are pre-placed. In multiplayer matches you have no time and the battle starts instantly. No pause available. Too fast for my taste. All in all a good game. The fact it's free basically is a no-brainer recommend. But i doubt it will keep a player interested for long enough. After 3 hours i already feel kind off done with the game. I don't think i'll reach 20 hours ever. Get the game. Play it for as long as its fun to you. If you feel ideological inclined to support indie developers get the Plus version of the game to support the big guy. I wasn't able to find a roadmap for development anywhere. Is the game still being actively worked on? I know it's just a hobby project for the dev - props for getting this done in your spare time.