Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars

The Emperor is dead, the kingdoms are leaderless, and everybody with an army has noticed. Lords Mobile is IGG's long-running MMO strategy game: you play a lord building a kingdom from a castle and a promise, in a world shared with millions of other would-be emperors. Unite the map or be united into someone else's empire — those are roughly the options.

The daily work is kingdom management with teeth. Upgrade buildings, run research, train troops across four types, and mind the formations: six troop formations exist specifically to counter each other, so reading an opponent's lineup before a fight is half the strategy. Guess wrong and better armies lose to cleverer ones, which is exactly how the game wants it.

Heroes carry both halves of the game. A team of five fights through an RPG-style campaign stage by stage, and those same heroes — recruited from a roster that runs from dwarves and dark elves to mermaids and steampunk robots — lead your troops in the real war. Ancient Artifacts from the Artifact Hall add another layer of power to upgrade and tune.

Guilds decide who actually rules. Join one and the game opens up: coordinated wars, defense pacts, and the Guild Expedition, a guild-versus-guild territory fight on a special battleground where your troops do not permanently perish — a rare place to experiment at full strength. Battles play out in animated 3D, it needs an internet connection throughout, and with hundreds of millions of downloads the map is never short of neighbors.