Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 03:26 pm
The Battle of Polytopia – Strategy Game Review
The Battle of Polytopia is a Strategy/Entertainment/Adventure game from Midjiwan AB, first launched in 9th February 2016.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 15,121+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes The Battle of Polytopia Stand Out
“Pocket Gamer – Mobile game of the year”
The Battle of Polytopia is an award winning and unique turn based strategy game about controlling the map, fighting enemy tribes, discovering new lands and mastering new technologies.
You take on the role as the ruler of a tribe and attempt to build a civilization in a turn based competition with the other tribes. It can be played offline line. Perfect for traveling.
AWARDS:
"IMGA award for excellence in gameplay"
“Gold Winner – Lovie Awards”
MENTIONS:
"If you ever wanted the feeling of a classic Civilization game on your iPhone, The Battle of Polytopia is a worthy contender" – PCMag.com
“This brightly-colored turn based strategy game is difficult to put down” – Mac World
With millions of players, this game has quickly become one of the most popular civilization style games for mobile and has been acclaimed for its sleek user interface and great depth in game play.
FEATURES:
- Free turn based civilization strategy game.
- Single & multiplayer strategy.
- Multiplayer matchmaking (Find players all over the world)
- 4x (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate)
- Exploration, strategy, farming, building, warfare and technology research.
- Three game modes – Perfection, Domination and Creative
- Diplomacy – Make Peace treaties & Build Embassys
- Invsible Cloaks and Daggers for Stealth attacks.
- Mirror Matches (Meet opponents with the same tribe)
- Configurable map types – Dryland, Lake, Continents, Archipelago and Water World
- Wide range of different tribes with unique nature, culture and game experience.
- Auto generated maps make each game a new experience.
- Allow offline game play.
- Gameplay in portrait and landscape mode.
- Strategy multiplayer & Pass & Play.
- Leader board with top scores for the best civilization builders.
- Really Cute low poly graphics.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, The Battle of Polytopia is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 30th December 2025
Recent improvements include:
Fix screen sometimes freezing and/or flickering between two frames
Download & Availability
The Battle of Polytopia is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get The Battle of Polytopia on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
New tech which evolve from muskets, flintlocks etc into morden day firearms and vehicles (planes ATVs etc) But hey we thought your game is extremely fun us and our brother enjoy it and we thought this would be a new and exciting dlc.
Love the game been a fan of for years Hope to see more updates coming soon. We ask for more balance online timers getting 27 sec vs 5-3mins Hurts.
If you are looking for a strategy game that is easy get into yet has a lot of depth, check this one out. It is a civilization turn based strategy game with great multiplayer options. If you are looking for a smart game check this one out.
This game blows us away with the fun poly graphics, which we enjoy (though, some graphics are really cool, like the Cymanti tribe and literally every skin). When we first downloaded the game, we were WAITING for an ad to pop up thinking: Aint no way any developer would spend this much time on anything without ads, but as its FREE we were amazed at the quality of the game. To top it with a cherry, its pretty fun too, and there are various challenges within the game to best. Plus, if you enjoy it enough, you can pay an extremely low price and get another tribe, AND get multiplayer, opening a bunch of cools things to do. Its also not like its pay to win either, Bardur and Imperius are forces to be reckoned with, very powerful and competitive, for the insane price of 151.4 MB. This game is amazing, so please stop reading the reviews and download it :).
Polytopia is the best strategy game out there! Easy to pick up but unique where it is always fun.
Every time we get a high score and it shows on the high score list, our name will eventually disappear even though the score is higher than others and should still be displayed. This is very important to us because we live for this game. Sometimes when refreshing the lists on different days the scores can appear very low. For instance a tribe bottom 100 players score might be in the 20,000 range. Sort of annoying but Im totally hooked.
This game is great, love the idea and the gameplay, one suggestion we have is: expand the diplomatic options. By this we mean add a option to ask for or send a ally 5-10 stars, make special actions that increase your reputation with a tribe (something like, praise capitol that increases the rep by a small amount and costs x amount of stars), and a action to negotiate a peace agreement with tribes your at war with. (Costs the negotiator some amount of stars or units. Example: a negotiation would cost 5 stars and 2 riders where then 2 of your riders would then join their tribe. Bots would be able to negotiate as well , especially when they are near death). We understand if this would make the game to complicated, but it would be fun to see in game. Once again, great game and cant wait for aquarion update.
It would be cool if we could also get to choose which enemies we fight in a battle, and an ability to make our own factions with their own special abilities.
We truly love this game it is so detailed especially with the new DLCs for the tribes and how we can dominate the square (world) It is really a good game and the team at Midjiwan . But recently we noticed a small glitch where a unit will take a lot of damage and will begin to recover but like with a giant/juggernaut it will get to maximum health again, after that turn we will try to move them but the recover option will still be there, if we click that the health wont change and a zero will appear to show how much he recovered . But other than that we love this game and we are sure that this is just a minor hiccup. By the time you read this (people who may get the game the glitch will be fixed :).
The Battle of Polytopia, what a name. The whole game matches its greatness. The creators idea was insanely creative and it doesnt match any other ordinary strategy game. We are in need of great words to describe the brilliance of this playable. From the Tribes of War to the interesting Tech Tree, this application stands out. A lot of thanks to the creator for soothing our boredom. The game itself is amazing but the fact that you can play it with no Wi-Fi makes it better. We were playing it on the way to the airport. Kudos.
To be short, this game is fantastic. The design is beautiful, the music/sound is great, and the gameplay is fun. However, it feels a little short and lacking of content. We think this game has great potential and needs large maps, technology trees, items, etc. Looking forward to see what the developer brings next.
We literally love all that this game offers. Our only suggestion would be to add either another game, the same as this with modern technology or somehow integrate it into this game through the advancement of city levels. June 30th 2024 edit: still an amazing game. Been playing for years and wont stop! Few bugs recently with opening news it wont let you click out of that menu, and during the game it will unclick what unit youre about to move if you dont move it fast enough. Diplomacy suggestion, could we have the ability to ask allies to join a war or send stars to use, like aid in a way.
Quite literally the only mobile game worth your time. Have a few minutes, perfect. Have to wait an hour, perfect. Watching something and you get bored, you get our point. Genuinely, if you want a game to play anywhere, anytime. We cannot recommend this enough. Ive played this since it released, Ive played it on Apple and Android. With every new phone, this is the first app downloaded. The creator(s) know exactly what a phone game should be. They need trophies.
This game is so much fun! It is a great game to play with your family on a road trip too.
This game is the best one on mobile we have. It is super fun there is so many tribes to explore and its nearly endless. At some points the game can get repetitive but at the same time we always manage to find something fun to do. This is an awesome game! Just one thing, maybe you could make multiplayer free. We know its going towards supporting the game but we still would like to try multiplayer out with some friends and competition. Good game though.
We'VE BEEN PLAYING THIS GAME SINCE we WAS 1 AND IT'S BE SO MUCH FUN we HAVE ALL THE SKINS AND SO FAR IT'S SO FUN.
We love this game. We always wanted a strategy game like this and we love it so much. We wish the devs could let multiplayer have unlimited time for turns, which would be nice. And we would love a pc version and would totally pay for it after some more development.
Unreal how good and polished it is for a free mobile game.
Ive been playing this game for years and it still provides high quality entertainment. Our bf and we regularly play multiplayer together and he hates video games – thats how great it is.
One of the best strategy games we have found. We wish you could kick someone from a multiplayer lobby who is inactive.
You will never be disappointed playing this game. We have had it on every device for over 4 years. It keeps getting better with each major update. To the developers, you are among the best. To the users, you will not be disappointed.
The ceiling for this game is so high. Incredible strategy game. Imagine if you combined chess and AoE, thats what you get with Polytopia. Need more investment into the multiplayer experience, fix a few bugs, and this could be a staple of multiplayer gaming.
We love this game but please for the love of god put a No Cymanti button in the multiplayer rules interface.
We love this. We wish we could see more updates. Maybe add a campaign to it about each tribe. Maybe even a more open world mode. Our thoughts tbh. We really like the concept of the game.
We love this game. Its fantastic! Only one issue: When youre in a multiplayer game, if another player doesnt play, then the game gets stuck in perpetuity. We think this actually only happens when they have started their turn but not ended it yet. But it happens a lot and the player is not forced to quit so games get stuck forever until we resign (not preferable). Please fix.
Please fix live games. If youre not gonna nerf cymanti at least give us the option to not play against them, like in the offline mode.
Our fat fingers keeps messing up, we want to confirm our moved before our turn is up. Lack of undo button is beyond frustrating.
Theres a mechanic where it recommends moves that you can enable or disable, it basically just gives you a recommended move for every single building or troop with a move available one at a time until you use all your moves and it recommends you to end your turn. If you enable it, itll harass you into moving troops that you might not want to move. If you disable it, you can easily lose track of if youve interacted with everything we wish maybe buildings/troops you havent played with during the given turn would glow blue and then stop glowing when you use them. Would certainly make long games more organized.
It would be a great game if there wasnt a paywall. At first, the game starts you off with 4 only tribes, which gets very boring after a while. To get more, you need to pay a few dollars each. Its not much, but it is still very annoying because some people dont like to spend money on games, just so it isnt repetitive.On top of that, you also need to pay to play online. We honestly would rather have ads.Besides all that, we would say it is a decent game.
We understand this game is supposed to be more in the simple side, that being said though games like that dont do very good just to be honest. For a couple weeks this game is fun playing multiplayer and battling every bot on crazy with the smallest map. But after everything its just boring. Definitely needs more tribes or more innovation and skills and tech. Wizards, a battle ram like troop that does area damage with bad defense, maybe a submarine like naval troop. Anything really this game just needs updates monthly or some sort of addition and change its too dull.
About half the time the game cant connect to the servers.
Since the last update we cant play multiplayer:( feels like we wasted a bunch of money Like a year later and we still cant play multiplayer.
Id love to spend more than 20min playing but we just cant see ourselves doing it cuz the severs are broken and cant connect to them.
In general tribe balance isnt the best for 1v1. We mostly lose unless playing meta tribes. And spawn rng, especially for weaker tribes like Xin-xi Is killer.
We had previously left a 5 star review, but after the past few updates, we felt the need to drop it down to 2 stars (and debating on 1 star). This use to be a fun game, but the past few updates have all but ruined it. From nerfing troops/ships to restructuring things, its made it more difficult to win, even on easy. And the area of attack by ships makes this a very frustrating game to play. This is another example of people in charge taking something great and fun and turned it into something frustrating and annoying. Truly sad!! Up to this point Ive bought all the new tribes and most of the skins, but its very safe to say, we wont be spending another dime on this game. It would be nice if they introduced a classic option that would allow you to play the game before the recent updates.
This is a very great game 10/10.
Our friends and we love this game and hope to add chinese lanuage in the future.
Its a great game really fun game play but its pay to win. Any tribe you pay for has really busted abilities and its no fun playing online because someone always dominates the game with it.
This game is really fun Ive been playing it all the time now but a small nitpick is the limited amount of tribes you have access to and also how you need to buy more tribes in order to have more tribes Against you if you could please Atleast give the ai the ability to have control over the factions you added like the kickoo and the hoodrick so players could see how it changes gameplay before buying it.
Stop making skins and make new tribes and skills in the skill tree.
Im not liking the new update. You nerfed it too much for sea combat. It cost 15 for a battleship but it only does 3 damage. A catapult costs 8 and does 4 damage. And, it takes two shots to kill both, most times. Can we meet in the middle? You took the fun out out of this game.
First, the most annoying thing about this game: we misclick on a unit almost every turn. Theres no way to accurately select tiles when too much is going on on them. Even Apple Pencil doesnt help. We unintentionally move units to wrong places all the time and theres no way to revert it even though we havent done any additional actions after that. Developers, please take unit movement seriously. We lost a battle and now we dont feel like continuing what was a pretty good match until this point. Besides this UX issue we love the of the game! Its a rare find where awesome ambiance, relative simplicity, and strategy come together. So far is also seems to be balanced pretty well. And its one of the very few good ones that arent pay to win or subscription access.
We need Chinese. We've been playing for many years and we really need Chinese.
Its an amazing game but the latest update taking away aqua farms is but a good game in all we also thought if theres Boats but why not any planes? You could build hangers on mountains and split the game into two layers with the sky and ground, plus you could have a button or to go back and forth. If you fix this we would give it 5/5 stars.
We wrote that it needed to be harder awhile back and yall sure did improve it. Its a great strategy game.
We love this game alot the only thing is new features that will make the game more interesting and fun to play. Please add new features like being able to set our own time on custom multiplayer and nerf the tank unit to at least 35 HP. And add more fetures and units tech tree and not just a tribe that cost money like a DLC please this game is amazing it could be so much more amazing.
Please release a larger map size, especially now that youve done work on both the tech tree and tribe skins to increase variety.
This is our favorite game. It has changed our life. We once was sad, but discovered this game. How happy our heart is now. It sings with joy and love. Only advice we would give the creators of this amazing game is allow players to have color options. Id love to have red, white or black dragons to choose from! Overall.. Heavenly game. Praise be.
Love the look and feel of this game! Very fun to play with friends or by yourself, especially challenging when you choose to unlock all civilizations and put them on a tiny map. So many ways to play all of which you cant go wrong if you like strategy. Suggestion: we mainly play on Massive maps with all civilizations. The continuous tapping of members to move them up one step at a time, turn by turn from the back line / already secured region gets quite tedious and leads us to turn our screen off and save for later rather than doing the round. We suggest to add a waypoint type movement, where you can select a member to go across the board and they will move turn by turn to the waypoint without user interaction(similar to civ). Maybe highlight a different color to note they have a waypoint // no need to manually move. Would make it a lot more fun and faster paced in our book. Thanks Polytopia team, love the game.
We appreciate that you made a fun strategic game, but we find it illogical that you would have to pay for multiplayer, because not all of us live very close to each other and have the time or opportunity to even play this strategic game that takes A LOT to finish, and online is the only option we have.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.16.1
- Size: 194.44 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PT, RU, ES
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Midjiwan AB
Last updated: 30th December 2025 | Genre: Strategy, Entertainment | Developer: Midjiwan AB