Published by YOUZU (Singapore) PTE. LTD. comes their latest entry to the Simulation Game genre titled Lords and Tactics.

Lords and Tactics is set during the late Han Dynasty of the imperial dynasty of China, where the chaos of war is still at large. The game starts off after the events where Warlord Dong Zhuo loses his life in the battle of The Fragments of the Thirty-Six.

It is up to you, the player, to rally up your troops, build up your army and wage war against others in your conquest to expand your territory and unite the divided lands, where riches and power awaits.

The overall gameplay for Lords and Tactics stems from two main maps, one being your own “Territory” and the other being “World”. In your “Territory”, players are able to build up key buildings that aid you in strengthening your kingdom. Buildings such as Barracks where you can train up troops, Farmland that produces food stuff, as well as other key structures that will aid you in your journey.

Whereas in “World”, it’s where most of the combat gameplay lies. For the combat in Lords and Tactics, the battlefield is divided into two sections for you and your opponent and each section consists of 4 columns of tiles. Players are able to build up their army they bring to battle with legendary chinese heroes from history, such as Xiahou Yuan, Cao Ren, Yue Jin and many more.

There are four different types of units in Lords and Tactics: Infantry, Cavalry, Crossbowman, and Archers. Each type of unit has their own respective attack ranges, and they are divided into frontline units, centre units and rearguard units. The units attack in that order and if two units occupy the same position, the one with the higher speed stat will attack first. So, it’s key to have the right units to be placed in the preferred positioning for maximum efficiency.

During combat, if there are no enemies within the attack range of your units and that there are no troops on the tiles ahead, your units will automatically advance 1 tile forward. Although, the battles play out by themselves so there’s no need to worry about being overwhelmed and micromanaging your units. 

Onwards to Victory

From our first impressions of Lords and Tactics, one thing that immediately stood out was the overall setting that the game takes place in. When it comes to Simulation Games (SLG), you’d normally associate it with post-apocalyptic settings because it narratively makes sense, since your objective is to rebuild society.

Lords and Tactics offers a unique twist in the genre that puts the players in ancient China where war and battle is commonplace, which is honestly a breath of fresh air. The setting for this game makes sense too since you’re building up your kingdom to expand your territory to unite the lands. Pairing up the game’s settings with being able to summon famous and legendary Chinese generals as heroes makes it all the better.

Another feature that was interesting in Lords and Tactics are how in depth you can go with levelling your units. On top of your usual levels, you can dive even deeper with strengthening your favourite units through Skills, Rank, Star-up, Tactic, and even equipment such as Treasure.

Skills as the name suggests, are the unique abilities that a hero has by levelling up your unit. With ranks, players are able to level up the troops that come with the specific hero through a tier system which can even eventually unlock abilities the troops can have under the hero. Star-ups are essentially the feature that turns duplicate fragments of a hero into stats, a feature that is common in most Gacha games.

Whereas with Tactics, they are passive skills that a hero can equip on that gives them bonus stats like an increased Crit rate or Evasion. All heroes start off with having only one slot for them to equip a tactic, but as they level up they’ll unlock more slots.

Last but not least would be the Treasure, or equipment that a hero can have that further boosts their stats. These Treasure can also be upgraded through levelling them up and from duplicates but they also have a unique feature called Reforge where you can re-roll the treasure’s attributes in exchange of a material called Reforge Stone. If you’re unhappy with the current attributes of your treasure, you can re-roll for some better stats. This would also allow more flexibility in building your heroes if you’re looking for a particular build that you want to work on.

And while this may all seem complicated and overwhelming at first, it’s pretty straightforward once you get the hang of things since all of these result in strengthening your heroes. Although, if you’re feeling lost at what to do next, Lords and Tactics gives off suggestions of quests that you can do at the bottom left area of the game’s UI.

Visually, Lords and Tactics perfectly captures the overall Chinese aesthetics pretty well. The designs for building structures, to the characters, and even minor things like the resource icons fit in with the theme that they’re going for. The portraits for all the characters in the game look amazing and implementing the Live2D feature just makes the characters feel more alive.

All in all, Lords and Tactics is definitely worth trying out if you’re looking for a fresh new take on the SLG genre or is a big history buff for Ancient Chinese history. There’s so much you can do in the game and heroes to train up, it can be a huge time sink where you can easily spend hours being engrossed in it.

Your Kingdom awaits, Lords and Tactics can be downloaded on the GameCentre so be sure to check it out!