Tribal Stance V3.25

Introduction

Tribal Stance was created by Dark Chaos using RPG Maker 2003 and is an ambitious project to create a strategy game with the engine in line with games like Age of Empires or Starcraft, but like many ambitious projects it fails on so many levels that it's far easier to think things it gets wrong then things it manages to get right.

Plot

Like many real-time strategy games there is no real plot to this game. Your goal is to simply conquer the land and destroy anyone that gets in your way.

Gameplay
The Good

As I stated previously its much easier to create list of things this game got wrong then what it got right. In fact, the only positive I can throw at the game is that the appearance of your buildings and structures change over time as you increase their levels.

The Mixed

In this game it is possible to assign the task of acquiring resources to misreable little peons that never appear on screen. The catch is that by the time you can unlock this feature, which is tied to constructing the workship, your likely to already have mastered the art of collecting resources quickly and probably have maxed out your production. As such you will gain very little from turning this feature on beyond being able to march off to battle after creating a fresh wave of troops and can be secure in the knowledge that your peasants will have refilled your warehourse while you were away.

Of course, that just nicely segways into my final piece of mixed criticism which is the combat system itself. On one hand the game allows you to create massive armies and send the better part of 300,000 soldiers in total against your enemies. On the other hand the game lacks any means of showing you the battles so your just left to listen to rather generic battle sound effects while sword, spear, and axe icons appear on screen.

The Ugly

Tribal Stance doesn't even make it out of the gate before stumbling over its own feet. As I mentioned previously it is possible to turn on an auto-collect feature later on in the game, but when you first start out your forced to send your warlord to pick up a few pieces of wood, iron, or clay at a time in order to begin the process of upgrading your warehouse and resource gathering facilities. Though, the biggest issue here isn't that you can't assign this mundane and repetetive chore to underlings, but that you'll need to make in excess of 100 trips between the three resource collection points in order to upgrade your warehouse and resource gathering facilities to level two. Thankfully, the game does begin to pick up the pace after this initial problem, but I imagine that spending fifteen minutes gathering resources just to get all of your mines and wood cutting operations up to speed would be enough to make many people quit.

Of course, if you stick with the game and work to upgrade your resource gathering facilities and headquarters a few times you can then unlock the barracks which is the key to gathering resources quickly in this game. In fact, this feature feels like it strips any sense of strategy out of this game since your opening strategy won't be to rush your opponent or to prepare your defenses, but to bribe your forces even if they are non-existent with food in order to begin the process of acquiring resources in massive quantities such as a million pieces of wood or iron and clay at the same time. This process works because you can also use the soldiers to acquire food and they will always give you more food back then you put into the system. So, you can basically farm for massive resources as much as you want at this point with the only cavat being you will want to max out your headquarters first since this building controls the cost of all of your upgrades. So, the higher its level the cheaper the buildings and walls will be.

Of course, the real horror of this game is discovered through this process. And that issue is the unwieldy nature of its various menus. These issues range from the game sending you back to the top of the list everytime you cancel a selection or successfully upgrade a building. This becomes annoying since you'll usually be upgrading the same building multiple times. So working your way through the options on the list to get to the one you want can quickly become a time consuming chore that is also needlessly tedious. The menus in this game really do need to be better designed in order to make the game move a bit faster. My best suggestion would be to allow for the player to buy multiple upgrades at the same time. That way they don't have to work their way through the entire menu to upgrade their warehouse fifity times.

Another issue with the menus is they never tell you what a building does once it is built. It wasn't until I was forced to upgrade the headquarters to level thirty that I began to realize its effect on the price of all of my other upgrades. The fact, the the game doens't tell you what the various buildings do is made even worse when you realize the save feature is tied into having a smithy. Since, the smithy acts as a save point for the player.

Another issue with the menus is that they never show you how many resources of any type you currently have at any given point in time. This would be a nice feature to have since it's highly frustrating to be told you are short on the resources needed to perform a particular upgrade.

Another frustrating note about the game is that pushes you in the direction of conquaring some of the neighboring villages in order to increase your own power and prestige, but niether of those villages is possible to upgrade since your starting resource limit is to low. So they just end up being left to sit and rot since you can't actually do anything with them.

And on an even more frustrating note the game is prone to crashing if your rival shows up during certain circumstances. Obviously, this can be highly frustrating if you don't have a relatively recent save file. Since, you will need to potentially repeat hours of work depending on how much had happened between your last save and when the game crashed.

Graphics

Graphically speaking the game feels rather basic and dependent on the default assets of the 2003 engine, but my real problem with the game is that the starting town becomes crowded and difficult to work with once you've maxed out a few of the buildings.

Music

On the music side of things the game is terrible. And it's not because the music selections are terrible, but because their usage in this game never feels appropriate.

Conclusion

Tribal Stance is an absolute mess of a game that is in desperate need of being overhauled if the developer wants to turn into anything approaching fun. As it stands I'd advice staying away from this game and maintaining your distance by pulling out a measuring stick if you have to. This game won't bring you any joy since it's too easy to overwhelm the computer if you know what you are doing and far to boring and tedious if you don't.