BattleForge

BattleForge is a video game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on Windows in March 2009. A demo was released in the same month. BattleForge is an online card-based real-time strategy (RTS) game.

On its initial release, the game revolved around trading, buying and winning through means of micro-transactions, though micro-transactions were not required for playing the game, only for buying new cards. On May 26, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free branded game with fewer cards initially available (32 cards and no points). The retail version comes with all of the starter decks (One for each element, 64 cards) and 3,000 BattleForge points.

The games virtual currency is now distributed to each player on a 1 point per day basis, but only if the player has played at least 15 minutes that day. Through this, all micro-transactions are available to all players, but doing them without purchasing the retail version of the game or any virtual currency is possible, only slow.

Features
There are a total of 383 cards available, almost equally divided between the powers of fire, frost, nature, and shadow. With a recent update, there are now combinations of shadow/fire, frost/nature, frost/shadow and fire/nature, as well as legendary cards. Players can buy and sell cards at an in-game auction house, using BattleForge Points (BF Points), an in-game currency. Players can also invite each other to conduct a direct trade.

There is a PvE mode (player versus environment) and a PvP mode (player versus player). In the PvE mode, players can complete missions. Some of these missions can only be played by 1 player, while others can be played with 2, 4 or 12 players. There are three modes available in missions: standard, advanced and expert. In order to unlock advanced and expert modes, players will have to complete the series of missions on standard mode first. The rewards for the missions are gold, card upgrades and PvE experience points. These experience points will increase a player's PvE level.

For PvP, players can choose between ranked and unranked PvP. Unranked PvP will not give any rewards, but can be useful for testing cards and strategies or for a simple, friendly match. Ranked pvp will give players gold, Elo points and tokens as reward. Gold and tokens can be traded for card upgrades, while ELO points will increase a player's PvP level.

Also of note, it is supporting DirectX 11, provided that the user has a DirectX 11 operating system, as well as a DirectX 11 compatible Graphics Card, providing full support for hardware tessellation.

Card Editions
The Twilight edition is the first edition of BattleForge cards. Twilight edition of cards contains a total of two-hundred (200) unique cards, including fifty cards for each elemental faction: Fire, Frost, Nature, and Shadow. Each of these powers has its own special abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Each power is represented by an orb color in the game. The Twilight Edition consist 200 cards in total, i.e. 50 units, buildings and spells for each of these powers.

The Renegade Edition is the second edition of BattleForge cards. It expands the BattleForge card set with legendary units and monumental buildings from the Southern Wastes region of Nyn. 60 new units and buildings will be added to the BattleForge card pool.

The Lost Souls Edition was released on February 9, 2010 with a total of 60 brand new and unique units.

The Amii Edition was released in small proportions in each patch. About 4 cards got released in almost each patch. When the Amii Edition was fully released on April 26, 2012 the last 2 cards where added, bringing a total of 32 new cards to the game. The Amii Edition is the smallest edition to date but took the longest time to be released, using Sneak Preview Decks for 2 years prior to the actual release.

Tomes
In June 2011, Tomes were changed to a rental item and the cost was lowered to 300 BattleForge points. All tome cards are charged and upgraded to level 2. Tomes rentals last 2 weeks, after which the contents of the tome leave your account.

Links

 * 1) BattleForge official site
 * 2) BattleForge at MobyGames
 * 3) BattleForge Wiki at Wikia Gaming