The Iglia Chronicles is an overhead background stand-alone SLG developed by Red Hand Studios and is about to end its one-and-a-half-year EarthLy Access at Steam. Thanks to the official invitation, we experienced the official version of the game in advance, in the trial cycle of a few days, I deeply felt the unique charm of the "two-dimensional + grand strategy" of the game, but also found a lot of "rough" and "missing" common in the early version of the indie game.
There are many small monsters in the temple, and there are big brothers everywhere
The backstory of "The Battle of Iglea" is designed as a bridge section with a strong sense of historical vision: the decaying Central Plains Empire is destroyed by the iron horses of nomadic tribes, and then falls into a chaotic situation of division. What the player has to do is to lead his own people to wipe out all the forces, and finally unify this four-screen-sized otherworld continent.
In this not-so-big world map, the production team placed more than 20 factions of different races, beliefs, and cultures, and determined the difficulty of the game according to the amount of resources each faction had at the beginning. It is worth mentioning that the different factions in the game do not only have differences in appearance and opening difficulty, they all have completely different classes and technology trees, and each of them comes with a separate opening and winning ending.
On top of this, the production team used the rules of the DND faction to assign forces to more than 200 heroes with different personalities and abilities, and very conscientiously designed the character story and social relationships for each hero.
The abundance of available factions and a large character library, as well as a variety of technology trees, make Aeglia Battle Record have plenty of repetitive playability, making the fun of platooning more diverse. This time you may start by assisting the last princess of the Empire to "rebuild the glory of the Empire" with the powerful Paladin Legion; the next time you may be helping the "Queen of the Dead" to create the "Land of the Dead" with the mage troops that destroy the world.
However, at present, the role of the character background story and social relationship system with a large amount of text in this game is somewhat "insufficient" in supplementing the world view and enhancing the sense of substitution in the game.
In the game, the character's social relationship system plays a role mainly in persuasion. These "iron-boned" heroes in the face of our torturers were very easy to submit to in front of their old friends and relatives, and often led me to a path of "if you want to conquer heroes, you must first conquer the hero's wife".
However, the system of "social relations", which can easily direct a bitter love scene, finally presents a great regret. The "pillow people" of this group of heroes will not "move and reason" with their imprisoned partners, but will only say something like other torturers or intimidate or persuade them, so that the role of "social relations", a system with strong story potential, is limited to the level of game mechanics.
It seems to be a wargame deduction, but in fact, it is cultivated into a spelling point
Like most SLG games, Iglia Wars uses both foreign and internal play to fill its own game content, but compared to the mature series, Iglia Wars is still relatively primitive and crude.
In terms of the internal affairs system, this game allows players to complete a variety of actions such as building city defenses, investing in cities, training soldiers, and destroying hostile cities in one turn. However, this seemingly diverse internal affairs measure can only have an effect on basic attributes such as resource output and the defense level of the city in the game, and the effect is relatively single.
The single internal affairs effect combined with the simple and rough city defense attributes of this game often leads to some annoying situations later in the game. Since the garrison ability of the city is a rough combination of the city defense value and the military strength of the defenders, players will find that the city has become a "Constantinople" numerically when facing the capital of some powerful forces later in the game, and it is almost impossible to break through by frontal attack. The game lacks siege strategies such as "food shortage" and "siege", and can only sit back and watch the other side rely on an isolated city to be self-sufficient, and then in the inability to rely on the dream of world unification on the success rate of the lobbying of the defending generals.
The two isolated cities surrounded by me will not be broken for ten thousand years by relying on the super high city defense
At the same time, this game does not provide players with a "unified management" function that can be called intelligent. Even in the later stages of the game with dozens of large and small cities under the hand, if you want to complete the development of the territory and the strengthening of the city defense more scientifically and reasonably, you still need to adapt to the local conditions of each city according to the ability of the generals, coupled with the internal affairs system that has some insufficient functions, let me feel only cumbersome and boring when facing these trivial things.
However, in terms of foreign wars, "Iglia Wars" still gives players enough freedom of operation. At first glance, the game's combat mode is somewhat similar to some domestic SLGs of the 90s. Each side can send five generals to lead the soldiers to attack on a horizontal scroll-style map, and players can adjust their formation before the battle, and can instantly change the position of their own legions during the battle, or release the active skills of the leading generals.
This design should have made it easier for people to experience the thrill of strategizing and winning thousands of miles on the battlefield, but the actual effect backfired. The real situation is that due to the cumbersome and abnormal combat operations of this game, the legion still needs to carry out a few seconds of "identification of enemies and enemies" in advance, and the results and battle losses of manual operations are often inferior to AI hosting or rapid battles, and it is basically only "theoretical possible" to win the weak with fancy positions and detailed micro-manipulations. After only a few attempts, I was very excited, and after that, when I encountered an advantage match, I would only brainlessly choose a quick battle to "combat power confrontation".
It's a lot more fun to make a fortune than to attack a city
"Iglia Wars" does not give special winning means such as "technological victory" and "cultural victory", and the only thing that can be done to pass the level to see the ending animation is to honestly dominate the world, which makes this game like many SLG games, unable to avoid the fate of becoming a "color-filling game" in the late stage of lineup formation.
However, for those who are not in a hurry to pass the level, the game's diplomatic system can still bring some interesting features in the late stages.
The diplomatic ability of the camp in the game depends on the comprehensive national strength of the forces and the personal attributes of the diplomats, and for those regional overlords who are strong and strong, the AI of all parties will not hesitate to exert their national strength to seek friendship, which provides a possibility for using the diplomatic system to "cut leeks".
In the process of trial play, the Imperial Restoration Army I operated stopped the pace of expansion after dominating the southeast corner of the map, and was at ease to build a city and engage in the economy. In the face of these foreign countries who have spared no expense in seeking friendship, I will always cruelly offer a price that they cannot refuse but is absolutely painful, and cheerfully give away a dozen rounds of alliances. In the end, by harvesting the economic potential of the various forces, I pointed out the five-level technology early and quickly bulldozed the entire continent with the elite army.
The diplomacy system of Eglia is one of the most satisfactory designs of the game, which effectively complements the single function of the internal affairs system and fills the game with a certain strategic depth. Diplomats from different forces and personalities can also show their character charm on this exclusive stage, and bring players some cute spots exclusive to the "two-dimensional" theme.
Overall
On the whole, "The Battle of Iglea" is a satisfactory SLG work on the whole, the "two-dimensional" attribute is destined to be different, and the large number of NPCs and the grand backstory also give it good plot potential. However, the game still has many shortcomings in terms of internal system and operation optimization, and the supposedly excellent plot and character development have not been tapped enough. Although the completion of the game is already very high, "Iglia Battle" still has a lot of room to improve from those mature SLG genre works.