Territory Idle is a idle/incremental game where the core mechanics is growing an island by buying or fighting for tiles until you can sail away to another continents, accumulating various upgrades along the way. With plenty of systems working on top of each other, Territory Idle kept my interest the whole way - I managed to beat the game, in a sense - but ultimately I was left disappointed by the strange balance, lack of quality-of-life features, a few small bugs and a breadth of options that weren’t really all equivalent.
The first few loops of the game were quite slow. Building wheat fields and waiting to get enough wheat to build more of them, only to reset for a few meager coins was quite the grueling ordeal, but I idled my way through all of that. After a while I got wood and then stone, which allowed me to build temples, accumulating faith to buy temporary boosts and choose a god to give me even more buffs. The gods came with trials - challenges of getting a certain number of tiles, usually starting from scratch, with a little twist on the gameplay - that gave permanent buffs when completed. Getting enough stone unlocked Academies, allowing me to capture tiles by fighting for them.
The combat is fairly simple, you pick a class, a weapon, a shield and a helmet, and the hero will fight until they die, then you need to revive them (or make them autofight). You can abdicate during a run in order to get money, transform your temporary religious boosts into permanent ones, or transform your hero experience into fighting bonuses for future runs, so a little bit of strategy was involved, which I enjoyed. After you get 15 tiles, you get one Empire Point, and these are permanent upgrades that make the game progressively faster and also the main progression system of the game. When you get 185 of them, you can move on to the next phase.
In practice, these upgrades are extremely hit or miss and erred on the ‘miss’ side for me. I was drawn to keep on playing because you unlocked new empires as you gained more points, but the empires you unlocked later in the game had worse abilities than the ones you had at the start. I was already producing over a thousand wheat per wheat field worker but then I got a “+1 to wheat field production” boost near the end of the game. Or having my temples cost no rock anymore at a point where I was making millions of gold in a flash. All upgrades in the game suffer from this problem, some are just useless. You’ll quickly figure out something that just works and repeat it for 99% of the rest of your progression and you’ll almost never do anything else. Some buildings and systems just feel useless, and that’s really strange.
After a bit, you unlock ‘great people’ which is presented like you might get more than one (the game will say that you have 0 great blacksmiths, for instance), but you can only get one, to unlock a few more tricks to add to your options. Growing the island large enough allows you to build boats and when you have enough tiles and boats, you sail away and reset to an island with four tiles, plus a ‘fame’ bonus that gives you more gold. Getting boats also unlocks ‘international trade’ which allows you to hire experts that halve tile cost, hiring time, religious perk costs and reviving times for heroes. These are real useful. You also get relics from your religion and can upgrade them for passive bonuses, which I did for a while.
When you buy tiles, you get ‘amber’, the game’s premium currency (you also can buy it for real money). You can use this amber to do a few things, one of them being to fast forward the game in time. I discovered past a certain point that I gained more amber than I spent, so I just burned through the last 50% of the game in three days, getting all empire points and unlocking ‘space’. Space is somewhat different; the resources aren’t the same, you need to research a few new upgrades and then send a ship to a new planet. I burned through more amber and did it in another day. This makes you restart the whole game from scratch, plus a bonus to empire points and a choice to powerful mutations that will make this next planet easier. Go through six planets, and you’ve done everything!
I had an okay time with territory idle through the 1700 hours it took me to ‘beat’ it. The start was way too slow and the end was way too fast. I just spent time complaining about all the little broken things with my friends, but I also was obsessed to see everything the game had in store. I wish there was more automation, because clicking all these tiles and through all these menus every single time got really bothersome and didn’t feel idle at all. There are an infinite number of idle games you could try. This one is certainly one of them! I’m not recommending it, but I’m not saying it’s terrible either, your call!
