Fizzer: Warzone is, and has always been, a pure strategy game — there is no way to buy your way to victory.
Warzone
(formerly known as Warlight) is a mostly-free online indie Risk variant, first published by Fizzer in 2008, and since then continuously updated by him and a team of moderators. In the game, you can control numerical armies and move them across territories you have captured, and use them to conquer new lands, which may either be neutral or held by a different player or AI. The goal is to take all the territories within a bonus, which grants you extra armies you may deploy each turn and eventually defeat other players and take over the world.
One of the special things of the game is the user's ability to create and upload their own maps for others to play. In addition, there are many aspects of the game rules that can be customised, including the amount of randomness (or lack thereof) involved in attacks.
In 2020 a spinoff called Warzone Idle was launched. As the name suggests, this is an Idle Game in which the aim is to conquer all territories on a map through generating armies and money. When disambiguation is required the original game is referred to as Warzone Classic.
Warzone Classic contains examples of:
- Artificial Brilliance / Artificial Stupidity: The AI is pretty good, though still less skilled than a human player.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Creating a big stack of a thousand armies or more can often ravage its way across the map, virtually unshaken by any defences the desperate enemies raise.
- Decapitated Army: Games can be played with "commander" units. The commander unit has the strength of 7 armies, but if it gets killed the player loses all their territories and is knocked out of the game.
- Defog of War: There are three types of cards that can be used to temporarily reveal fogged territories.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Most early-made maps lack elements such as bonuslinks or connection lines, that do not make them unplayable but are notable and confusing to the inexperienced player.
- Emergent Gameplay: As a Risk-like game, there is little context provided and hard rules are only combat-oriented, yet players have come up with diplomatic games and scenarios with made-up rules. Those tend to provide pretty good roleplay.
- Fog of War: The game has six different levels of fog. The default level has adjacent territories and their army counts visible to the player and further territories fogged; there are also lower levels (no fog and light fog) and higher levels (dense, heavy and complete fog — the last one having every territory that is not the player's fogged, even adjacent ones).
- Four Lines, All Waiting: In really big free for all matches this trope gets abused, as there will be a lot of plotlines going on in different parts of the map, involving truces, alliances, and blindsides.
- Game Mod: The game has support for various mods, which can add features such as extra unit types, modifying cards and game mechanics, and more. Creating games with mods is restricted to premium members.
- Gameplay Automation: The game has an "autopilot" setting for multiplayer games available to premium members, where the AI can direct the player's orders. There is a choice of four different bots.
- Guide Dang It!: Not that the base game needs much explaining, but some of the levels in the singleplayer campaign has a different goal than just "expand and take out your neighbours as fast as you can". A few examples:
- In 'World War 2320' there's a boss that you have to fight. The game never explains that Despite seemingly having 0 armies, the boss actually has 400 strength, as indicated by the tiny, easily-missable-if-you-don't-zoom-in figure.
- To win 'The Italian Hunt' and 'Calling All Reinforcements' you should ignore the whole expand and conquer concept and just rush to kill the commander to trigger an Instant-Win Condition. 'Calling All Reinforcements' is worse off in this regard as it doesn't even tell you about said commander, who is in southern Italy.
- Indie Game: In the truest sense of the term, the dev team narrows down to one man, Fizzer.
- Let's You and Him Fight: A good strategy for a weaker player in a game is to let the big guys fight and build up strength to take them on later.
- Level Editor: The game allows you to create and upload your own maps, and also (if you are high level enough or cash in) to create customized scenarios on existing maps.
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Nintendo Hard: The singleplayer campaign starts off relatively easy, but slowly ups the ante. Community consensus is that "Caesar's Palace" is the point where it gets to infuriatingly frustrating hard. Each level also has a 'gold star' which requires you to beat a level in X number of turns (usually meaning you have to expand every turn), not only requiring players play perfectly start to finish but also hope that RNG works in your favour. - No Plot? No Problem!: Risk hasn't much of a plot either... Take territories, fight enemies, take more territories, win...
- Pragmatic Adaptation: From Tabletop to video game.
- "Risk"-Style Map:
- As a Risk-inspired game this is naturally the basis of gameplay. There are over 2500 maps available to play on, one of which is the original Risk map, here named "Small Earth".
- The "Clan Wars" mode also involves a Risk-style map, in which clans have to earn territories through winning quickmatches. Unlike in the main modes, the map display is purely eye candy since the territory locations are irrelevant and there is no way to earn another clan's territory.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: Diplomatic games, called diplos, run on these mechanics to start scenarios. The restrictions range from simple (declare war before attacking) to very complex (a whole ruleset with predefined characters/countries designed for roleplaying).
- Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: Expanding can look like this.
- Take Over the World: The very objective of the game.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: To compensate for some Artificial Stupidity the later single player levels are designed to give the AI advantage over the human player.
- Turn-Based Strategy: Each turn takes either days or minutes, depending on whether the game is "Multi-Day" or "Real-Time".
- Viral Unlockable: "Viral Achievement" is earned by defeating someone who already has it.
Warzone Idle contains examples of:
- Gameplay Automation: There are various advancements that automate parts of the game, such as Auto-Conquer, which conquers territories automatically. Not all of these are helpful.
- Idle Game: It's in the title, and playing often contains long stretches of idling while armies and resources accumulate.
- Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: The original implementation of markets had resources available at a fixed price much higher than the player could sell them for. This was changed in an update so that the initial price now starts lower and increases as the player buys from them, which meant that the player can make some profit but not an unlimited amount.
- New Game Plus: The player can ascend after beating Europe Huge, which resets level progression but retains everything else (advancements and artifacts in particular). At a certain point the player can then super ascend, which resets everything except artifacts you can select to bring forward (initially a maximum of two), but grants a perk each time.
- Play Every Day: The player can claim a random bonus power once each day.
- "Risk"-Style Map: Each level has a map derived from a Warzone Classic map. As in the main game, the player can only conquer adjacent territories on the map.
- Tech Tree: Techs can be purchased using alloys and items, which then give benefits. The early levels contain only the first few techs in the tech tree, with the full tree appearing in later levels.
