What’s the point of gaming?

To relax? Have fun? Develop skills?

We think it’s all of these. And, maybe most importantly, we want to provide you a place to create.

We want to give you the chance to step into the frontier of a game that’s new, easy-to-learn but hard-to-master, and chock-full of opportunities to create strategies no one’s seen before.

To do that, the theme of Dragon Lords is our choice point system: We want to provide a platform for as many creative, strategic, and meaningful decisions as possible. That’s why we more than a dozen unique hero options and hundreds of armies for you to build your stacks with.

But stack building is just the beginning. There are more than 200 items to be discovered by your heroes as a search ancient ruins. There are 50+ unique scrolls that can influence the strategic map. There are 50+ city buildings that you can use to develop your empire. There are more than 150 unique governors you can hire to boost your city’s capabilities. And on and on.

Before turn one starts, you’ll make numerous decisions that will influence your playstyle throughout the course of the game. These decisions include choosing your:

  • Doctrine

  • Deity

  • Leadership Style

  • Governance Style

  • Economic Policy

  • Intelligence Directive

  • Starting Hero

  • Starting Armies

  • Starting Scroll Cache

Below, you can explore these initial decisions. We think you’ll quickly begin to feel a pull toward some of the options. That’s exactly what we want. We want to see the unique blend of choices that will culminate in your grand strategy!

Doctrine:

Dragon lords is about discovering, developing, deceiving, and dominating. All of these components of running your empire are important. But you will decide which of the four doctrine’s you’ll specialize in.

Before the game starts, you’ll choose your doctrine, which has a small but noticeable effect on your empire and armies and determines all future bonus options.

On turn five, you’ll choose one of three additional bonuses from within your doctrine. On turn ten, you’ll chose one of four additional bonuses. And on turn twenty and turn forty, you’ll choose one of six additional bonuses.

Discover:

Develop:

Deceive:

Dominate:

Players who choose the discover doctrine usually believe that power and might are important…but having that power and might in the right place at the right time is what makes all the difference. As a result, discover doctrine players emphasize speed, vision, and flexibility.

As a result, the discover doctrine emphasizes unit speed, unit vision, exploration, and map awareness. Early bonus options include increase the speed and vision of all friendly armies or access to early scouting units. Later bonuses provide reduction in cost or build time of exploration-focused units and buildings and instant knowledge of the location of cities and ruins.

Players who choose the develop doctrine recognize the importance of strong armies. It’s just that they are keenly aware that the best way to field the largest amount of the most formidable armies is to have the economic foundation to do so. So, develop doctrine players emphasize city development, economic growth, and gold acquisition.

This means that the develop doctrine, in addition to providing the player extra gold at the beginning of the game, provides the player options to reduce the cost of city buildings, generate more prestige, create trader and merchant units, and increase gold generated per turn.

Deceive doctrine players recognize that armies and gold are valuable. Yet, they aren’t nearly as valuable if they can’t be deployed. Dragon Lords offers a simple-but-deep set of spy mechanics. Players who don’t monitor enemy spy activity can find their empire paralyzed, or worse, by enemy agents. Deceive doctrine players are highly attuned to the power of the right disruption at the right place at the right time. Is a city’s defenses just barely hanging on thanks an enemy dragon? It would be a shame if that dragon was assassinated. Is your empire running short on funds? It’s nice to have spies capable of quickly obtaining you more from enemy player treasuries.

The deceive doctrine allows players who are drawn toward this shadowy approach to increase the power of their offensive and defensive spies, reduce the cost of these spies, and weaken enemy player agents.

Dominate players have a different approach. Discover? Develop? Deceive? Dominate doctrine players came to conquer. And the tried-and-true way to conquer your enemies is to have the most powerful armies on the map. Marshalling the strongest armies is exactly what the dominate doctrine does. No beating around the bush. Just strong armies coming straight at you.

The dominate doctrine permits players who prefer a direct, in-your-face style to supplement the number, strength, and punch of their armies. Early bonuses provide small increases to unit combat value. Mid-range and later bonus options provide flexible approaches, including quickly adding new units to the empire, training armies to increase their effectiveness, and even calling on dragons to aid the war effort. There’s nothing a dominate doctrine player loves more than asking his opponent: “How is your map / city building / spy going to help you as my dragons storm your capitol?”