Empires in Ruins
The most offensive defensive Grand Strategy game around, with a black humor infused plot, set in a grim, disillusioned world.
Empires in Ruins is a story-driven novel take on Grand Strategy that merges Empire Building, Tower Defense and RTS battles.
Conquer, build, defend and lead the grumpy Sergeant Hans Heimer in his own personal vendetta against “the system”.
KEY FEATURES
- Plot driven campaign – betrayals, diplomacy and nasty twists
- Turn based strategy – quell the rebellion, kick back the enemy and restore the law.
- Empire management – conquer back the provinces, strengthen your command, chose your best governors and grant your military campaign a steady flow of resources
- Arcade play mode. Because… FIGHT!
- Tower defense-based combat – fight your battles in a new, advanced tower defense style that winks at advanced real time strategy
- Dark humor, dark humor everywhere! – Don’t smile, it’s punishable.
In a corrupted little Principality governed by spruced up popinjays, snobby clergymen and power greedy army officers, something just happened. A god forgotten borderland, the Western Marches, just got inflamed with rebellion, cutting every contact with the capital and declaring independence.
And in such a critical moment, who to send in order to quell the rebellion if not a grumpy alcoholic sergeant with discipline problems and bad bad temper?
Why him? And what is the neighboring kingdom, the Krovans, plotting to do with the Principality of Koth?
Empires in Ruins is composed of two main parts. The turn based Main Map, where the campaign develops and you are called to managed the conquered provinces and the Battlefield, where the real time blood flows and you need to kick the enemy in the arse or be the one kicked.
Empires in Ruins whole plot-driven campaign of turn based strategy and empire building, is managed in the main map. Through it you will access
the single combat maps (according to the plot flow or in order to defend/replay maps), manage diplomacy and access the single province to improve or check their assets and governors.
- Expand, fortify and expand further taking advantage of the conquered provinces reach and infrastructures.
- Improve the regions’ production, increase the flow of resources to fund your brutal military campaign. Don’t expect much help from above.
- Handle diplomacy – Like a bull in a china shop.
- Assign trusted men to govern the regions. Expect betrayals or hang them before that.
- Manage research – More than 100 technologies to research.
Battles are fought in real time, using a hybrid of Tower Defense and RTS mechanics.
COMBAT MAP FEATURES
- Erect your buildings in real time. Avoid getting your workers killed if they walk the wrong path
- 17 towers with unique feats
- Combine the special abilities of your towers to obtain even deadlier effects (Ever tried a flaming arrow on an oil covered enemy?)
- Manage multiple resources, production and special buildings
- Deploy Officers to command and enhance your battlefield forces
- Beware of nasty, canny enemies. They will open new unexpected paths, sabotage your towers, blow your production and get through your defenses in surprising ways.
- Ground, air, water, amphibian and secret enemies paths to defend against.
Ze path to victory is paved with opponents wiz badly planned research trees. [cit. Gottfried Megler]
Few things make progression in a game as interesting as unlocking new technologies to empower your troops, weapons and economies. Provided your hated engineer chief, Gottfried Megler, with the tools to evolve your ragtag army against all odds.
- 70+ technologies to research
- 30+ unlockables with towers, abilities, buildings and headquarters
Steam User 42
Absolutely love this project! Dr Hogan and H&R have done a super job creating the perfect blend of 4x tower defense, & city management. Politics, spies, Nothing was left out. Even in early access the game is pretty damn stable!
If you're a tower defense fan you'll love it!
I've played several of the demo's over the last year and worked with the team.
Discord is your friend if you need help or advice for strategy.
"Nominated for Game of the Year"
Steam User 60
Review by Gaming Masterpieces - The greatest games of all time on Steam.
Is this game a masterpiece? No, it is still in Early Access.
At first sight, it looks like another tower defense game. When you play it, though, you soon see that the most important part is not the tower defense, but the strategy game.
You have to mount a campaign to pacify some provinces that revolted on a far edge of the kingdom, maybe conquer a few neighbouring provinces as well. While battles can either be played as tower defense game (even attacks...), they can also be automatically calculated. What cannot be done automatically is the whole campaign/province management. You have to decide where to attack, you have to improve the infrastructure of your provinces by ordering construction works, you have to quell revolts by executing some rebels (or some bystanders), you have to appoint governors in your provinces, you can hire generals to serve in your army, you can send scouts into enemy territories, you get reports from your secret police, you have to oversee the research of new weapons, train your troops, set the tax rate, bring your economy in good shape...
You do all this while drinking heavily, abusing your subordinates, bad-mouthing a baron sent to oversee your campaign, moving your headquarter around your provinces, trying to react to things like a draught, mass desertions in your army or the Black Death. The result of your actions and orders influences the strength of your army during the next tower defense battle. During the tower defense battles you build not only towers, but also support buildings like a woodcutters cabin to receive wood that is required for towers.
It is not easy to make your provinces happy, they seem to revolt very often. Or I am just an alcoholic, bad ruler and the more peasants I hang and cities I pillage the more they hate me?
Conclusion:
Interesting mix of complex province management and tower defense.
Steam User 22
Empires in Ruins is a mix between a 4X strategy and tower defense game, which surprisingly blends pretty well.
There are in total 3 game modes right now. The arcade mode offers currently 26 maps, just select one and you have instant tower defense action. (more maps to come)
In the campaign / story mode you follow the story of sergeant Hans Heimer and his army during the Western Marches campaign.
You have the ability to research new towers, upgrades for your towers, upgrades for your workers and soldiers as well as researching new buildings. You can also spy out other provinces and conquer them while trying to manage your provinces and overpower rebellions.(Research and development are tied to campaign chapters)
In sandbox mode you are not following any storyline, and you are free to conquer the world map as you please with all mentioned features above.
The game offers a beautiful artstyle and an awesome soundtrack.
Totally recommending this game.
Steam User 17
DISCLAIMER: I started play this little gem since the closed alpha, so I have more than 100 hrs of play time.
This game has 3 layers of gameplay in it: Tower Defense (the battles), 4X (Like Civilization), RPG (moral choices).
Don’t think that it’s the usual TD game: it’s not a “place towers and spam units”. A single sapper can blow up the 80% of one of your towers. Workers can repair them but you need to manage when order them to do it. (If they will be killed they respawn in a couple of seconds, but a perfectionist player don’t want to lose even a single second).
Towers can be upgraded on damage, rate of fire and range. Also specialized towers can be unlocked and built. This game feature a tower with Hot Air Ballon for strike the trolls from the sky.
The enemies can attack by land, air and water. Can dig tunnels and put in place basic strategies to cripple your defenses. Do not ignore scout reports. And do not rush the wave. Expecially at the hard difficult, a single wave can be your defeat.
The 4X and the RPG layer will put you in the shoes of Sergeant Hans Heimer who has the order to recapture an entire reign made of provinces. In a turn based map you will manage provinces, level up your character, unlock abilities, research more than 100 tecnologies to power up your towers and your armies.
Hang a traitor or bribe him? More troopers to the guards (less rebellion) or more to the army (easier battles)? Be sadic or be kind? Suffocate revolts while securing your back supply lines.
3 levels of difficult from easy to hard, an awesome and detailed tutorial, a campaign and a sandbox, unique battlefields with resources to gather and natural obstacles to use in advantage to fight the enemies.
Technical side, the game is very stable. It runs fine on a old pc with an Nvidia GTX460. Still no graphic options but they will arrive soon. It has the vsync so no risk to burn the gpu with more than 200 fps. The only fire will be the fire of your ballistas against the enemies.
The Developer is very active and present on Twitter, Discord and Steam Community.
It’s an early access title just because it still lack some parts of the gameplay. But it’s already perfectly playable and already can assure you dozens and dozens of hours of fun.
Steam User 12
Empires in Ruins is an incredible game.
There is way more to take in and analyze than one might realize at first glance and I definitely advise that you really try to dive deep when you get into this excellently crafted game.
Addressing the voice acting and audio- I love the no-holds-barred attitude the developers used when building this thing. I won't quite any of the lines specifically but you can certainly tell they loved writing the dialog and recording the lines. There is a particular 'adult' flavor to this game's storytelling and narrative that taps into the cynical and down-to-earth nature of your innermost thoughts. On top of that- the fact that this type of game has a narrative and story is actually incredible. Throughout play I am constantly reminded of "Stronghold" (the first one- from way back) and I think that's an absolute plus.
Regarding difficulty- this game delivers. I find that I am able to jump in and have fun with the lower difficulty items quite easily, and also am challenged with the ever increasing and ramping difficulty-based objectives in a way that is constantly pushing me to get just a tiny bit better. I have found that my favorite way to play this game is with the repeatable skirmishes because I can rapidly try out different build and deployment styles- trying different techniques to accomplish the goals and determine what works. I really, truly, feel like I am afforded an opportunity to explore my own creative solution to the conflicts, within the confines of the gameplay design, and love the feeling I get as I overcome the challenges.
The story and overworld design that exists is a shocking shift in the design of the game from what I expected at first seeing the game and have to say it leaves a rather positive impression. This feels like a really fascinating mix of Tower Defense, RTS, RPG, and Kingdom Manager that had to have been built by people that appreciated the early '00s gameplay experiences to bring this together. There's some very cool feeling throwback to things like Heroes of Might and Magic.
I think overall that I love this game.
It kicks my butt, and there are some rough edges in the overall design-- but if you remember that this is an indie endeavor and is bringing in an absolutely astonishingly large amount of design elements into one (cohesive) package... it is just jaw-dropping in its execution.
I have watched this game grow and change as the developer(s) have continued to work on it and have to say the community engagement is incredible. I have nothing but respect for how hard they're working on this project. One example of the positive response they provide to the community is an anecdotal experience: I (unprovoked) sent a list of probably 15-25 different 'complaints' (things that I thought needed to be fixed / tweaked / tightened up) and the developer immediately responded to discuss what I brought up, ask some opinions, and subsequently get to work on addressing these (minor- basically non) issues.
This is a great game and you will definitely get lost in it.
I only have about 13 hours in it right now (I don't game a whole lot right now because of life things) but I know this will be a staple in my regular gaming regimen for years to come as it just has an awesome soul and super engaging (and challenging) gameplay design.
Steam User 9
Edit: The developer is super chill, and is looking to patch out the bugs soon. This is still a hard game with hit-or-miss writing and an imperfect UI, but serious props to anyone who can indie dev something this complex. Check it out if there isn't something in the review that's a dealbreaker for you.
This is a very "yes, but..." recommendation.
Empires In Ruins is a thing I should like. It's a tower defense with a 4x strategy layer, and where you can econ yourself into an easier TD situation, or TD yourself out of a bad economy.
Unfortunately, Empires' mechanics are a bit of a jangly, stumbling mess. I can't tell how much of this is intended---as the game puts an emphasis on imperfect information and incompetent, disloyal underlings---but gameplay flits back and forth between neat and engaging and janky and frustrating.
Here's an example:
The game board is a map of provinces which you slowly spread across. Each province has its own upgrade tree of structures as well as a province level. The structures provide things like food for the province's population, or resources for you. You can only directly build structures in the province you've parked your headquarters in; for everywhere else you need to appoint a governor and give them general directions for what kinds of upgrades to build. Except...they don't follow them. I ordered a province to build food, there were food buildings available to construct, the construction queue was open, and the province started building a mine.
Maybe this is intended. If so, it would be fine, except for the way food works.
Province populations rely on food. If the available food decreases, the province starts starving and losing pop. If it loses enough pop, it loses a level and unbuilds a bunch of expensive and time-consuming structures. It also seems to be bad for morale.
However, provinces gain population as long as they're not starving. And food buildings are limited and province level locked. So you'll often have provinces that are at max food, gain a population, start starving, lose a population and morale, gain a population, start starving, etc.
And heaven help you if you're foolish enough to increase a province's level without having a full on economic crash-cart on standby. The level goes up, the province's food demand goes up, it immediately starts starving like crazy, and you have to race the next several food upgrades before it de-upgrades itself.
And all this is assuming that you don't get a string of random-rolled events that lower food or lower pop or de-upgrade key buildings for you.
The tower defense game layer is less janky, but it revolves around the idea that enemy units can destroy your towers very easily. In normal mode, doing so removes all of your towers' upgrades. In easy mode, it simply costs a butt ton of resources to rebuild.
Tower destruction isn't preventable in many cases. Fliers, on death, putter forward a seemingly random number of pixels before exploding. This means you need to set out some low cost towers way ahead of your formations to act as spoilers. Speaking of towers, better hope you research the right ones by chance---since the information on what they do is hidden behind the clunky UI.
And honestly, a *lot* of Empires' information is hidden behind the clunky UI---or just straight up not included.
When I started my first campaign, I played on normal. No word from the game on what that entailed. Turns out: higher enemy unit health, worse luck with random events, fewer skill points per level, lower starting skill points, fewer resources at the start of maps, and probably a lot of other elements I haven't been able to pinpoint yet.
This led to my scuttling my first campaign five hours into the run, when it became clear I'd backed myself into an unwinnable state. Empires is an autosaver, and it plays slow, and it's *very* easy to accidentally go into a terminal spiral, so be ready to delete at least one campaign save partway through. Playing on easy helps, but it doesn't cure any of the stuff I talked about above.
On top of that, the game's writing is...okay at best. Its main character in an antihero living in a crapsack world, and he just wants to drink himself to death, but he's been put in charge of a reconquest for political reasons. That's not a bad setup, but it requires a bit of a deft touch, and Empires' touch is, uh... cackhanded.
I'm using that word choice deliberately, because Empires *really* likes talking about defecation. It does it almost constantly---both as an attempt at humor and to remind the player that this is a grim world. Neither approach really works.
Now, I haven't cleared the game yet, so there may be issues or bright spots I haven't encountered yet. I'll update this review as I go.
At the moment, I think there's the sparkle of a gem in here, but someone dropped it in the outhouse and you have to go fishing for it with your hands.
Edit: I think there are some actual bugs. For example, when I go to set my battle board, sometimes everyone turns into clones of the same guy. Also I have a province that has structures it can build and that can be set to active construction, but when I set it to active it simply stops producing resources and doesn't build anything.
2nd Edit: More bugs! "Get Volmja to 50% authority or happiness" glitched out. I'd gotten it over 50% authority, it remained over 50% authority, but then the objective de-cleared itself. Moving my headquarters there unstuck it. This seems to be an unintended primary function for moving the headquarters: unglitching provinces.
3rd Edit: Wrapped up the last battle at the end of chapter three. The loading screen going back from the battle to the main map was a bit long, so I tabbed out and back in and the game had set itself into some sort of default state. All provinces were unlocked, my resources were all set to 1250, my objectives had updated but couldn't be accessed. I killed the program without letting it save, but this might have borked my run. (It did not, but I did end up with Schrodinger's Headquarters for a bit, as it was traveling between provinces when the chapter ended and the game got Very Confused.)
4th Edit: "Build two levels of infrastructure in Rumplitz." I have. I've also cleared all enemy provinces, and this is the only objective remaining on my board. Is the very last thing in the game glitched? Or do I have to wait for a random event to increase its food supply so I can get it to tier 3? (Edit: solved the problem by upgrading my neighboring province of Kreet.)
Steam User 18
Best Tower Defense game I've played in a very long while
At the time of writing this review the game is considered early access, however it doesn't not feel like that. It feels like a really well made in-depth Tower Defense with really cool characters.
The Sergeant has character development, drinks alcohol!, and has a generic hate for mostly anything. I love the nihilist approach.
Pros:
• great characters
• a Tower Defense with a story!
• awesome music
• multiple gameplay modes
• very in-depth, you research stuff, you upgrade stuff, you research some more
• complex
• not casual
Cons:
• not enough different alcohol references, not everyone likes brandy THAT much!
• not casual
Now if I could only get over this damn map on hard mode that would be great!