Strategy Guides to Popular Facebook MMORTS Games

Massively multiplayer online real-time strategy (MMORTS) games have begun following in the footsteps of MMORPGs, and are faring quite well on Facebook so far. Popular examples include Kingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis from Kabam games, and Backyard Monsters and the new Battle Pirates from Casual Collective.

Some strategy guides to get you started in the first three of these:

Guide to Kingdoms of Camelot for Beginner Players (screenshots are a bit out of date, but most of the info is still good)
Guide to Dragons of Atlantis for Beginner Players
Beginners Guide to Backyard Monsters
Backyard Monsters: Outposts Starter Guide

Kingdoms of Camelot was the earliest put out by Kabam, while Dragons of Atlantis is the latest. In between there was one called Glory of Rome, which has game elements intermediate to the other two that didn't really mix all that well, and thus Glory of Rome didn't become as popular. As a clone, it improved on a few things where KoC was lacking, and introduced new things that weren't quite there yet - that the next clone (Dragons of Atlantis) fixed.

Meanwhile, Backyard Monsters by Casual Collective (now Kixeye) has many similarities to the Kabam games, but has many anti-bullying aspects built into the game design. For example, there are level limits on whom you can attack, limits to how many attacks in a row you can carry out, how much damage you can inflict, etc.

The newest Kixeye game, Battle Pirates, has a base-building design closer to the Kabam games than BYM in many ways, but retaining the anti-bullying elements. It also introduces something that none of the others have: real-time battles with actual ships that you can actually control in micro.

In fact, with fleets functioning much like avatars in other Facebook games, combined with the sector chat, a whole new level of setting immersion and interaction is possible that I haven't seen since Farm Town.

I haven't written a strategy guide for it yet because my rule of thumb is that I don't know what I'm talking about unless I've played the game for at least a month. But stay tuned, one is coming soon. :)

And in any case, it'll be interesting to watch how things develop for Facebook mmorts games from here.