Feature - Black Market

Summary:

• Players spend a unique currency farmed through events or bought in sales to prep and launch a missile.

• Once ready, the player can target the missile at another player or NPC’s base.

• On launch, the targeted player is notified via push notif, so they can respond accordingly. If the missile reaches its target, it deals a fixed amount of damage to the base’s housed troops. 

From a marketing perspective, Missile Strikes was a callback to a Mobile Strike commercial where Arnold Schwarzenegger is shown launching a “strike” from his mobile phone by pressing a big red button on screen. We wanted to capture the effortlessness of being able to impact other players with just the press of a button.

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From a gameplay perspective, I designed Missile Strikes to promote more frequent, aggressive interactions between players. Unlike typical 4X battles between troops, the attacking player does not risk their own troops (a common deterrent to attacking in 4X). Our team also devised some special events that refunded all troops lost to missile strikes for the duration of the event and awarded event prizes for troops killed by missiles strikes to promote adoption of the feature as well as monetization on climbing the event leaderboard.