Eternal Dragons : The Newest Auto Battler on the Block

Eternal Dragons is an original intellectual property created by Trailblazer Games. They're a web3-native gaming studio created by people that had experience working in King, EA, and Microsoft.

Eternal Dragons is broken into a three (3) part trilogy of games. Chapter 1 is an auto-battler, Chapter 2 is a city builder and Chapter 3 is a 4x Strategy game. I was given the opportunity to try out the early access of the auto battler game. Genesis Dragon collectibles can be bought to gain priority for early access.

Into the World of Auto Battlers

Being in the auto-battler genre, Eternal Dragons will certainly be compared to the more prominent games in the genre. This would be Auto Chess or Dota Underlords. Let's explore whether it has anything to offer that its competitors don't!

Core Gameplay

The auto-battler game starts with both players holding three (3) coins at the first turn.

Both you and your opponent will decide whether to:

• buy the minions available in the shop,
• upgrade the shop,
• shuffle the minions available in the shop instead; or
• lock the shop to fix the available minions until the next turn.

As the number of turns increases, the number of coins we start with at each turn increases. On the second turn, both players get four (4) coins at the start. This increases until we reach a turn where both players go with ten (10) coins. The more coins you have, the more minions you can buy.

The shop starts as a 1-star shop selling 1-star minions. The shop can be upgraded up to five (5) stars. Each time the shop increases its stars, the higher-starred minion will be made available to be purchased in the shop. All minions can be bought with 3 coins and sold back to the shop with 1 coin each. You would need to sell at least 3 minions to upgrade to a 5-star shop. The fee required to upgrade to a 5-star shop is 13 coins, 3 more than the max number of coins players will ever start with.

The minions available are categorized into three different classes and four different affinities. Classes available are Slayer, Tanker, and Warlock. Each different class has different Max Hit Points, Armor, Elemental Power, Physical Power, and Spellcasting. Energy affinities are broken into Metal, Earth, Nature, and Energy. They are used as combos for having the same energy affinity minions on the field. The more same type of affinity minions on the field, the higher the bonus obtained.

Adding another layer of complexity is the positioning of minions on the battlefield. Each minion has skills that affect adjacent units. So you need to think about where to place your minions to get the best bonus effects possible.

Game Modes

The current version that was accessible to me was PvE modes only which was against computer opponents;

• “Dungeon” is the mode with a normal difficulty opponent. The opponent has the same types of characters and health points (HP) as us.
• “Quest Mode” is a mode in which the opponent had 10 times our HP. You’ll need to survive for a long time to be able to trickle down the opponent’s health down
• “Hard mode” is the most difficult mode as the opponent has an advantage on the type of characters available to them. You’ll need to have an extremely good strategy to beat this mode.

The PvP mode is currently still unavailable. This will likely be the most anticipated mode for most people. in PvE mode, the game’s AI would only be able to use the strategies preprogrammed by the developers. It would always follow the same predetermined paths. This can make the game feel somewhat formulaic and repetitive. For the game to truly shine, we must test it against real players. The game studio has teased that a league system will be coming in the future.

Final Thoughts

Eternal Dragon is a promising game with a lot of potentials. They will need to make sure they can come out with great features for the game that will help them stand out from other auto-battler games in the market.

As of now, I would only recommend the game to auto-battler fans. There isn’t enough pull factor to attract non-auto-battler fans. The real anticipation would be how the game is perceived after introducing PvP mode.