Kingdoms of Camelot

It’s been a while since a staff has posted a substantial article here, seeing the amazing job that the current GET bloggers are doing already in penning here. So here’s the first of a projected series of games on Facebook and web-based games that I think many of us are familiar with! I’ll write one up whenever I can find the time too.

The first game is Kingdoms of Camelot (KOC), a game that – despite its title – has only very loose connection to the Arthurian mythology. I’ve been playing this game for several months now, and having reached the highest experience level for a while now, think I’ve got enough of a grip of the game to say something about it.

KOC is hosted on Facebook. Players create a Lord or Lady, get awarded with their first new castle on one of several huge game servers, and you’re pretty much left to your own devices on what you’d like to do next. The game is a war game, and it won’t be long before rival Lords will survey your forces and fortifications, and if they think they have an advantage, will proceed to send their armies against yours. To build your armies and castles, you’ll need resources: and here you’ll find the staples of any fantasy wargame or RTS: lumber, gold, food, ore, and stone.

There are several aspects of the game that work well. Down time is minimal, and the game’s relatively light on computing resources. At this stage of game’s lifecycle, there’s also a wealth of game knowledge that’s generated by its players. Players who encounter a building, resource or unit type that’s unknown to them can easily take a trip to one of those sites for more clarity.

I thought KOC does a great job hiding its complex combat mechanisms too. The interface is kept simplistic through the use of tabs, with liberal use of context sensitive pop-ups that present more information when needed.

The social component of the game is all front and center too. There’s a simple chat mechanism built into the game that allows for server-wide, alliance (guild), or private chat. And while there’s no facility to automatically save the chat log, the chat buffer seems big enough to store quite a nice amount of chat messages for your perusal should you need to be AFK.

Nicely too is that apart from one instance where you’ll need a relatively small number of Facebook ‘neighbors’ to get a second castle, the game doesn’t actively require your neighbors to interact with your Facebook wall for you to get going (think, Zynga games LOL). Your neighbors can click on your build projects that in turn shorten the time it takes to complete the construction, but past a certain level of building upgrade their clicks won’t help as much as do in the earlier levels. And the daily bonuses you can ‘gift’ to your neighbors are pretty miniscule compared to what your resource farms are going to generate when you’re at the highest levels.

That doesn’t mean you should play the game alone though. The most widely used indication of your Lord’s strength is ‘Might’, a numeric figure that aggregates the levels of advancement your castles and its buildings have attained and the size and composition of your armies. The players who have very high ‘might’ are generally recognized to be the stronger (and more active) players, and thus are less vulnerable to casual attacks. For the rest of the players on the server, being part of an alliance becomes of great importance. Alliances are ranked on each server in terms of the collective ‘might’ from all its members, and while there are exceptions to the rule, the highest might alliances tend not to be opportunistically attacked too often.

On the flipside, there are issues with the game though some of it is inevitable in a game of this type.The biggest of it has to do with the fact that while the game falls squarely into the wargame genre, many of its participants – Facebook people mind you - are loathe to actually play it like a ‘war’game. Your consent to engage in PvP is taken as given through your being in the game. While you get the requisite 7 day beginner’s window in which you can’t be attacked and there are a couple of artifacts you can buy through microtransactions thereafter that will temporarily shield you from attack, I’ve seen many players stop playing and leave the game simply because they came to a point where they couldn’t handle the relentless armed hostilities from other Lords. While a successful attack from your armies’ defeat will only result in your resources getting pillaged (your buildings cannot be destroyed), it still causes some emotional stress that some players have difficulty reconciling themselves to.

The conflict between game genre and the supposed type of prosocial platform KOC is hosted on does take its toll on many alliances. One recurring point of contention I’ve observed from several alliances I’ve been in have been in view of the fact that not every one in the collective is always willing to treat KOC as a w, and a lot of arguments has come about because players and their alliance leadership cannot agree on how they should respond to aggression. And without an explicit consent-only PvP option, it’s impossible to tell the kind of war disposition a player has. In view of this, KOC has its fair share of intra-‘guild’ politicking and drama, and I’ve seen even top ranked alliances disintegrate within a day because of member bickering within its ranks.

Another issue has to do with the game’s pacing. An active player can reach about the highest levels of advancement within about 3 months – or that’s about as long as I took – after which the only things you can do are to either go postal on someone else’s castles, keep playing and parcel out to new players your millions of daily-generated lumber, ore and stone, or just quit. The amount of resources you’ll generate will come to a point where unless you’re engaged in all out war daily and needing resources to replenish the ranks of your depleted armies, you won’t know what else to do with those resource heaps.

All said and done; Kingdoms of Camelot is worth a look. Just go to the game with an adjusted level of expectations of it being a wargame.:)

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