Last updated on January 17th, 2026 at 02:03 pm
Mother Of All Battles – Strategy Game Review
Mother Of All Battles is a Strategy/Board game from Sean O'Connor, first launched in 17th March 2011.
It’s rated 9+ and currently has 119+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Mother Of All Battles Stand Out
Conquer the world starting from your single home city. Each city can build units (either tanks, planes, paratroopers, bombers, transports, destroyers, battleships, submarines or aircraft carriers) in order to explore the world and defeat the other five AI controlled enemy players.
There's a lot of AI in the computer's moves and the maps are randomly generated, so each game is interesting and challenging.
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Mother Of All Battles is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 15th July 2022
Recent improvements include:
- minor bug fix for accidental screen touches at the edge of a screen
Download & Availability
Mother Of All Battles is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Mother Of All Battles 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:
Just like slay been playin for 25 years.
We loved this game when it was called Strategic Conquest. Played it incessantly back in the day. So glad we found this game for Mac iOS.
Im an old time Empire player starting around 1976 on a Vax at RIT. Later we enjoyed the DOS versions. Now Im enjoying it on our phone. This game has staying power and satisfies all our strategy game cravings.
We're hoping the developer recompiles this app for the MacOS and adds support for widescreen.
This is a great re-creation of the early Macintosh classic strategic conquest. However, it would be SO MUCH better if Sean OConner introduced a multi-player feature. Ideally that would allow you to find opponents on the Internet, but even allowing opponents on a local Wi-Fi would be a huge improvement. Ive played more hours than we would care to admit, but the artificial intelligence is just not as good or creative as a human player would be.
Wish it can let us save maps (eg maps we lost in) that we can replay again later. Also wish we can watch how we won/lost at the end of a game.
Hello, we are disappointed that you cant choose to have more than one human player in a game. Our son Hank and we would like to play a game where we each control our own armies, etc. And the computer play the remaining armies. We purchased for $10 your special generated game which showed a tile for selecting up to 6 players only to find out that was only for the number of computer generated players. We feel like we got ripped off and Hank is bummed. It sure would be cool and we think good for your sales to introduce a multi-human player option. Thanks for your consideration. Ross And Hank.
If this game is still being worked on please make everything free except the custom maps, If not then ill uninstall this game FOREVER. Great game btw.
As a great fan of the original Empire, it took a little bit to get used to some of the differences most notably a fighters turn ends even if the attacked unit is destroyed. The lack of a production list and the a inability to give units marching orders also creates a lot of mental overhead. The main issue we have is that periodically the AI goes into crush the human mode. Opponents ignore each other and focus on you exclusively. Their attacks destroy you in a single engagement while yours do minimal damage. Could be a great game, but instead its a swing and a miss.
If you like 4x games, this is for you. It's exceptional. We finally deleted it from our devices yesterday because we had spent hundreds of hours playing it over the past few months. It had taken over our life. But that's our addictive personality and it's not your problem. :) Frankly, we had the same problem with the original Strategic Conquest when we were a 23 y/o. We did all-nighters playing the game in 1989 and suffered the next day at work. Our only quibble is that there's no auto-forwarding of units, so it can be a little tedius moving every piece near the end of the game when you have a lot of them. Doesn't matter. The game is immersive and takes over your life. You dream about it and think about it when other people are speaking. Food becomes optional. 33 years later, and it still caused us to play all night and suffer at work the next day.
Love the game- reminiscent of strategic conquest on old Mac, but better. Would be better if there was a 2 player (human vs human) version.
We played this game for many years when it only had pc version. We are still playing it now but in iPad. However recently we found a bug which some cities are not able to produce army ( tanks) in custom map. Hope this defect is resolved.
Seriously!!!! We were redoing all our maps on the next difficulty up. We were almost done and the new update erased all our progress and the current map we were playing!! And its not restoring all our maps.
Love the new features, in theory. But game unplayable at present. Enemy units seem to skip moves. Enemy cities are ungarrisoned. Can't even get the upsell to work: can see the screen to purchase custom maps option, but unable to buy it. Any, glad the game is still being maintained/updated: great fun.
Being able to place units, citys, enemie units etc. Best turn base we have played.
This game is exactly what we were looking for, in terms of a laid-back but challenging turn-based strategy game for the iPad. The best part is that it is free! The beauty of this game is its simplicity, as it offers an experience similar to other strategy games like Advance Wars or Tiny Metal, with a very small learning curve. We are having a blast just building up our armies and navy to invade enemy islands and conquer the world. Don't pass up this gem. Pros: -30 starting maps, plus 300+ more maps that can be purchased -competent AI -naval combat -Fog of war -frequent developer updates Cons: -could use a grid overlay -infantry division units would be an interesting addition -terrain could be more varied (hills, passable forests, roads).
You cant go wrong. Better than the old Strategic Conquest IMHO. All of Seans stuff is great! Would love to see an End the turn option for when you just dont care what the rest of your pieces do. Have unmoved pieces treated like done.
The new worlds for each level are a welcome quarantine gift. Always a fun and challenging game.
Having had played Strategic Conqest since the mid 80s, we were very happy to find this game for the iPhone. The game is close to the original but lacks one huge element- playing against a human or multiple human opponents. Hooking up multiple toaster box macs through AppleTalk is what made the original so fantastic! This version is still a good time killer with the ai, but networking between humans is what really made this a challenging game.
This most recent update has made the game almost unplayable. Please fix it.
This has been a fun strategy game to play during down times. Unfortunately it seems like its not supported in the new iOS version updates.
UPDATE: we're happy to see another update. This absolutely our favorite game after years of playing it. They did an incredible job in improving one of our favorite games. Please make this a multiplayer gam so that it would make this the absolute best.
This game is, er was about an 80% clone of the old Empire, War Game of the Century. We bought all of the maps ages ago, and definitely recommend that you do to in order to really enjoy the game. However this new revision, we AM NOT a big fan of. Changing the game control locations was a bit confusing but we can adapt. Changing the way the game plays, specifically the fighters, absolutely NERFS out your fighters. No longer can fighters fly over mountains the way they ALWAYS did, even going back to the original release of Empire, and continuing through Empire 2 and the previous releases of Mother of All Battles, going back to when we first downloaded it almost 10 years ago. Yes, folks we have enjoyed this game for about a decade now, but this latest snafu really messes with the game mechanics. We may end up uninstalling it… How sad that a great game has to die like this… :(.
We like that U added ships and airplanes.reminds us of wwll.
Next version should have one computer opponent. Computer vs computer takes pressure off at the beginning. We win almost all battles on most difficult setting Higher cost for transports would also help gameplay.
The first two maps were fun, the third map was on very easy, we were placed on the upper left corner of the map and all the AIs attacked us instead of each other. The second go round on the same map, we started on an island middle left with only one factory, and all the AIs ganged up on us again. Is this part of the programing that the human player is the prime target for the AIs? Maybe the game designer should play Deluxe Empire (the game this one is very similar to) to understand how to make a game that is fun to play.
Reminiscent of the old Mac game Strategic Conquest. You will love it.
We used to love strategic conquest on our Mac. This game is close to the original, but as mentioned in other reviews, would be nice to pick the number of opponents. Also nice would be if the game kept track of how many days it took to beat each board, so that way we could play again and try to beat our record.
We were an addict of Strategic Conquest on the Macintosh 30 years ago. We do have a few suggestions to make Version 2.2 even better: 1. Have a city inventory list so the user can see what they are making & quickly make changes. 2. Provide a ruler tool so the user knows the distance between pieces/cities to accurately calculate striking range. It is frustrating when you think your bomber is in range and it falls short. To accomplish this, we suggest you have a Measurement button, that if clicked, lets the user click two squares and it will tell the number of squares between them. 3. Have the ability to attack an opponents city from a transport. 4. Have the ability to let the user determine the time it takes to build objects & what objects can be built for themselves & the opponent. This would make it so the user can determine their own skill level on a piece by piece basis. 5. Have a random map feature for those of us that play a lot and have memorized the existing maps. 6. Have the user possess the ability to save a game at various stages & return to that timeframe. This way, if a user makes a few bad moves, they can try again from a saved spot and make different moves. 7. Have it so planes dont change course on their own to fuel up. Sometimes we want to run a suicide mission and dont want pieces deviating from the course we set for them. 8. Provide an auto-play feature, so that when you have the game in hand, you can speed up the outcome by letting the program finish playing for you. 9. When you set a current destination for a piece, it should not stop unless it encounters enemy or reaches destination. It seems like we constantly have to tell the same piece the destination we assigned to it. 10. Make it so pieces that are on patrol stop if they encounter any enemy piece. This would give the user the option to attack the enemy if they want. Sometimes pieces ignore enemy encounters. 11. It would be great if the user had the ability to set specific patrols for any piece. For example, have a button called Destination whereby if you click on that button and then click on a piece and then click on the desired patrol square, that piece will go to that destination and return to the same square it was on when you set the destination automatically (unless it encounters an enemy in which case the patrol would cease). If a city is clicked after clicking the Destination button, then any piece that reaches that city will be automatically re-routed to the destination square. This would save a lot of time manually moving each piece every day. 12. Make it so ships that are on patrol dont go back to any square they have already visited during that turn (if possible). Right now, there are a lot of times where ships just go back & forth between two squares & dont cover much surface area. Also, ships on patrol should give higher priority to uncovering black squares to reveal the rest of the board. 13. Let the user determine the length of time an opponent attack is shown on the screen & blink the attacking piece a few times so the user can tell what is attacking what piece. When we play the game, lots of times we hear explosions and have no idea what piece is being attacked by what piece. Sometimes the screen doesnt scroll to where the attack is taking place, so we dont have any info at all. 14. When a transport touches land not 100% controlled by the player, it should automatically wake the armies on board. Lots of times our transport will be the last piece moved for the day, and upon reaching the land, we dont get the opportunity to unload the armies before the enemy starts its turn. 15. It would be nice if the program told you what kind of piece you were attacking in a city & if you were successful in destroying it. 16. Have it so a game already in progress tells the user what the skill level is. If we have multiple games going, we have no idea which game is playing on what level. Can you tell we play this game too much.
Great game, retro but good. Random map generator please.
Great version of the classic Strategic Conquest. Would have rated five stars except one increasingly frustrating issue. With large maps and sparse cities it is very frustrating trying to use bombers. You approach a city and one or two spaces before you detonate, it runs out of fuel and turns around with an almost guarantee to be shot down. A counter or vessel turning a different color with 3-5 spaces left to go would help dramatically.
It is just loading forever, we cannot purchase large maps.
Like many players of a certain age, we come looking for something that recaptured the vintage Strategic Conquest, and we wasnt disappointed. If the makers of this game are looking for ideas on how to make it even better, heres two: 1) the old Strategic Conquest allowed you to program where the output of a city would move – in other words, all the planes or ships made by a given city would automatically head for the front when they were built. This saved a lot of tedium on large maps in the later stages. 2) one of the most satisfying features of the original Civ we were the replay at the end – the small world map with the colored areas showing all the civs would play an accelerated recap of how each power had risen and fallen throughout the game. This would make winning even more fun as you watched how youd grown from a minuscule power to a world-dominating force.
Would pay for this app if it were multi-player like the old strat con on the Mac.
We LOVE playing this game, and will continue to be addicted to it, but we agree that there are a few features from Strategic conquest, that would be great for this. Definitely bring back the city production list, as that only seems realistic that any warring power would want to take inventory and scheduling on what theyre producing. Also the old game used to have a feature where, before you sent a plane flying or ship on a certain course, you could drag the cursor to a place in the map to see how many sections youd be traveling, or you could also set a ship sailing all the way across the world if you dragged that far. Also, as morbid as it sounds, we think you should bring back the future of being able to attack your own vehicles, as sometimes you need to clear something out of the way to attack an opponent.
Please provide a toggle for turning off the atomic bomb option. It takes all the fun out of building up & organizing an invasion only to have it wiped out.
Love this game. Play it often. But after the last update we're finding that there are entire games where no AI player builds battleships. That means we can basically casually romp them. We're not saying it happens every game but it happens about half the time. Please try to make another "slight improvement" to the AI.
The Ai is hard and we need a lot of days to make units and it needs a tutorial and the little worlds are not little there big to a noob eyes but its good but its better if its easyer for the noobs and the people who dont know how to play and #Kael the king.
Loved this game and played it all the time but recently added zoomed out map makes the pieces too small. Need to have a way to turn it on/off. Great game until last update.
We really Love this game and the addition of the little world map is fine but they also made the rest of the map quite a bit smaller. We think if you are on an iPad this will be fine but if you are on a phone (and we have a large plus phone) its too small. And unfortunately you can not turn it off as far as we can tell. So if you like the game the way it is and dont have eagle eyes Id skip this upgrade. Now… How to undo it and go back a version… Ugh.
Brings back memories of playing Strategic Conquest back in the early 90s! Missing a few features from the version we remember (being able to set patrol parameters rather than random) and isnt multiplayer, but has been a blast to play again.
One of the first games we bought for our old Mac plus it's called Strategic Conquest. It was easily one of the most addictive and compelling turn-based strategy games going. Sadly it was never updated to keep up with Mac iOS. This game is a wonderful adaptation of it for the iPhone. The only drawback is that once you get good, the AI will be no match for you.
Take another run at this and put patrol and auto load and finish by computer like strategic conquest. Love this game.
Don't have to have network to play! Play at your level, it will be challenging.
Love this game would love to buy more maps. Also how about random generated start positions?? Finally could we track how long a map took to beat..right now you just know if you completed it but the number of days to win would be cool. But really just more maps!! We'll pay a buck or two for that.
The game has many maps, and the addition of the option to end the game when conquering a certain portion of the map is also convenient. It might be an interesting idea to add maps which are almost all land, to enphasize ground type warfare. Perhaps one of those maps could also have a single small river with a few bases along it's route to emphasize geound warfare, but offer a strategic opportunity to supplement an assault with ships and resources. Oh, maybe another option where there's a chance the difficulty could get even harder (or their resources build twice as fast), and different colored teams merge together against the main player as they conquer more of the map. Maybe that could be a randomly generated thing. Still, a fun, addicting game.
Three stars for bringing back the classic Empire style game to iOS; there doesnt seem to be any other app that replicates the old style of this type of game. That said, the bad UI UX makes the game unplayable for us. Tanks also can cross water for some reason… Nice try though.
This is a great game for people that like strategy. It's simple and addictive.
Needs: 1) destination city for each city, so that when a new unit is created or arrives at a city, it is routed onward to another city. 2) patrol routes. 3) landscape mode. 4) random maps.
This is the single best game for killing the battery of our iPad that we've found. Absolutely terrific!! Would like to see more maps – Large and Sparse to bring the navy into play, or maybe a random map generator (input size, type, # of opponents, difficulty). MOB is super-playable, and lots of fun. Excellent and highly recommended! This is THE ONLY Empire-style game in the iStore worth having.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.8.1
- Size: 26.50 MB
- iOS: 10.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
- Developer: Sean O'Connor
Last updated: 15th July 2022 | Genre: Strategy, Board | Developer: Sean O'Connor