Genre: Strategic City Building
Publisher: NoriTown Studio
Overview
Build your Ninja Town, research technology, construct new buildings and train ninja warriors to defend yourself and raid enemy towns.
Ninja Showdown is a new strategic city building game on Facebook, launched in April 2012 by NoriTown Studio. You can rule your own ninja town as a great Kage. Defend your town from your enemies, and revenge them by attacking their town in return!
Rule your own ninja town. Train the best ninja skill ever. Invade other clan's town to get more resources and spoils. Be the Kage!
Game Play
A traditional City Building game set in an old world Ninja land where you act as the Kage of your own town and must lead it to power against the other Kages that wish to take your land by force.
Launch attacks against other players and computer opponents, and defend your home against incoming invaders.
Build your town's housing, research buildings, training, defensive installments, storage and resource production supplies, strategically position and upgrade buildings to make them more powerful.
Research Tree is a nice feature, using resources and points gained from destroying opponent towns you can research new unit types and powers for the units such as fire damage, accuracy, speed, etc.
Analysis
Leading ones own Ninja Village is fun sounding premise for a city building game, and always having to compete with the other Kages is a challenge indeed. Ninja Showdown brings to mind the anime Naruto, I remember he always wanted to be Hokage. Although Ninja Showdown don't incorporate as much of the ninjutsu or other 'magic' skills but you can play around with units such as; archers, samurai, animals and more elite human ninjas that can be upgraded as you see fit.
The unit control features in battle are a challenge to say the least, some units run around with a mind of their own ignoring your commands and get themselves killed. So using brute force appears to be the only way to complete those more difficult battles especially with the five minute time limit. So just let your warriors run in there, swords ablaze and slash your way to victory and unify the land, under your control of course.
Strategy
Between battles I highly recommend taking a few moments to allow your units to rest in the town and regain their health points. Doing this will allow you to keep your regiment well stocked, avoid unneeded expenses such as buying new units and ultimately let your units gain more battle experience to level up and grow stronger.
When researching unit abilities choose units that work well together, such as a heavy unit and a ranged unit, because the heavy units will be the front line, dealing big damage and intercepting enemy blows, while allowing your ranged units to strike from a distance and remain safe. Also by focusing on developing specific units you will be focusing research time/resources on only the ones that need it, so in stead of going into battle with 6 different poorly enhanced units, you will have 2 or 3 much more powerful unit types that will make quick work of the bumbling army.
For an army build featuring heavy melee and ranged units, please consider adding a few healers, they wont provide damage support but can assist in healing the front line keeping it strong and saving any rangers that might have taken some unexpected damage.
Consider using:
Front line - Siroco (The Firefox)
Ranged - Archers or who ever has highest ranged damage
Support - Healers
Tips & Tricks
Space in your town is valuable and limited, so pay special attention to where your buildings are positioned.
For starters, the town hall is the most important so place it in the center or guarded by defensive installments.
Structures such as houses and mills cannot attack enemies so you will want to bundle them together and save space, if you have lots of these structures consider putting space between them so your units can travel between them without having to walk around. Another good idea is to position your non-combat buildings on the outside of your town as use them as barricades for enemies, this will make enemies need to walk around your structures in order to reach your defensive installments, but be sure you have structures with sufficient range to attack enemies while they are moving around houses, etc.
Crates are also a great for fending off invaders, they are small a inexpensive:
Basic crate method:
Wall off your buildings from invaders using crates and use your units to engage enemies.
Advanced crate method:
Build a lot of crates and use them like a tunnel so the enemies must walk up and down, left and right in order to reach your buildings. This will eat up the enemies time. To make this much more effective build plenty of long range towers and units that can deal constant damage to the enemies while they march to your base (aka. their demise), the enemy will be defeated before they deal a single damage. Also build lots of traps on the pathways, the enemy will have no option but to walk over them and extra damage will be dealt because the enemy units will be bunched close together.
Now what if the invaders try to destroy your crates and go straight for your city center? You can prepare for this also by deploying all of your units at the center of your town and organize your great big power house of ninjas, traps, towers, walls and warriors the enemy will be walking right into a slaughter that you were more than prepared for.
Recommendation
Fans of city building games, RTS or Naruto should consider giving Ninja Showdown a try, it is an easy to understand game and is entertaining. It's only been out for about a month (released in April 2012) so there isn't a whole lot of PvP features right now but the first generation is still being created and that is always cool. I think it would be great if they added more unit types and decreased the waiting time on buildings and research and the like.
Video
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