Chaotic Conquer: The worst flash game?

So there exists a game on the internet called Chaotic Conquer, a game based on the teleivision show Chaotic. I must be the only person in the world who cares about this game, but it does exist and with flash apparently going to die, I am worried this game will be lost when it should stand as a testament to poor game design in every possible way. This is my rant immortalizing Chaotic Conquer as how not to make a flash game. There's definitely worse, but certainly none then I've played. As of time of writing the game can be found here.

Chaotic Conquer is a game spin off of Chaotic, a tv show made by 4kids as basically an advertisement for the trading card game Chaotic. I watched it to gather feats and found it surpringly watchable. No revolution in children's television but pefectly capable of holding your attention. Just to go over the series a bit, the show features the world of Perim, divided primarily between 4 tribes. There's the Overworlders who are beast-men and oddly colored humans who are noble and have codes of honor and their primary mechanic is increasing their power from elemental boosts or from teamwork. Their opposite are the Undeworlders who are demonic creatures or animal-people that are meant to be more scary like snake-people or bat-people. They have a philisophy of survival of the fittness and their main mechanic is debuffing people or sacrificing their own creatures to gain an advantage. There's the insectoid Danians who basically are just serving the will of their insect queen and their main mechanics are their weaker creatures giving boosts to their stronger creatures via hive mind and later infecting opponent creatures to turn them into insectoids. The Mipedians are desert-dwelling lizards who are a mix of laid back/friendly and sneaky/deceptive. Their main mechanics are invisibility and speed, and are a bit glass cannon-y being able to do a lot of damage right off the bat with ambushes but lose in a long run match. They later added a secret evil fifth tribe of lovecraftian monsters though that's neither here nor there. Humans that are from "our world" teleport into Perim to scan creatures and places and whatnot to use in the actual card game. Some of the creatures there don't like humans and will kill them while others like to use their ability to teleport anywhere to use them as scouts in their war with each other in exchange for scans. The show's human characters are fairly likeable, and it's lore is decently developed. It also shows actual strategies used in the game being used in the show which is surprisingly rare for a TCG show, who usually go for what's dramatic and flashy. The show had some problems with it's messaging however, in particular it pretends that all 4 tribes are equally valid but the Overworlders are constantly being painted as the "good guys" and the Underworlders are constantly being painted as the "bad guys". There's an episode that tries to go against this by showing an Overworlder oppressing some Mipedians, and if you've seen the earlier Last Airbender episode with Jet oppressing a Fire Nation village, it's like that but stripped of nuance, depth or consistency with worldbuilding. Also the artwork for the series after the artwork changed, I really don't like. I'm not usually a visuals person but...

Anyway to get off this massive tangent, what good I can say about the show however does not at all translate to the game. I give such a long description because I wanna give an impression of just how many opportunies were missed with this game. The game is basically a Risk Clone except simplified even further. Risk is on the border to those games that are purely luck. If you look at a game like Monopoly, there's hypothetically some skill in it but in reality it is basically just luck who wins, especially without auctions. Risk is the most luck reliant game I would say actually does take some skill to win. Simplifying it down removes that skill element.

Let's start with probably the first problem with the game you'll notice, outside of it's weird scratchy audio of some of the show's music. When you begin the game you are given the choice of which tribe to pick. However no matter what you select, you are given the Overworld tribe. This is not intentional, the game gives you a screen to select a tribe but no matter where you click you are given Overworld. There's something almost comical to how the show went so far to try and make the Overworld the good guys, the ones you want to root for and the game then basically forces you to play as them. I know that in reality it's almost certainly just a bug, but it makes me imagine them saying "present them a choice, but they're DEFINITELY going to choose Overworld". Bear in mind the brief time I looked into it, the player base who actually play Overworld in the game are actually commonly disliked. I remember seeing one forum post of "proposed alliance of Mipedians, Danianis and Underworlders against the Overworld".

Anyway upon beginning the game you'll find that starting the game is quite different from actual Risk. In Risk you take turns choosing territories and then placing armies in those territories. That isn't what happens in Chaotic Conquer. Instead the game gives you an auto-generated map with territories randomly divided beteen the players and a random number of armies on each territory that all equal the same amount asking the player to accept or to reroll. There does seem to be a minor selection bias that territories controlled by each tribe are closer together, but you will often have numerous individual territories that are completely isolated.

Most of the flaws of this game can be explained as the designers were lazy/rushed or it was simplified for children. Simplification for children I don't think can explain a lot about this as children can and regulaly do play Risk. It's not that complex a game. This system of randomly assigning territories I am guessing was some attempt to simplify the game, though I can't imagine how selecting territories in turn is too complex for a child. The ability to keep going though presets is actually extremely powerful as you can keep going until you get basically a corner of the map with all your troops there, something you actually have to do to win but more on that later. And in case you're wondering, no there's no multiplayer at all. Online, hotseat, nothing. It's not like this is a really complex game to make multiplayer for. There are plenty of online versions of Risk, which are more complex then this game, that allow hotseat or online multiplayer including free versions.

So this game only has 1 map, and it's completely and totally generic. This is a massive missed opportunity; a lot of versions of Risk have areas on the map that give special bonuses, and the world of Perim is loaded with interesting locations that have explicit effects. It would have been a great idea to make a two-layered map for the above ground and below ground modeled after map of perim and it's canonical locations. Chaotic already has locations in the show that are strategic chokepoints between the Overworld and the Underworld like the Passage and Cordac Falls. It would have been easy to make those the chokepoints in the game. Even if you aren't going to put in unique effects, the least that could have done was naming the areas after locations. If I'm some kid playing this, I'm going to want to say I'm launching an attack from Gigantempopolis to Kiru City or from Castle Gothica to the Lava Ponds but I can't do that because this map has nothing to do with Chaotic, the series.

Not that there's anything else Chaotic in this. If you wanted to make this right, you'd probably get special "mugic" abilities themed after your tribe. In universe there is mystical music used by the tribes called mugic, and they all get unique ones depending on affiliation. If you're playing Underworld you could for instance cast Cannon of Casualty to wipe out some armies in an enemy territory. Danians could use Song of the Mandiblor to give them an additional really strong roll on their next die roll based off the number of armies they're attacking with. Battlegear might be hard to include but anything is better then this complete lack of anything. And you can't tell me it's for balance purposes when you can only play one of them anyway. Instead of getting cards, which you don't get in this game anyway further removing any strategy from it, have it so each tribe gets a mugic counter each turn if they take territory and they then can spend x amount of mugic to cast one of say 3 different options.

However none of this is the biggest problem with the game. The biggest problem with the game is not what it lacks but what it does actually have, that being attacking territories. Believe it or not, they somehow messed even just attacking territories up. In normal risk attack assigns a certain number of armies to attack a territory, leaving at least one in the territory they attack from. They then roll up to 3 dice. while the defender rolls up up to two dice but wins ties. The highest result from both are compared and the second highest result from both compared with the loser of each roll losing one army. The attacker can withdraw after each roll but if they destroy all opposing armies they move all the armies they assigned to the attack in. Chaotic Conquer simplifies this already simple system causing it to break entirely. You don't choose any number to attack with, instead when you attack a territory virtual dice are rolled for both sides equal to the total number of armies they have. The results of all the dice rolls are added together. The two results are compared with defender winning ties. If the defender wins they lose NO ARMIES and the attacker is left with one. If the attack wins they again lose NO ARMIES, and move all their forces into the attacked territory except one remains in the territory they moved from.

The fact that you get almost no choices in this whole manner, you can't choose to disengage, you can't choose number of armies to attack with, you can't choose how many to move in or out would be bad enough since it removes some of what strategy Risk has, but the bigger problem is how only one side loses armies no matter what. I can not explain how fundamentally this changes the game. This means that every single roll is all or nothing. There are no degrees of success in Chaotic Conquer, every attack means that one side is exceedingly punished. This becomes even more of a problem with how armies are given at the end of the turn. In normal Risk, you place armies at the end of the turn in territories at your discetion. In Chaotic Conquer however you are given armies in random territories you control and you can't fortify at all. What this means is the only strategy that works, the ONLY strategy is to get incredibly lucky, taking a lot of territories early on, walling up until every single territory hax max armies on it and then taking your opponent's territories one at a time. The reason why is the random armies at the end of the turn can only fully replenish one or two territories at the end of a turn (if that, depending on how much of the map you control) so if you lose any more offenses in a turn then that, then you will lose more territories then you take. In Risk, there are degrees of success, so maybe you lose offenses but you deplete your opponent's forces on the border enough that if they try a counter-attack, they will risk the same territories. In Chaotic Conquer, the degree of success vs failure is so absolute that you can only afford failures that are completely meaningless since it will be undone at the end of your turn. If you attack, lose and then don't get that territory refilled at the end of the turn, the AI will take that territory basically for free.

You'd think with a game this poor, the AI would at least have the decency to be fittingly awful, yet somehow, incredibly the AI for this game is incredibly smart and does that exact strategy. Maybe it's because the game is SO simplistic that it couldn't mess it up, but the AI tries to take a lot early, wall up and take territories slowly from a corner of the map. If they had the ability I half suspect they are smart enough that they would resign when the player controls majority of the map.

All of this is compounded by the fact that the AI cheats. I can't prove this obviously, but it's incredibly clear if you play more then one game. You lose even matches the clear majority of the time and lose more often then is statistically probable when you have a larger force. This is partly why you can only afford to attack when any losses you sustain you know will be replaced at the end of the turn. This is the part that confuses me th most about this game. Stripping down the rules of Risk I can understand as some attempt to make the game accessible to children, even though children can understand Risk fine. Having nothing related to the Chaotic series outside of some poor sound assets and the tribe colors I can understand as just laziness or lack of time and resources. But I can't understand why this game cheats in favor of the AI. You would think that would be harder to implement, if only by a bit, because you're adding an extra variable. Children aren't going to like this game, but assuming they did they would only get frustrated by the rampant cheating. Maybe they won't notice it's there, but they will notice they always lose, and very often unfairly. If anything you'd expect some poor flash game made as a tie in to a children's television series to be easy to win, something a child could realistically do. I have no idea why this game has that element, outside maybe some attempt to try and extend the game's playtime by making it harder to win.

Chaotic Conquer is I think a perfect example of how not to make a game.