Hello everybody, today we're gonna answer
the question, What is Driftland: The Magic Revival Driftland is an RTS game where four
races fight for control of Islands and their Strategic Resources.
The Islands are floating around in the upper atmosphere of a planet and can be pushed and
pulled around with magic, hence the name of the game.
The game has been in Early Access on Steam for around 8 months, and currently has a playable
skirmish mode versus the A.I. with campaign and multiplayer to be added later this year.
While it might sound light on content, what's there is really polished and plays very well
and the game is pretty cheap, weighing in at under twenty dollars.
As I mentioned there's four races; Humans, Dwarfs, Wild Elves and Dark Elves, and they
each come with their own unique buildings and units, which I'll touch on a bit later.
So let's delve into the game mechanics of Driftland.
You always start with one island under your control and a Castle on that island.
That is your capital building, if it get's destroyed, you lose the game.
You can never build a second one, or get a chance to recover, once it's gone, it's GG.
Castles produce explorers, these are units that will explore islands and uncover any
treasures and resources.
Now unlike most traditional RTS games, in Driftland, you don't directly control the
units at your disposal.
They have free will so to speak, meaning they will kind of do what they want and go where
they're needed.
To get them to do something, you can assign a task for some gold, and then increase the
bounty on that task over and over, spending more and more gold until someone takes the
job.
This was a pretty weird system to me at first, and I'm a little divided on it still, but
essentially it means you have to spend gold to get what you want done fast.
Placing attack orders on foreign lands can cost quite a bit if you want everyone to join
the attack, so it's kind of interesting that your economy also has an affect on what orders
you give.
Economy is the biggest part of the game, without direct unit control, you spend most of your
time building and managing your economy, assigning and reassigning workers to different projects.
So to get an idea of how things are managed, let's talk about each resource.
On the left side of the UI we have everything to do with population, the population count,
the maximum housing they can have, the food they consume and the gold they produce.
There's a handful of rules that govern how the economy works.
The first is the bigger the population, the more food required to sustain them.
The second is, those who don't work, generate gold.
The third is that all buildings and units require gold to maintain.
So at the very least, you have to balance how many workers are working food to keep
food coming in, and not working to keep gold coming in to sustain buildings and units.
It can be a tricky little balancing act in the beginning of the game, but you're given
a very flexible assigning and reassigning tool to dynamically shift workers around instantly
to balance your economy.
Now as you begin to grow, you'll also want other resources and will have to shift workers
onto them.
There's 7 other resources; Mana which I'll touch on last, wood and stone which is used
for building, coal and steel, which is mostly used for upgrades and diamond and ruby which
is used for special units.
These 7 Resources are finite in Driftlands, you will use up the resources on an island,
and when the resource is completely done, the worker building dismantles itself and
the workers return to the population pool.
Food and Population are infinite though - as long as you have houses and farms to work.
That's the basics of the economy, in order to setup a good economy, you'll need to build
efficiently.
Now the building aspect is pretty interesting, you can place buildings anywhere on islands,
but space is obviously finite, and resources take up space on each island whether your
gathering them or not.
Once an island has no more resources, it's a good idea to redevelop it by placing military
buildings or farms on it.
And outer islands need more defenses to keep away patrolling enemies and random barbarians.
The last aspect to building is the Castle itself.
This is your main point of progression, build up the resources to fortify and upgrade this
and that allows you to then upgrade to the next tier for all other buildings, so much
like an age of empires type game, you should be constantly pushing to get the next tier
of castle as quick as possible.
It allows further development of all buildings and increases your magic range.
Next we'll talk about Magic.
Each race has their own set of magical abilities, some with crossovers and some unique to the
race.
Generally though, each race can use the same Island cantered magic abilities.
By building up enough mana, you can push and pull islands around with spells, in order
to bring them close to yours and establish bridges, locking them down as your own.
You can build teleport gates, that allow you to island hop, but they degenerate over time
so typically building bridges is the best way to get islands under your rule safely.
As well as that, magic allows you to terraform islands and even create new ones.
Some of these spells require an active mage on the ground, such as terraforming or destroying
an island.
A fun tactic is to keep up the pressure on an island with heavy bounties for attack,
and use mages to try and destroy it.
It can take a long time, so you'll need heal spells to keep the mages from dying or fleeing.
I tried it once and it went well though I did end up killing some of my own allies with
the explosion.
I'm not sure if Island destruction is ever really necessary.
The Dwarfs have a powerful spell that causes an earthquake damaging all buildings on the
island which I feel is a better alternative than total destruction.
Magic is also limited in reach by your Castle.
The more you've upgraded the further your magic will work, else you'll be restricted
to just using aerial units to reach far away areas.
For most races, these units are very high tier and require finding wild birds to tame
and then a unit with a high enough rank will mount it automatically.
They typically require ruby to create and if the enemy get them early on, they can be
hard to fend off, typically spells and magic is their best counter I've found until you
get your own.
If you wanted to move your capital, you'd have to destroy the bridges and move it around
with magic, while it can be cool to have a mobile base like this to extend your magic
reach, it totally destroys your economy as all production islands are disconnected from
the capital producing nothing.
With careful management though it can be pulled off, but it is certainly more risky to have
your capital on the borders of your empire.
The final aspect to discuss is reputation and progress points.
Driftlands has a few PVE aspects to the game, roaming eagles, treasures, barbarian camps
and more mysteries lie around islands waiting to be discovered.
Exploring and Attacking these places net you progress points and usually some form of treasure,
so are worth doing.
Progress points are put into a tech tree between economy, warfare and magic and basically buff
you up over time as you perform actions.
While it's a relatively simple and useful tech tree, it does favour those who are doing
well already, so I could see it as being a bit of a steamroll which it's often felt like
for me.
There's also Reputation, which I found sort of hard to understand.
Essentially as long as you keep ontop of your economy then your people will give you good
reputation, allowing for a higher gold yield and faster population growth, sounds pretty
straightforward, but I had an overcrowding debuff for a while, even though I had empty
houses so I just wasn't sure what was causing that necessarily.
If this reputation gets low enough, or something in your economy goes bad, you can have mini
rebellions where workers come out of houses and attack nearby units and buildings.
It's never been much of a threat for me, but it's something you'll want to keep ontop of.
So that's basically it for all the mechanics of Driftland as it stands right now.
You can play with up to 5 other AI in skirmish and set a few different rules for the game,
but I'm looking forward to seeing how multiplayer will hold up when it gets introduced.
I think it'll be a really fun game to play with friends, and games can last quite a while,
with all of mine taking at least 90minutes.
As I mentioned in the beginning the game is very polished, looks and runs great, has neat
new ideas and I think deserves a lot more attention.
With only the AI to battle, it's hard to say whether the island mechanics are truly being
used to their full potential, I feel like stealing islands away from the enemy and connecting
them to your land should happen more, but it's very rare.
Technologies feel pretty one dimensional, I would rather see the player dedicating scientists
to boost research so it actually feeds off the economy, allowing players to potentially
build tall so to speak.
Either way, the game has been very fun so far, and when multiplayer drops I'm hoping
we can get a few members of the republic in to play a few games on twitch.
I think with players looking to target farm islands or a few key buildings you can really
destabalize an economy.
Something I didn't mention is there are buff buildings that increase production by 10%
of a given resource, so wiping out a few of those could tank your enemies economy, and
unfortunately I just never saw the A.I. making any plays like that.
Not to say that A.I. is bad, just that I feel there's more potential in there for deeper
strategies.
That's it for my early impressions on Driftland: The Magic Revival.
Let me know what you think about the game and the video in the comments below, do you
think you might be picking this up?
I for one just think it deserves more attention as not many people know about it.
If you want to support the channel, and keep it going, check me out on Patreon, the support
there is what's keeping me going.
I'll probably keep mentioning that $1 there is the equivalent to around 1200 views for
me, so you can have a really big impact on this channel, and currently ad revenue makes
up about 10% of my income, with the rest being fan funding so thank you for the support.
Also check out my twitch schedule to see when I'm playing these types of games, join our
Discord to get involved, and if you have the time, join the steam group, to play with like
minded players.
Thanks again, I'll see you in the next one.
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