Chillingo bringing Cave of Wonders' Civilisation Wars to iOS

As every good commander knows, choosing the right tactics for the battlefield on which you fight is one of the most important decisions for victory.

In that sense, there's no point trying to squeeze the vast range of options of a strategy PC game like Civilization onto a iPad, much less an iPhone.

But while a touchscreen can't compete with the detailed unit selection and movement enabled by mouse and keyboard, its intuitive nature does allow for a more fluid approach to superiority.

That would appear to be the main selling point for the release of Cave of Wonders' popular Flash game Civilization Wars, due onto the App Store sometime in late October, or early November.

Ported by developer Alcomi, and to be published by Chillingo, it takes more of a tank rush approach to world domination.

You start each level with a base that produces generic army units. Simply touch it and then drag onto any neutral or enemy base to send your troops into the attack.

Conquering a base is simply a question of deploying more troops than the number displayed on each base, so if you attack a 6 base with 10 troops, you'll gain it with 4 units then defending it from the enemy.

Obviously the more bases you control, the more troops are produced.

You can send troops from multiple bases into the fray by dragging your finger over as many of your bases as you want to, although you can only send them to attack one enemy position at a time.

Adding tactical variation into the mix are the game's special powers, such as fireball, lighting, quake and golem. These are displayed on the bottom of the screen, and powered up as you send troops to control the various crystal locations scattered around each map.

There are three kingdoms to play - Egyptians, Romans and Chinese, each of which offer slightly different attributes in terms of unit speed, attack, defence and use of crystals.

You can also customise your group's skill set by using the points gained as you complete levels in the main Campaign mode. Completing each campaign requires you to defeat a particular boss, ranging from a giant crab to a giant octopus.

Filling out the action are eight modes, 90 levels and 150 achievements, supported via Chillingo's Crystal network.

You can get an idea about the gameplay in the following video, or play the Flash version here.

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