To be honest, the current mobile game market is getting more and more impetuous. It's all about drawing cards, making money, and automatically finding paths. As you play, it feels like it's missing a bit of flavor. As an old player who has been involved in the game since the Saipan era, I recently flipped through the photo album on my mobile phone and saw a screenshot of playing "Legitimate Three Kingdoms" back then, and suddenly I felt a little emotional. Many people may not have heard of this game now, but in that era when mobile games were just starting out, it was indeed a breath of fresh air.
Not to brag, this game is not strictly a "classic masterpiece", but it is solid. "Legendary Three Kingdoms" was developed by Guangzhou Haodong Network and was launched around 2014. At that time, it was still in the era of Android 5.0. The gameplay is a typical SLG business strategy. You play the role of a protagonist, starting from a small city, and slowly farming, building troops, fighting bandits, and grabbing resources. To be honest, this mode may seem a bit old-fashioned now, but it was really good to play back then.
What I remember being most fascinated by was the strategic depth of it. It's not the kind of mindless thing. You need to plan the order of building upgrades, study the technology tree, and consider troop restraint. Resource output, warehouse capacity, and the number of generals and troops must be carefully calculated. Once, in order to compete in the rankings, I stayed up late every night for a week to calculate the recruitment time, just to knock down the enemy's main city before others. That sense of accomplishment of building your own city from a thatched hut to an iron-walled fortress step by step is something that many games nowadays cannot provide.
And it has a particularly good feature, which is the real map strategy. You can see other players active on the land near the main city, fighting bandits, collecting resources, and secretly sending troops to attack enemy allies' mineral points. The game feeling of "endless fun when people fight against each other" is much better than those current SLGs that automatically fight with their eyes closed. Of course, I also had the painful experience of being bulldozed by a big boss overnight. At that time, I cursed a few words in the forum and continued to focus on development the next day. It was also a unique social experience.
Looking back now, the graphics and UI of this game are all pixel-level, but it is still playable. I heard that Guangzhou Haodong later released some sequels, but none of them had the flavor of this version. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, and I always miss the days when I used 2G networks to load games and used feature phones to fight the Three Kingdoms at night. If you also like slow-paced, hard-core SLG, I recommend trying the old version, provided you can stand the style of that era haha😄
I won't say any more, I'll go see if I can find the simulator archives from that year and rebuild the city that was demolished seventeen times.