Battle Forge

"You are a Skylord. Once a mortal hero, you long ago gained immortality and became a counselor to the Gods. For generations you have lived with them in their majestic fortress floating in the skies over the magical world of Nyn."

"The fortress of the Gods was named the Forge of Creation for it grants the ability to bring the world's legends to life; use this ability to help guide the fates of the mortals on the surface below."

"Conjure up wonders of old, bring about storms and wildfires or wonderful blessings and mystical healings. At your word, legendary creatures spring to life, heroes, monstrosities, dragons and spirits are shaped of pure elemental power to do your bidding. Monumental structures and mighty fortresses of old rise from the earth wherever you desire."

A Free to Play CCG MMO RTS, created by the German game developer company Phenomic and published by EA. Released March 2009. Has four factions: Fire, Frost, Nature, and Shadow.

Basically, it's Magic the Gathering if it were an RTS. You get cards by buying Battleforge points (with real money). With Battleforge points, you can buy boosters in the ingame store, or bid/sell cards in the ingame auction house. Theoretically, it's possible to play the game completely for free by selling your initial cards and then slowly building up a massive fortune by trading on the auction house... but it's extremely slow since everyone else also has your initial starting cards. It becomes somewhat faster when valuable promotional cards are available through out-of-game events.

Also, you can upgrade your cards by playing PvE or PvP, increasing your card's stats in battle. Your units could have higher attack, higher health, new abilities, cost less power to summon, etc. This part of the game has nothing to do with Battleforge points, as you cannot trade or buy upgrades.

Gameplay

There are two things needed to use cards in the game: power, and orbs. Power is gained from capturing power wells spread across the map, which then give you a steady income of power. Orbs are gained by capturing amii monuments scattered across the map. A card may require one to four orbs to use, allowing for a great variety in decks (pure decks have access to unique cards that are only available to a certain faction alone, while splash decks are more flexible because they can play around with the strengths of each faction, at the cost of losing access to the faction-unique cards).

There are three types of cards in the game: units, spells, and buildings. You can play cards anywhere you have ground presence (where you have a unit, building, well, or monument in the vicinity), though some spells do not require ground presence. And the most interesting mechanic: power is conserved in the game, it never goes away. Whenever a unit/building dies, or when you cast a spell, the 10% of the power you spent is permanently lost, and the remaining 90% goes into a "void pool", where it slowly flows back into your usable power pool. This leads to fast paced game that steadily gets faster as more power from your wells flows into your power pools.

Factions


 * Fire: (Aggressive) The fire faction focuses on direct damage spells, high attack units, killing things with fire, and destruction in general.
 * Frost: (Defensive) The frost faction features building defense spells, freezing spells, shield spells, high health units, slow units, and protection in general.
 * Nature: (Control) The nature faction has lots of crowd control spells, healing spells, and disabling spells, along with many beast/forestkin units.
 * Shadow: (Risk) The shadow faction has units that frenzy before they die, damage spells that hurt their own units, buff spells, and power manipulation cards.

Splash Factions

As expansions have been released, new factions have joined the standard lineup. They consist of two-orb combinations.
 * Renegade Expansion
 * Bandits: Fire/Shadow faction, special ability: Life Stealing.
 * Stonekin: Nature/Frost faction, special ability: Damage Reduction.
 * Lost Souls Expansion
 * Twilight: Fire/Nature faction, special ability: Transformation.
 * Lost Souls: Shadow/Frost faction, special ability: Revenant's Doom.

This game provides examples of:

 * Action Girl: All female units basically.
 * Baleful Polymorph: The spell Curse of Oink is a staple in every Nature splash deck because it turns all enemies in a radius into useless pigs.
 * Blade on a Stick: Frost imperials/phalanx and nature spearman and ghost spears come to mind.
 * Blood Magic: The Shadow spell Blood Healing is one of the most powerful in the game, but almost certainly causes the unit you cast it on to die in exchange for healing all the units around it. Many shadow units like the Shadow Mage and Cultist Master use their own life points to fuel their attacks or abilities.
 * Church Militant: Gun Cultists worship their rifles and weapons, with quotes such as "Full. Metal. Jacket." and "Thou shalt count to three."
 * Dark Is Not Evil: While the element itself was created by the Original Sin (tm), Shadow is also the essence of preservation and self-sacrifice. The Lost Souls are an even better example, as they, realizing they weren't going to shuffle off the mortal coil anytime soon, decided to make the best of it and assist the Skylords.
 * Shadow faction also does this to a lesser, if abit more iffy degree.
 * The Determinator: Captain Blight
 * Gentle Giant: Mo, the White Juggernaut
 * Gods Need Prayer Badly: Without the faith of the mortals, Brannoc is weakened and killed by the avenging Skylords. All Gods, Skylords, and creations of the Forge exist because of the belief of the mortals.
 * Gotterdammerung: The Gods fall to the Twilight Curse, and it is up to the Skylords to protect the mortal races
 * Ice Queen: The Frost Sorceress is an early Frost Deck unit, An Ice Person like most frost units, but her quotes come off like a Jerkass
 * Love Makes You Evil: Brannoc betrays the Gods because he thought they were holding back the secret of creation from him, and without it he couldn't bring back his dead wife.
 * Norse Mythology: Some influence, probably due to the game being developed in Germany. The cruel giants ruled the mortal races with an iron fist before the gods came and drove the giants underground. Subverted in the end because the gods all die, while the giants befriend the mortals in the face of the The End of the World as We Know It
 * Offing the Offspring: Brannoc kills his own daughter, Viridya
 * Power of the Void: The Lost Souls invoke this, although most are pretty nice.
 * The Precursors: The Amii, creators of the monuments.
 * The Reveal
 * The Forge cannot create, only copy the legends and dreams of mortals. So all the Gods and Skylords are just creations of the Forge, and the original heroes who inspired the Skylords are long dead
 * Brannoc was the pawn of the Harbinger of Souls, who created the Twilight Curse to end all life so the lost souls could be free from their torment in the land of the dead.
 * The Forge was created by the Assemblers, an empire of dimension-hopping steampunk AI machines who trade mortals the ability to make dreams reality in return for access to a peaceful afterlife (the machines, although powerful, do not have an afterlife). The mortals get the short stick, because they get trapped in torment forever after they die.
 * Shout-Out: They pretty much completely ripped off Moby Dick for the Renegade expansion
 * The Time of Myths: Throughout the game you're summoning legendary creatures.
 * Total Eclipse of the Plot: In the Twilight campaign, the sun is eclipsed for two years, and the mortal races are forced into the giant caves for warmth. After reaching a bargain with the giants, the giants make a new sun and throw it into the sky in exchange for enormous wealth.
 * The Undead: Lost Souls
 * The Virus: The Twilight Cursed
 * Zerg Rush: You can technically use masses of T1 and T2 units, but later on against larger enemies they will just get sent flying.