Video Game / BattleForge

You are a Skylord. Once a mortal hero, you long ago gained immortality and became a counselor to the Gods. For generations you have lived with them in their majestic fortress floating in the skies over the magical world of Nyn.

The fortress of the Gods was named the Forge of Creation for it grants the ability to bring the world's legends to life; use this ability to help guide the fates of the mortals on the surface below.

Conjure up wonders of old, bring about storms and wildfires or wonderful blessings and mystical healings. At your word, legendary creatures spring to life, heroes, monstrosities, dragons and spirits are shaped of pure elemental power to do your bidding. Monumental structures and mighty fortresses of old rise from the earth wherever you desire.

A Free-to-Play CCG MMO RTS created by the German game developer company Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts, released on March 2009.

Basically, it's Magic: The Gathering if it were an RTS. You get cards by buying Battleforge points (with real money). With Battleforge points, you can buy boosters in the ingame store, or bid/sell cards in the ingame auction house. Theoretically, it's possible to play the game completely for free by selling your initial cards and then slowly building up a massive fortune by trading on the auction house... but it's extremely slow since everyone else also has your initial starting cards. It becomes somewhat faster when valuable promotional cards are available through out-of-game events.

Also, you can upgrade your cards by playing PvE or PvP, increasing your card's stats in battle. Your units could have higher attack, higher health, new abilities, cost less power to summon, etc. This part of the game has nothing to do with Battleforge points, as you cannot trade or buy upgrades.

There are two things needed to use cards in the game: power, and orbs. Power is gained from capturing power wells spread across the map, which then give you a steady income of power. Orbs are gained by capturing amii monuments scattered across the map. A card may require one to four orbs to use, allowing for a great variety in decks (pure decks have access to unique cards that are only available to a certain faction alone, while splash decks are more flexible because they can play around with the strengths of each faction, at the cost of losing access to the faction-unique cards).

There are three types of cards in the game: units, spells, and buildings. You can play cards anywhere you have ground presence (where you have a unit, building, well, or monument in the vicinity), though some spells do not require ground presence. And the most interesting mechanic: power is conserved in the game, it never goes away. Whenever a unit/building dies, or when you cast a spell, the 10% of the power you spent is permanently lost, and the remaining 90% goes into a "void pool", where it slowly flows back into your usable power pool. This leads to fast paced game that steadily gets faster as more power from your wells flows into your power pools.

Factions

• Fire: (Aggressive) The fire faction focuses on direct damage spells, high attack units, killing things with fire, and destruction in general.
• Frost: (Defensive) The frost faction features building defense spells, freezing spells, shield spells, high health units, slow units, and protection in general.
• Nature: (Control) The nature faction has lots of crowd control spells, healing spells, and disabling spells, along with many beast/forestkin units.
• Shadow: (Risk) The shadow faction has units that frenzy before they die, damage spells that hurt their own units, buff spells, and power manipulation cards.

Splash Factions

As expansions have been released, new factions have joined the standard lineup. They consist of two-orb combinations.

• Renegade Expansion
  • Bandits: Fire/Shadow faction, special ability: Life Stealing.
  • Stonekin: Nature/Frost faction, special ability: Damage Reduction.
• Lost Souls Expansion
  • Twilight: Fire/Nature faction, special ability: Transformation.
  • Lost Souls: Shadow/Frost faction, special ability: Revenant's Doom.

The game servers were shut down on October 31st, 2013, bringing the game itself to an end in an official capacity. Unofficially however, a fan-made revival server has been made in the form of Skylords Reborn. Battleforge Points are no longer bought, and now may be acquired by playing the game and completing specific daily objectives. The game is regularly updated as of this writing, with new units slowly added with time.

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This game provides examples of:

• Action Girl: All female units basically.
• BFG: Odd as it may seem fantasy gun control is not enforced much here. Fire's thunder wagon has a giant mounted cannon, Frost has cannon towers, cannon fortress's, their battleships carry one BFG for long range bombardment, their contructs blast's knock back anything on land and of course the worldbreaker gun. Shadow has the aptly named Rifle cultists who have guns almost as big as them.
• BFS: When your an XL unit who can use one you use this troop. Troops of lower status also sometimes have giant swords as well; Ice Guardians or Giant Slayers come to mind.
• Blood Magic: The Shadow spell Blood Healing is one of the most powerful in the game, but almost certainly causes the unit you cast it on to die in exchange for healing all the units around it. Many shadow units like the Shadow Mage and Cultist Master use their own life points to fuel their attacks or abilities.
• Blown Across the Room: Small units tend to get blasted around by Large or XL units with ranged attacks very often. Medium and even Small units sometimes have the ability too... and certain XL units can blast Medium and above units around; Constructs (Frost) in particular will knock anything around the arena with their Arcane Turret's massive blasts.
• Bring It: Besides the fact units will crap their pants at seeing XL enemies come at them sometimes they also have a different quote such as...
  Phalanx (frost), "Oh this is going to be interesting"
  Storm Singer (frost), Daughters of the storm, STAND FIRM!!"
  Silverwind Lancers (frost), "HOLD THE LINE, NO TURNING BACK!!!"
• The Cavalry: Small units tend to start cheering when they see your or your allies have friendly XL units coming to help them.
• Church Militant: Gun Cultists worship their rifles and weapons, with quotes such as "Full Metal Jacket." and "Thou shalt count to three."
• Dark Is Not Evil: While the element itself was created by the Original Sin (tm), Shadow is also the essence of preservation and self-sacrifice. The Lost Souls are an even better example, as they, realizing they weren't going to shuffle off the mortal coil anytime soon, decided to make the best of it and assist the Skylords.
  • Shadow faction also does this to a lesser, if abit more iffy degree.
• The Determinator: Captain Blight
• Enemy Chatter: All units tend do the following:
  • Cheer when a unit of equal or greater value is summoned near them
  • Say a 1 liner when going to combat without you telling them to
  • Have an Oh, Crap! moment when they seen an enemy XL charge at them
  • Cheer very happily when they have an friendly XL come to help
  • Cheer when enemy XL unit dies near them
  • Oh, Crap! when said XL or L unit dies in near them
  • Insult units of different factions
  • Talk back to unit that insulted them or growl
  • Express relief when healed
  • Certain hero units have insults towards specific factions or certain other heroes (summon Mo and the Ravenheart near each other for example)
• Faction Calculus: Each of the 4 main factions have their own unique ablities. Fire has unit ablities or buildings that allow it to summon in units without daze, Frost has units/spells/buildings that give their units or friendlies ice shields, Nature has access to units/buildings/spells that heal units, Shadow has spells that sacrifice /burnout/buffs that make their units strong, but weakens/kills them afterwards also some of their abilities revolve around corpses yours or your enemy doesn't matter.
• Forced Transformation: The spell Curse of Oink is a staple in every Nature splash deck because it turns all enemies in a radius into useless pigs.
• Game-Breaker: Over time players discovered more and more cards which have a too great synergy or
  • Mortar used to be
  • Lost Vigil with Ice Barrier used to be.
  • Lost Grigori and support cards from Frost and Shadow
  • Voidstorm (literally, forever lost because of disconnection) used to be.
  • Church of Negation: Can disintegrate many enemy units at once and paralyze them during the process. The downside is that it loses HP during its attack... which is very easy to fix if you play frost (along the faction's building protect/repair cards).
  • Immediate void power return
  • Avatar of Frost during early days, costed 220 power and if not dead in 10 seconds shield refreshes. In 1 is hard as it is to kill 2-3 was lethal, nowadays 12 seconds seem a bit viable and power increased to 250
• Lethal Joke Character: Pure nature, this faction doesn't have good counters against medium sized creatures... but don't really need them. Deep Ones along massive support can hurt a bit.
• Heroic Spirit: Sort of, all the units you can summon ingame died in the past or are legends/myths brought to life by the forge.
• Horse of a Different Color: The nomad lampshades this with one of his quotes
  Nomad(fire), "It is a valiant...goat..."
• Gentle Giant: Mo, the White Juggernaut
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: Without the faith of the mortals, Brannoc is weakened and killed by the avenging Skylords. All Gods, Skylords, and creations of the Forge exist because of the belief of the mortals.
• Götterdämmerung: The Gods fall to the Twilight Curse, and it is up to the Skylords to protect the mortal races
• Ice Queen: The Frost Sorceress is an early Frost Deck unit, An Ice Person like most frost units, but her quotes come off like a Jerkass
• Green Thumb: Nature cards have this effect
• An Ice Person: Frost has a quite a few units who are made of ice, examples are ice guardian, raptor, frost mage, and of course avatar of frost.
• Knight In Shining Armour: The Lyrish Knight, for his dark counterpart see Dread Charger.
• Love Makes You Evil: Brannoc betrays the Gods because he thought they were holding back the secret of creation from him, and without it he couldn't bring back his dead wife.
• Offing the Offspring: Brannoc kills his own daughter, Viridya
• Pariah Faction: Some color combinations don't synergy well in PVP and leaves you with several disadvantages.
  • Shadow and Nature
  • Fire and Frost:
  • Fire/Shadow: This faction got many cards strengthening your units... only that you got no good units to make stronger.
• Power of the Void: The Lost Souls invoke this, although most are pretty nice.
• Precursors: The Amii, creators of the monuments.
• Resource Reimbursement: Whenever you use a spell/unit ability, and whenever one of your units or structures is destroyed, 90% of their cost is reimbursed into the Void Pool, where it slowly flows back into your actual spending funds over time. The bigger the Void Pool, the faster it flows back in, so a player whose army was just massacred in a massive battle full of wild spellcasting will often have a hefty budget from which to summon reinforcements.
• The Reveal
  • The Forge cannot create, only copy the legends and dreams of mortals. So all the Gods and Skylords are just creations of the Forge, and the original heroes who inspired the Skylords are long dead
  • Brannoc was the pawn of the Harbinger of Souls, who created the Twilight Curse to end all life so the lost souls could be free from their torment in the land of the dead.
  • The Forge was created by the Assemblers, an empire of dimension-hopping steampunk AI machines who trade mortals the ability to make dreams reality in return for access to a peaceful afterlife (the machines, although powerful, do not have an afterlife). The mortals get the short stick, because they get trapped in torment forever after they die.
• Shout-Out: They pretty much completely ripped off Moby-Dick for the Renegade expansion
  • Several frost units quote Winter is coming
  • Colossus(nature) sometimes say Green yes, peace no... when clicked on
  • Rifle Cultist(shadow) Full Metal Jacket or Thou shall count to three(although when upgraded that attack starts at 2)
  • Forsaken(shadow) Abandon all hope
  • Amazon(nature) I'm beauty and the beast
  • Overlord(shadow) Your lack of faith is disturbing when being insulted by a different faction
• Stripperific: Some units are pretty skimpy on the clothing/armor, but it balances out that said units can't take many hits very well.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Small and medium units will give you a few variations when they come into contact with enemy XL units.
• The Time of Myths: Throughout the game you're summoning legendary creatures.
• The Juggernaut: pretty much what it says
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: In the Twilight campaign, the sun is eclipsed for two years, and the mortal races are forced into the giant caves for warmth. After reaching a bargain with the giants, the giants make a new sun and throw it into the sky in exchange for enormous wealth.
• When Trees Attack: Using nature cards you bring fun with spikeroot, thornbark, spore launcher, and grimvine for some examples. Twilight also have a few mutated versions of said above trees.
• The Undead: Lost Souls
• The Virus: The Twilight Cursed
• Unfriendly Fire: Shadow unit abilites and spells tend to hurt both friend and foe. Hopefully the latter more than the former.
• Victory Pose: Small or medium units start cheering when a enemy Large or XL dies. The variation changes depending on unit. Examples...
  Phalanx(frost), "The bigger they are..."
  Silverwind Lancers(frost), "WELL DONE, GENTLEMEN!!"
  Frost Mage(frost), "Na NaNa Na Na Nah"
• Zerg Rush: You can technically use masses of T1 and T2 units, but later on against larger enemies they will just get sent flying.
  • Also Bandits can make use of rallying banner to spam many small units in little time.
    • Even more the Banditos unit which deals more damage the more units are close to it.
  • A certain infamous combination let’s a player spawn a literally infinite number of Twilight Bugs for free. Not only can you bypass the unit limit, but the bugs are strong enough to rip apart most T4 creatures easily if given proper support spells.