I was a huge fan of the video game Sangokushi (Romance of Three Kingdoms) and after witnessing so many old-fashioned PC games ported to mobile platforms, I’ve been wondering when we Sangokushi fanatics will see a Sangokushi mobile game. Fortunately, I’ve found a decent substitute of it - Autumn Dynasty, the sequel to 2012 released Autumn Dynasty from Touch Dimensions.
I don’t know whether Touch Dimensions drew from the Sangokushi series when creating Autumn Dynasty or Autumn Dynasty Warlords, but there is obviously a heavy flavor of it in almost every aspect. In Autumn Dynasty Warlords, you are gonna play as an ambitious warlord amid an ancient era of turmoil. Your mission is to manage and expand your empire turn by turn and ultimately unify the land by conquering all other provinces ruled respectively by ten or so warlords.
Autumn Dynasty Warlords offers a true taste of RTS that you might only have seen on PC. There are a great deal of tasks to be completed. Every task, including constructing buildings, managing the cities, raising troops and engaging in diplomacy and espionage, revolves around how to strategically increase your income and military power.
The economic base determines the superstructure. This is a truth applies not only to the real world, but also to the game. Compared with its predecessor, Autumn Dynasty Warlords brings in the city building and managing elements, making it more of a typical mobile RTS game like Clash of Clans. Even if you are more into the real-time tactical battling, you have to make sure your domestic economy in good order at the first place, for otherwise, you won’t even have the money to support the massive troops you’ve raised.
I guess what players, like the most about RTS games is the conquering part. Armies are to be maintained in the course of long years,but to be used in the nick of time. When you find yourself powerful enough to bring down other forces, it’s time to jump in the intense real-time tactical battles.
The real strategy of battling in Autumn Dynasty Warlords lies in which types of troops you pick up ahead of each battle and how to make use of different terrains to deploy them. Every troop has its strengths and weaknesses, which means each troop is best used to counter another particular troop, and has another troop specially against it. The idea is inflicting as many as casualties on enemies and taking as less as damages on your own side.
I’m really amazed at how smooth the controls are when it comes to the battling. You use simple tap and swipe controls to direct your armies at a specific target or location and use special abilities to turn the tide of the battle. When the troops of one side is eliminated, the opposing side wins the battle.
The only real problem I had with the game was its tutorial, which was over too short for a complicated RTS games like this. New comers need time to get used to the mechanics, but it just offers a simple one-minute lead-in, causing a lot of confusions about what to do next. It would be a great pity if newbies come and go within minutes without figuring out how great this game could become.
In any case, Autumn Dynasty Warlords is a pleasant surprise for a hardcore RTS game fans like me. It literally brings me back to those days when I stayed over nights playing Sangokushi. The excitement is still fresh when I, after tens of intense city-crashing battles, finally got the land united under my iron-fisted control. And believe me, you can get that same sense of achievement too in Autumn Dynasty Warlords. It drops only a little from the hefty PC package and displays an unprecedented RTS gaming experience on the mobile.
View and Download on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/autumn-dynasty-warlords/id813330182?mt=8
For more iOS games: http://ios.appsgoer.com/
For hot forum discussion: http://forums.appsgoer.com
