Check out our interview with the developers of brand new strategy game Legion Wars

Christmas has definitely come early this year, thanks to Bear&Cat’s brand new turn-based strategy game - Legion Wars.

Developed by the 2 man team, the game aims to revolutionize the face of the turn based strategy world, and is jam packed with loads of exciting features.

Boasting 15 beautifully designed campaign levels and 4 varying stages of difficulty, the app is bursting with adventure and excitement, and promises to be bigger and better than its competitors.

Featuring an AI like no other, it’s clear that the developers have gone all out on the app. With the ability to evaluate the situation of each battle, recruit appropriate characters to counter attack your forces, formulate attack plans, and optimise the actions of each unit – you’ll have to think smarter than you ever have before if you want to beat this artificial boss.

With load of cool features to look forward to we couldn’t wait to find out more about what Legion Wars has to offer, so we caught up with Bear&Cat to get the inside track on the game.

What do you think your game offers that you can’t get from any other title on the App Store?

The AI system is the major difference between Legion Wars and other TBS games. As a super fan of turn-based tactics games, I think the AI is very important in this kind of game. It will directly affect the whole game experience; a stupid AI can ruin the whole game, even if every other feature is perfect. Legion wars is different. It’s both challenging and beatable to provide a good game experience for players.

The graphic performance and user interface. Most turn-based tactics game do not pay attention to their graphic performance and UI, because they think it’s not important. But we think even it’s a strategy game, it’s necessary to have a nice graphic performance in Legion Wars.

What challenges did you face during development, and how did you overcome them?

Although Legion Wars is not a very big game, it’s still a big project for only two people and we’re very proud that we finished Legion Wars in only 7 months.

We had to cover all the roles needed and learn everything necessary for developing the game, but there would sometimes be something that we both didn’t know anything about. For example, the animation. We wanted to make animation for our units and we tried many times, but the work wasn’t satisfactory. Finally, we found another way to achieve our goal, by using a single frame with quick movement and shake to represent the attack and hurt animations. We found that this method works really well in game.

What are the main differences between the different maps in the game?

We have two game modes, campaign & skirmish.

For campaign, each campaign level is well designed. Each level has a main task and three secondary goals to give extra bonuses if achieved. You start with some given units and building, and find a way to complete the main task.

For skirmish, everything is balanced, what your enemy has is equal to what you have. It’s a fair battle for each player, and the only goal is to defeat all your enemies. You will have different strategies for different maps, some maps are suitable for quick assault and some are suitable for defensive counterattack. Each map is a different game experience. You can also set your own rule for the skirmish battle, for example you can have a relaxed 1vs1 battle on a small map or an epic 1vs3 challenge on a big map.

Which part of the game are you personally the most proud of and why?

The Game AI, which took dozens of hours to complete and test.

It’s smart. It has the ability to evaluate the situation of a current battle, recruit the right units to counter your attack force, make attack plans, allocate units to defend and optimize actions of each unit. It won’t miss any chance to kill your unit.

It’s efficient. I have optimized the AI system many times..Player’s will not feel any lag or delay when playing so the game experience will not be interrupted by AI thinking.

It’s fun. The hardest AI is not the best AI. I made changes and limits to the system to make it both challenging and fun to play with.

Do you have anything planned in terms of future updates for the game and, if so, can you give us any details of what these might include?

Undead Legion - We will have a big update at the end of 2016. We will add undead legion which has 8 unique units (including reaper & necromancer) into our game. The undead legion will also have its own campaign which is the same as the human legion. Hence with this update, the content of the game is exactly doubled.

More Legions & Support Magic – We will continuously add new legions, and we will also add some support magics which you can use to help you win the battle.

Map Editor – We will add the feature of map editor into our game in the future, so that users can make up their own maps and campaign levels.

Online Multiplayer Game– The online battle is a major feature that we want to add, since playing against a real human is much more interesting and challenging.

Legion Wars is now available in the App Store and on Google Play.