Tag: The Battle of Polytopia »

In a lot of ways, turn-based strategy games are an ideal fit for mobile. Their menu-heavy navigation and slow pace mesh better with touch input than just about any other control scheme.

Unsurprisingly, this means there are a lot of strategy games to choose from on mobile, but not all of them are worth your time (or money). Take, for example, War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. For all its flashy visuals and pedigree, it’s a shameless gacha game that capitalizes on your fondness for Chocobos and older, better games while locking up its strategic depth behind a dizzying amount of monetized systems.

With that in mind, I went ahead and selected our top picks for the best turn-based strategy games on mobile. Check them out below. Oh, and click here to check out all the great lists we’ve been making recently.

The Battle of Polytopia (Free)

If you’re new to this genre and wondering where to start, I can’t recommend The Battle of Polytopia highly enough. It’s free, matches are short, and it does a great job of teaching you the fundamentals of strategy games without feeling overly complicated.

It’s also one of the most convenient strategy games there is, as it plays well in portrait mode and auto-saves constantly. Once you feel ready, you can also spend as little as $ 0.99 to unlock a new tribe that will also give you the ability to play with others online.

Click here to read why The Battle of Polytopia is the perfect introduction to strategy games

The addition of multiplayer to The Battle of Polytopia has catapulted the game from a fun enough time waster to a fully-fledged 4X experience on your phone. We've been playing quite a few matches over the past week or so, and we've put together a list of tips to help you get a leg up against your fellow human players.

Pick the right civilization

The Battle of Polytopia presents a pretty simplified version of something like Civilization, but that doesn't mean strategic nuances aren't still important. Before you even start a match of Polytopia, consider who to play as to give yourself a leg up. Are you playing against a ton of opponents? Choose the Vengir for a quick military leg up. Want a slower start to your empire? Take advantage of the mountains usually afforded to the Xin-Xi.

A new update just released for The Battle of Polytopia (formerly Super Tribes), which introduces online multiplayer. For all the fans of Midjiwan’s lite take on Civilization, this is certainly welcome news, but playing online isn’t as easy and straightforward as it could be. Luckily, we’ve gone ahead and figured out the best way to start hopping online and playing against people. Check out the tips below:

Pay to play

Although The Battle of Polytopia is a free-to-play game, you can only unlock access to the game’s multiplayer mode if you’ve made at least one purchase in the game. If you’re not sure if you want to shell out just to play online, no problem! You can test out The Battle of Polytopia as much as you want offline for free before deciding whether you want to dive into an online competition or not.