Back to Rome time by Total Conquest

Shortly after I’ve met Clash of Clans, I decided to check some of its rivals. I’ve installed a couple of similar games. I’ll be writing about the ones that I found worth playing. Today, we’ll go back to Rome time by Total Conquest.

It’s already over 6 months I have been playing Total Conquest. The game is provided by a well-known game development company: Gameloft. Gameloft has quite many games in many different categories, FPS, car racing, football, action (Iron Man 3), RPG (Dungeon Hunter), strategy… Because of Gameloft’s PC gaming history, unlike new mobile gaming companies, they have experience and apparently big enough team to develop complex graphic-engined games. Although this brings a competitive advantage in most areas (like football, car racing, dungeon RPG), I think they need to stay a little bit away from overloading graphics and instead focus on usability and simplicity especially in certain categories (like resource collecting games, puzzles, clones of famous games).

If you are looking for a mobile game with enhanced graphics to match your PSP experience, check out Gameloft’s games. Otherwise, most of their games might be too complicated and heavy-loaded for you.

With Rome theme and Diana popping up often, Total Conquest successfully reaches its audience.

Back to our topic… Total Conquest is briefly a Clash of Clans kind of tower-defense game. At first sight, the only difference is the theme. The game has Rome/Ceaser time concept. You’ll enjoy if you were a fan of TV series Spartacus. I found the game successful but I believe not enough players could discover the game, considering low activity in global chat.

Let’s check some of the highlights of Total Conquest:

Neutrals:

• There is no flying unit. Rome time! The troop types are realistic (ballista, gladiator, etc.).
• Unlike you request from guildmates, you deploy troops to “Militia” building to defend your town. Meanwhile, the troops you get from your guildmates can be used in attack battles.
• In addition to upgrading troops, there is an extra upgrade available to add special attack to that troop type.
•  Town hall stores quite a high amount of gold and resource. It means protecting only your storages is not enough to avoid resource/gold hunters. You need to protect your town hall as well.
• “Gates” available in addition to ordinary walls. I really could not understand the real use of it during the defense. If you attack with a thief, not only thief passes the gate but also, the gate is opened, and all the troops may sneak in. Therefore, for me, it is only an additional object to extend town area so that attacker can not deploy closer.
• Graphics is detailed, characters, their dresses, buildings… This may be good or bad depending on player’s taste. I find graphics to much detailed. They could be simpler.
• Although some of the loading screen hints are useful, some have no use. Check my post on hints.
• You can not log in when you are being attacked. There is an alert but no info about approximately in how many seconds you can log in.
  

  Total Conquest offers interesting hints/tips at launch.

Pros:

• There are guild wars. Guild leader can declare war on another guild. Each war takes 3 days. At the end of war, the winner guild members (I don’t know how it’s distributed) get a considerable amount of gold and resource.
• You don’t need free workers to upgrade walls.
• You can modify the viewing angle. You can have a bird look or more 3D style. Up to you.
• You can speed up battles. In other games, you can speed play the playbacks of past battles but in Total Conquest you can speed up the current battle. This is nice when you already deployed all the troops and you can speed not to wait another 2 mins.
• There is a daily login reward (gold/potion) which increases every day you log in. You are being rewarded for staying loyal.
  

  Daily loyalty bonus increases every day you play.

• New features are added every few months. It’s nice to see new things and refresh your motivation to play the game. In march a new troop type (Cyclops) arrived as well as the feature of events/quests taking 2-3 days.
  

  With events lasting few days, Total Conquest offers new challenges to players.

Cons:

• The game uses 223mb of space (vs. 75mb Clash of Clans). It may not be so important, but Gameloft seems to enjoy games having 200Mb+. I have tried a couple of more of their games and all were so: Dungeon Hunter 4 (1Gb), Heroes of Order & Chaos (750Mb), Iron Man 3 (640Mb).
• Loading time is a bit long. It hurts when you need to switch back and forth often.
• Poor touch accuracy. I play over iPhone and it hardly selects the building under the point I touch when I’m trying to move/relocate the objects. I don’t feel the difference while choosing big units, but it makes really difficult to move walls. I believe this is the only real weakness of the game.
• Protection you get when you are defeated is much shorter, about 40% shorter than similar games. For casual players this means you may get attacked few times during the day, resulting a bigger loss in gold and resource.
• You can not cancel a building upgrade if you don’t have enough available space to store the refunded resource/gold.

Bugs:

Even I don’t put special effort to find bugs, I often end up finding bugs about any software I use. I’m a natural born bug-finder 🙂

• When you accept incoming troops from your guildmates, you can not send a new request until you use them up. But if you don’t accept the troops and let them stay as messages in your inbox, you can keep requesting. Unfortunately, if you stack up such messages in your inbox, when you accept one of them receive the troops all other troop messages are deleted.
• When game matches me with some opponents to attack, I see zero gold and resource available to loot. Zero can be possible if someone else collected all the loot earlier, which means a poor “matching” algorithm. But I see loots like “3” gold&resource. Which is almost impossible technically, the previous looter can not leave only “3” golds even he/she wants.
  

  Only 3 golds to loot? Something weird!

• In player naming, the game accepts but does not support characters not included in English. I see such names as “????????” on my screen.
• There was a new year promotion as: “Reach town hall level 8 between January 1st and 7th to receive a special gift…”. When the promotion was announced in January, this was already almost impossible because upgrading the town hall from level 7 to level 8 itself takes 7 days.  In order to get the award you should have known about the promotion in advance and started town hall upgrade before January 1st.
  

  Seasonal promotions are offered, but the user experience part could be designed better.

• Badge notification does not work on iPhone if you have initially selected to disable it. It can not be enabled again.

Do I recommend Total Conquest?

The game is quite stable in terms of speed and connection. Graphics is high quality. Attack/defense balance is good. Until the rewards from guild wars, it was quite difficult to collect enough resources for upgrades due to short protection periods but guild wars addressed that issue. If touch accuracy could be improved I would play the game more often. At the moment, I’m trying to avoid any town editing/relocation.

With a single guild war, you may earn good amount of gold and resource to fund your upgrades.

I believe the most important point is that the game is offering new features often enough so that you don’t get bored. Few months ago new troop types and troop special attacks feature arrived as well as guild wars. In March, events feature arrived to get more rewards and let you fight for something new. I would expect similar improvements from Clash of Clans, but I found it weaker at introducing loyalty features.

If you are enjoying similar games, apart from Clash of Clans and possibly Castle Clash (I’ll write about later), Total Conquest is a good option to play at your spare times. Let me know your user experience…