Gridlords: an auto-battler where your opponent does not need to be there

There is a word in Gridlords' description worth stopping on, and it is neither castle nor hero.

It is asynchronous.

The game enters early access today. No score, then, but the structure is worth discussing.

What asynchronous changes

In a conventional online strategy game, you wait. You look for an opponent, you wait for them to take their turn, you wait for them to come back. And if they quit halfway through, your evening is gone.

Not here. You build your fortress, you submit it, and the auto-battler system determines the winner against other players' castles from around the world, whether they are online or not.

Which means your move is your castle. Not an order during a battle, not a click at the right moment. You spend your time preparing, and the fight is the verification of your preparation.

That is a structure I find genuinely suited to people who do not have three uninterrupted hours. You play for ten minutes, you submit, you come back the next day to see what your build is worth against the rest of the world.

What is announced

A race and a hero. The hero brings their own abilities and, in the studio's phrasing, a personal philosophy, shaping how your army fights and survives. Relentless aggression or impenetrable defence, your call.

A castle. It is the heart of the strategy. You place buildings, unlock units, upgrade the fortress. The stated idea is to combine unit types, experiment with synergies, maximise your castle's strengths and reduce its weaknesses.

A ladder. The asynchronous PvP battles feed ranked matches where you climb.

All of it in fantasy pixel art, a presentation the studio describes as nostalgic yet detailed.

Who is behind it

Developed by Sphere Studios, published by Goblinz Publishing.

That second name is a useful signal. Goblinz has made a speciality of independent strategy games and roguelites, often demanding, often with real systems behind a modest presentation. It is not a guarantee of quality, but it is a publisher that knows how to read a game like this, and does not put out just anything in this niche.

The three questions I have

The depth of the synergies. Everything rests on this. If combining two unit types simply produces a numerical bonus, the game becomes a contest of who has the biggest castle. If a combination changes how a battle behaves, then there is a real creative space. You cannot guess which from a store page.

Countering. In an asynchronous auto-battler, you see the enemy castle after the fact. The question is whether you can learn from your defeats and build specifically against whatever dominates the ladder. If the game gives you a legible battle report, it is won. If not, you go in circles.

And race balance. That is the classic trap of this format. When a single assembly dominates, an asynchronous game ossifies faster than a real-time one, because everybody copies the winning castle and nobody has room to improvise mid-battle.

What I like about the idea is that it respects people's time. We have had plenty of competitive strategy games that demanded you be available at the same moment as somebody else, and plenty of players dropped out for that reason alone.

A castle you fine-tune in the evening that goes and fights while you sleep is an honest proposition. The question is whether building is as interesting as playing.

We will come back with a score once the ladder has lived a few weeks.

Ever built an unbeatable composition in an auto-battler? Come and describe it on the InsertCoins Discord, we will happily take it apart.