Rising Empires

Rising Empires is a strategic, single-player 4X civilization game. The focus is on the strategic level: positioning of units, settlements and holding of territory play a major part. Besides that the game has an element of civilization building with a choice of technology advances to develop that gives all different kinds of more or less necessary improvements. You compete against other computer-controlled empires that follow the same rules as you do.

You start with two settlements and from there you can expand with more settlements in the wilderness if you want. The surroundings are totally empty except for terrain. If you do not see the point in establishing more settlements you can still explore the surroundings by sending scouts there. Eventually you will encounter scouts from neighbouring empires, they are controlled by an artificial intelligence and follow the same rules as you do and they have started from the same meagre two settlements background.

You can see the game as a competition between a couple of empires, your rating among the worlds empires could be read if you want to keep track of how you are doing. The game is rather open, with a couple of different strategies. Each empire have a range of preset choices to make that makes them better in some fields and not so in other. During play, your choice s on how to develop the settlements and what path in the civilization advances to explore makes every empire quite different from each other.

Warring is a large part of the game and it is conducted in battles when the troops of different empires meet on the map. The troops specifics are chosen by yourself and the choices of proficiency are given by your civilization advances and must also be supported by development of the settlements. Unless you progress in a very odd branch of the civilization tree you will have similar traits of your troops as the other empires.

A distinct aspect of the game is that the map is on two levels. The empires does not only cover the bright sunlit lands we are used too but there are also a dark netherworld. The Netherworld shares many terrain traits of the brightlands but the mountains are replaced with impassable stone with some tiny corridors that make up excellent defending posts.

Mostly tapping is used as an input method, long press is used for info, panning is used to navigate the map, but there is no pinching or other two finger gestures. There are different settings to influence the speed, based on the power of the device it is played on. It is released as a paid premium version and as a free version with advertisements on the screen.