EA Sports has just launched early access to FC Empires, a new 4X football strategy game that’s like Football Manager and Clash of Clans.
It’s available on iOS and Android in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand right now, with a global launch scheduled for sometime in the near future.
FC Empires focuses as much on the business side of modern football as it does on the sport itself, tasking players with turning their club into a global superpower with clever marketing, the best medical and scouting facilities and an experienced coaching staff. .
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We’ve played a closed alpha version of FC Empires before this release, and it was equal parts strange and strangely compelling. The different mechanics will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has played EA Sports’ Ultimate Team FC 25 and any other mobile strategy game like Clash of Clans or even The Simpsons: Tapped Out.
You invest your in-game currency into building infrastructure, which is built in real time but can be sped up with premium items. That infrastructure then has utility in the game, as the hospital speeds up the recovery time of injured players. So far, a very mobile strategy.
Building your team is where EA’s Ultimate Team comes in, as you get a drip feed of “transfers”, like opening packs in EA Sports FC 25. You can then mix and match different players based on their nationality, life team real and the league they play in, to develop team chemistry and improve statistics.
Where the similarity to Football Manager appears is in the match engine, where you don’t control each player individually, but instead set the formation and tactics and watch the game from the sidelines.
FC Empires is much more streamlined than the in-depth tactical plans you can devise in Football Manager, but it’s clear that EA is targeting a similar type of football fan who is put off by the fast, intense speeds of a hundred miles a minute. EA Sports FC gameplay, but enjoys team building and tactics, albeit in a more casual way.
Once you’ve chosen your team, you can invite AI-controlled teams to visit your home stadium for exhibition matches, or go out into the world to compete against other players, and the victor will earn the adoration of more fans around the world. . and increase the value of your club.
It is a field that is as far away from “real” football as possible. The notion that you can become a fan of a team because it is winning is itself completely foreign to most avid fans. Supporting Leeds United makes me miserable, ruins my weekend and shoots up my blood pressure. I love it.
But there’s no ignoring the fact that FC Empires is a confluence of two key gameplay mechanics that have proven incredibly popular and compelling on a global scale; Plus, it’s worth mentioning, literally addictive in many unfortunate cases.
FC Empires has an official website with more information, as well as an official Facebook and Discord that you can follow for release announcements.
