Shogun Wars - Idle battling, social coordination, staking, crafting, and classes

Introduction

Shogun War is a blockchain game project residing on the Arbitrum Layer 2 network. Its roadmap has revealed that Shogun War will be split into 2 games, the first one being a 2D game which features pixelated NFT characters and interactions on the blockchains such as staking, NFT battling and crafting. The 2nd game will be a 3D RPG with more involved gameplay such as dungeoning, looting and more.

As its name suggests, the lore behind Shogun War is based on feudal Japan where two clans fight against each other in battles and wars. Players can stake their NFT assets to acquire tokens and these can be consumed to craft items, tame beasts, and eventually level up their in-game avatars. As their characters become more powerful, players can team up together to battle opposing clans to earn rewards.

The 2D Shogun War game is currently actively developed and is available from the project’s dApp. Since it requires NFT assets to be purchased to play, it is not free-to-play and features play-to-earn elements.

Gameplay

“Your story begins with a map, as most do.” says the Whitepaper.

The Shogun War 2D game can be categorized as an RPG where players control their Shogun characters and use them to collect resources and eventually fight enemy clans. The gameplay loop can be summarized as the following steps:

• Staking your Shogun for training to earn a class specialization

• Different Shogun classes will have different playable actions in-game, meaning that your characters will be put to use across different facets of the game. This can range from producing resources, crafting, or summoning familiars that aid your fights against your opponents

• Pick a side and choose a clan: Hojo or Tokugawa. Then co-op with your fellow clansmen to fight against your enemies.

• Other important actions include continuously staking your Shoguns to work on your land NFT to earn tokens, resources and fulfilling its own roles

The game features various GameFi elements such as single staking to earn token emissions, upgradable NFTs, liquidity pools and more. 

To dive down further, let’s look at the different classes and the actions they can take:

• Dungeons can be raided per week for drops, and includes a very small chance for the NFT characters sent on the mission to be locked out for 7 days if they get “injured”

• Beast forests can be entered for a cost and gives XP and a potential beasts to aid you in future battles

• Clan raids are exclusive to Ronins which have no allegiance to both clans. This mechanic earns resources and XP by raiding either side.

• Finally clan battles and wars are MMORPG battles where players of the two clans battle each other for rewards. In short, all players pay a stake and at the outcome of a battle, the winning side will take all of it and split the winnings evenly.

Other minor game mechanics and craftable items are described in the whitepaper. In short, Shogun War requires putting your characters to use with game theory and strategies in mind to maximize resources production, and ultimately cooperation between your fellow clan players to usurp the opposing side.

Team

The Shogun War team is mostly anonymous. Key figures of the team are Steeb, Mathias and Oliy .

Mathias is the co-founder of Shogun War and also the co-host of the Web3 Whispers podcast. Steeb is also a core contributor to the Shogun War project and regularly joins Mathias in co-hosting Web3 Whispers. Despite being anonymous builders, they have been quite active in the crypto scene for some time and mingle very well with the crypto native Twitter audience.

Oliy is the main developer of the project and hangs around often in the project discord and delivers most of the ongoing updates to the community.

Partnerships

Shogun War is an independent project and mostly has been building on its own. The most notable partnership the project team has is with Byt for designing their in-game NFT marketplace.

Another previous partnership at the inception of the project was with TreasureDAO. TreasureDAO is an ecosystem of metaverses connected by MAGIC and houses a number of Arbitrum’s most famous NFT collections, such as the smol NFTs and the Bridgeworld game. However, this partnership came to a close in early March as the teams concluded there wasn’t a viable path to integrate with Treasure. Since then, Shogun War has pretty much remained an independent project on Arbitrum.

Assets & Ecosystem

Shogun War started as a project under the Treasury Metaverse. In Treasury Metaverse a lot of the NFT projects started as a free mint. Shogun War was no exception to this either and the NFT mint was a whitelisted free mint.

The mint concluded in late February 2022 and around 9300 Shogun NFTs were minted with a max supply of around 13000 mints.

Originally, Shogun War was looking to integrate with the TreasureDAO metaverse, so the NFT assets in the in-game marketplace are traded with the TreasureDAO governance token, MAGIC. However, the project has been pivoting away from TreasureDAO and will eventually be switching to ETH and later SHO as the primary token.

Shogun War will feature a two-token system for the current 2D game and the same applies for future games.

The current in-game token is SHO and the max supply is approximately 395 million. This is an inflationary currency and will be used for all in-game actions and transactions. Emissions for SHO will follow a 6-month halvening schedule which means emissions will be cut in half every 6 months until year 3 after which the supply will be capped. This means that the token inflation is significantly higher in the earlier epochs.

Token allocation and emissions schedule can be referred in the whitepaper and are depicted as follows:

As for the governance token of the project as a whole, this is still in the works and is yet to be announced. 

How to get started

Shogun War and its assets reside on the Arbitrum blockchain which is a layer 2 for Ethereum. To play the game or interact with the assets, you will need to have a Metamask wallet and bridge some ETH to Arbitrum to start with. Also, please always keep some spare ETH in your wallet as gas fees for interacting with the blockchain.

Since Arbitrum is a L2 network, you will need to add it as a custom RPC. The easiest way to do this is to go to https://chainlist.org/ and add it as a chain on your Metamask wallet.

Search for Arbitrum, make sure it is Arbitrum One, click connect and you will be prompted to add the RPC 

The NFT and land assets used to be only tradable via MAGIC which is the token of the Treasure Metaverse, but now the project is pivoting away from TreasureDAO, the Shogun War assets will eventually be fully tradable with ETH too.

The in-game marketplace is available at https://market.shogun.lol/collections

There is also a secondary marketplace at TofuNFT, which is a popular marketplace for NFTs on multiple chains and the main marketplace for Arbitrum NFTs in general.

Once you have acquired your NFT assets, you can start playing the game at the dApp.

Other than interacting with the dApp, you should really check out the project Discord because Shogun War is meant to involve social interactions as a clan and there are decisions to be made amongst your brethren!

Conclusion

Shogun War is a fairly interesting title as it’s pretty much an independent project without VC backing or large funding, and yet it’s got quite some hype on its launch. We liked the social aspects of the game, and it’s certainly different to the other genres and you actually need to have a strategy and coop with others to succeed. The community is closely knit even after months on its launch while the core mechanics get developed. In the foreseeable future, we would like to see how the project plays out and certainly are not going to underplay its potential!