The Shrine

I know some people play wargames so I recommend this one on mobile. It's your typical wargame genre but it's got pretty good balance. Your max army size, stamina, troop hiring speed, and resource generation cannot be meaningfully increased by spending money, and the level cap is fairly easy to reach. Now people with money will have stronger leaders, but it's not like Gandalf the White can fight 5 level 50 Gandalf the Grey, or even 2 of them unless you've a favorable troop matchup. You also have to stage your troops from either a fort or your settlement so if you find where they're staging their troops from you can knock out the staging area and even if it's at a considerable loss they wouldn't be able to move anybody for quite a while to reinforce the positions.

The game's objective is to capture the ring plus 3 faction capitals (your own counts) or until a predetermined time has elapsed, and then the season is over and you start over on a new server. You can also quit your faction until the step before Dol Guldur can be sieged to join another one of the same alignment so if your side is doomed you can jump ship to a stronger one, though if your entire alignment is losing bad you're pretty screwed. Still, since the winner only needs to capture 2 more capitals this means even while losing if you hold your own capital you get the second best prize at the end of the season (biggest is ring + 3 factions, then ring, followed by holding your own capital, and obviously only the faction with the ring can have either of the top two prizes). On the new server everything starts from scratch but you keep your commander and their influence (basically talent points), items and any enhancement they may have had, so those are the long term power. Your guys go back to level 1 and you start with nothing so in theory you can get a fresh start if the last season didn't work out. Right now one of the really dumb thing is that heroes do not transfer across from alignment, so if you're on a good faction the previous season and you move to an evil faction you start with nobody. It's probably not intended that you have Gandalf while being a bad guy but I think they should just map heroes so that say if you had Gandalf you now have Saruman if you're on the evil side. It might not be an optimal mapping since the heroes are unique but at least you have someone so there might be an incentive to play a different alignment than the one you started from. Hopefully they'll do something about that in the future.

There's also no shortage of dumb things people do. In my server the Elves have like 3 layers of forts surrounding Dol Guldur before it can even be sieged, not that it'd matter since like 2 guys inside there out of the 50 would probably wipe out the entire attack force at this point in the game, but I guess people are planning ahead, or something. I'm on server 17 elves and our side seems to have a pretty runaway advantage. The Rohan and Isenhart seem to be already dead as I assume all their players quit or defected to another faction after being dealt a crushing defeat by us like 3 days into the server start. I'm sure if we wanted to we can siege their capital right now except the level 50 static defenders are way too hard to be defeated at this point (they're same strength as the defense force for Dol Guldur). In fact as is right now since elves also control the region where Dol Guldur is all we have to do is wait until people are high level enough and then we should have an easy win taking the ring plus 2 capitals, unless everyone else all gang up on us.

So my faction, the elves, have conquered Dol Guldur and since capturing the ring is the primary criteria for winning the game, we've been fighting the rest of the server for like 2 weeks now. I don't know if it's the first season but they didn't announce when it'd end so it's kind of tiresome to fight everyone else continuously. Now there's also a winning criteria for conquering enough land, so normally if you're like the #2 you want to betray your own alliance to conquer enough land since you almost certainly won't be taking it from the #1 faction, but the #1 faction has no reason to deny you this criteria (they'd definitely already enough land to get the criteria) if they hold up to their bargain. However, in our server either people are too delusional to think they can take the ring or they think they're too weak to even betray enough allies to get the 20 regions needed because I think the most anyone else has is like 12 while elves have 28.

This game has a pretty good balance between powerful spenders and not because stamina cannot be bought, so no matter how much money you have you can only attack a fixed number of times, and even there, it's not impossible to hold back a powerful spender especially if you got the right matchups. Now you can never see what troops your opponent brings, not even if you have a spy on the other side (it'll just show the hero) unless someone's saw that unit fighting something they have, but you can still make reasonable guesses to what or who they likely bring and plan accordingly.

Sounds like my kind of game!

Although, one question, since I’m super busy until like Christmas… how time consuming is it? Like how often are logins required, how long are play sessions?

Well, traveling in this game is in real time, and you can only move to tiles that's immediately next to your faction's lands. Your town/fort has a 50 tile radius, and it's about 20 minutes for a slow moving unit like Dwarven Guardians to walk 50 tiles. Horses can do that in about half the time. You usually won't be moving that far, and in friendly land you can just queue up everyone to move somewhere very far and come back later to check. You regenerate 20 stamina every hour and you can have up to 150 stamina with the max ring tech, and it takes 20 stamina to make any move.

In the early phase of the game you obviously want to maximize your stamina usage since you'd just be conquering land from trivial defenders so each additional move you make is extra resources coming in. Though in friendly land you can just queue up a bunch of 20 minutes moves if needed and come back later to check since there's no danger for exposing your units like that. You usually won't be traveling that far anyway.

Once you start fighting players, though, it obviously does no good to have movement but no troops, so it's no longer about never missing any excess stamina. Now, fighting players could require constant attention to, since you need to know when to pull out and when to push forward, but unless your faction has a 24/7 maintenance, someone also has to leave the troops out there to defend critical areas so you could do that. It's dangerous to leave your troop outside unattended, but if nobody does that then the other side can simply plow through undefended territory uncontested and that'd be bad. It can be quite time consuming to deal with an active player since that guy will be running away when you try to chase after him and it can be a game of cat and mouse.

You can switch faction to the same alignment (e.g. elves to dwarves or men, but not evil men). You lose all your land but I think you keep everything else. There's like 300 servers or something so it can't be that hard I'd think to find something that at least looks playable.

I think elves are actually kind of weak after playing them but they're generally a favorite so there's no shortage of players there which is like having extra power itself. Gondor seems by far the strongest faction because Marshals match up well even against stuff designed to kill them, and it's complete blowout if they caught you without some kind of pike.