Stick War: Saga (aka Stick War III, Stick War 3, or SW3) is an Android and iOS game published by Max Games. It is the sixth entry in the Stick War series.
Gameplay
The style of play in Stick War: Saga borrows heavily from the previous games, incorporating much of the mechanics, such as from Stick War II: Order Empire and Stick Empires, seeing the return of a second main resource. In the aforementioned Stick War entries, Mana was the secondary resource and was passively acquired by commanding a miner to pray at the statue. Crystal is introduced in Stick War: Saga, a mined resource much like gold. Additionally, several single-player and multiplayer game modes are available, and as a first for the series, the game introduces team-based gameplay with a 2v2 game mode. Winning games allow players to acquire gems to purchase cosmetic items for their units and the statue.
Commands have been further refined, allowing players to order their army to the Tower using the "Attack" or "Defend" commands. Additionally, individual units may be ordered to garrison, attack, or hold position, and units can be manually controlled similarly to Stick War and Stick War: Legacy (albeit without stat bonuses). Also, miners and enslaved miners can now be commanded to attack as well as the other units. (They have separate command buttons from the other units (except for "Man the Fort" or "Defend"), meaning a player could have Castle Archidons while his/her other units are helping defend the statue.
There is also Sudden Death, where once the game lasts for more than 9 minutes, Sudden Death will occur, dealing damage to both statues. If there is a tie, the left team wins.
Multiplayer Game Modes
1v1
The player is matched with a human opponent of similar skill level in a normal game.
2v2
The player teams up with a party member, or a teammate chosen by matchmaking, to face another team of two players.
Each team shares resource patches (though an additional Crystal patch and several extra Gold patches are added to each base) and their Statue, however each player has their own population cap and resources.
Daily Battles
Allows the player to team up with another player to face off in a Daily Battle. Daily Battles have fixed decks and may have other special conditions that do not appear in normal gameplay. Daily Battles have three difficulty levels (Normal, Hard, and Insane) and players gain gem rewards for completing each difficulty.
Brockemon posted an update at the 27th of March, 2019 about it in the #official-news section of the Official Discord Server for the Stick War Series. Here's a basic summary of the information there:
- They have started early work on it and are confident with a multiplayer engine setup of 40 vs. 40 unit battles with individual unit control.
- Individual unit control will be similar to Stick War and Stick War: Legacy's, differentiating from Stick Empires.
- They are considering the idea of multiple players on the same team, i.e. 2 vs. 2 matches. They are imagining that the primary player will be in charge of managing the economy and building units. Any additional players would be "side-kicks"; they will be controlling individual units. "Side-kicks" may be rewarded or given a bonus in the game for doing this.
- The game will be rendered in 3D, though the sprites for the stickmen will be in 2D. This approach is predicted to improve camera effects as you move past the army, otherwise known as the Parallax Effect.
Further Updates
- On the 18th of January 2021, CrazyJay uploaded a trailer, showing the new game, where he mentioned the game's release in 2021.
- On the 26th of March 2021, the alpha version of the game was released for testing.
- On the 11th, 12th and 14th of December 2021, the game was released for early access to play on Android and iOS in Canada, Australia, and then globally.
- Stick War: Saga was officially released on March 2, 2024.