Cubed3 recently had the opportunity to chat with Christian Lövstedt, the CEO of award-winning developer Midjiwan, to discuss flagship title The Battle of Polytopia, which will be celebrating its 10 year anniversary in February 2026. The Battle of Polytopia is a 4x strategy game, designed with mobile play in mind, bringing a genre predominantly played on PC and consoles onto smart phones.
With more than 20 million downloads and an active esports scene, The Battle of Polytopia has a dedicated community that enjoys its more streamlined approach to the strategy genre, combining fast and straightforward gameplay with the resource management and game planning depth expected of the genre. The game is currently available on iOS, Android, PC and Nintendo Switch.
Cubed3: To start with, could you tell us how The Battle of Polytopia first came about?
Christian Lövstedt: Midjiwan’s founder, Felix Ekenstam, created it as a personal project. He was looking for a minimalistic, turn-based strategy game that he could play on the go and could not find one anywhere he searched. So, he resolved to make it himself. Then when he shared his early build with friends, it turned out there were other people who also wanted the same thing and so it spun out into a much larger, commercial product.
Cubed3: The strategy genre is not one that usually fits the mobile game model, due to how long games can take. Why was mobile the platform of choice for The Battle of Polytopia?
Christian Lövstedt: Mobile was always envisioned as the default platform for The Battle of Polytopia, as back in 2016 it was the best platform to make a game designed to be played while on the go. After all, everyone has their phones on them nowadays!
Cubed3: What considerations did Midjiwan make when designing The Battle of Polytopia for a mobile setting?
Christian Lövstedt: Felix played a lot of Civilization when he was younger and he found that as the series added more content and options in each subsequent game, the overall experience got slower. He wanted to make a game like Civilization that was much faster, but still kept the tactical gameplay the genre is known for. And faster games are easier to pick up and play in short bursts, which is ideal for the mobile market.
Another factor is the UI. The original idea was to make a Civilization style of game that would work on a small screen. One of the considerations we had to make was finding the right balance of visible information and what could be hidden away in menus. It resulted in a clean UI that didn’t confront the player with too much information all at once.
Cubed3: The Battle of Polytopia’s simplicity in game and visual design has given the game a reputation for being a good entry point into the 4x genre. Was that always a goal you had in mind for the title?
Christian Lövstedt: I’d say it was a byproduct of many of our core game design principles. We believe in the benefits of streamlined game design, making the mechanics and interfaces of our games approachable and intuitive, without sacrificing depth. This is particularly important when developing mobile games, due to the smaller screen space and wider adoption by more casual, and non-gamers. By cutting down on unnecessary systems and focusing only on the core elements of the 4x strategy genre, we naturally made a game that was easy for newcomers to the genre to get into and enjoy.
Cubed3: How has Midjiwan tried to keep a balance between keeping that simplicity in-tact but adding more depth and variety for long-time players?
Christian Lövstedt: The design philosophy behind The Battle of Polytopia was to be easy to play but difficult to master. The game’s simplicity came about from not wanting to confront players with too many complicated choices right from the start of play. In fact, we avoided including a lengthy tutorial in the game for this very reason. We instead wanted to embed learning directly into the gameplay itself.
The depth and variety that more dedicated players experience comes from the game’s strategic complexity and replayability. The Battle of Polytopia offers an infinite number of replays and a large pool of in-game tribes, each starting the player with different units and skills unlocked. Player strategy depends on what tribe they’ve chosen to start a game with, but also what tribes their opponents have chosen as well, which you won’t learn about until you discover them on the map. That requires some flexibility to a strategy, which provides further variety and depth.
Cubed3: Early next year, The Battle of Polytopia will be celebrating its 10th anniversary. That’s quite the milestone! Do you have any plans for the event?
Christian Lövstedt: Our plans are still being decided, but I’m sure whatever we decide on, we will make it a major event for our community. For now, our focus is on our currently running eSports event: the Polytopia World Championships, which has a $10,000 prize pool.
Cubed3: Where did the idea to run a tournament come from and how has it been organising the whole event?
Christian Lövstedt: Polytopia has always been a competitive game, it just felt natural to run tournaments for it. We’ve run successful events in the past with Challengermode, but never to this scale and so this time we wanted to take it to the next level. We also wanted to celebrate our player community by hosting a championship that is available to players of every kind, not just professional esports athletes backed by numerous sponsors. It fits with our philosophy of approachability, to allow any and all players of different skill levels to enter.
Actually organising and hosting the tournament has been a real breeze, thanks largely in-part to our partnership with Black Molly Entertainment, an eSports organizer. Their abundance of experience managing other world championships, like the Geoguesser World Championships, has been extremely helpful for us in making our own eSports tournament a success.
Cubed3: The tournament is still actively going on as we talk, but what has been your biggest takeaway or surprise from the event so far?
Christian Lövstedt: That we got so much interest in the championship! We’ve run tournaments in the past and they’ve always done reasonably well but never to the scale we are seeing now. The qualification rounds started in September and we are still getting thousands of new registrations every weekend.
We also put together a limited number of tickets for players to come and watch the finals in Stockholm this coming December, and based on the community’s initial reaction we already know that there is a lot of interest in these tickets.
Cubed3: It’s impressive to see that the community behind The Battle of Polytopia is still going strong. What has Midjiwan done to help foster this community?
Christian Lövstedt: The most important thing we could do: continuously improve upon the game. To keep players engaged with The Battle of Polytopia, we’re always considering what new content we could add and where we could improve. But, it’s our philosophy at Midjiwan to be very cautious when adding or changing things. We rigorously test new features internally, in our team of six, and then with a small group of hardcore players for further testing before releasing the content publicly. One new feature we released earlier this year was the Weekly Challenges, which let players battle on the same map for a week to see who could get the best score.
We are very strict when it comes to adding new content. We might come up with lots of ideas, but on average we scrap 90% of them. It’s important to have the courage to “kill your darlings,” even if the team has already put a lot of work into them.
We also frequently interact with our community on platforms like Discord and Reddit, and listen closely to their feedback, although we will only implement a community-requested feature if we like the idea ourselves. We never feel pressure to implement every change that’s requested. I think this is understood and it hasn’t hindered our ability to produce new content for the community to enjoy.
Cubed3: One aspect of the game we’ve seen the community enjoys are the different Tribes players can battle as. Could you explain the thought process that goes behind deciding which Tribes get added to the game and how they differentiate themselves from one another?
Christian Lövstedt: The tribes are a vital part of The Battle of Polytopia. It’s one of the aspects that our community loves the most, so of course we have to be very considerate when adding in new tribes to the game, as well as new skins for those tribes. We ensure that every Tribe added fits the established lore and the gameplay. To achieve this, we iterate everything we do many times and test it carefully with the community before making it public.
It was much easier at the beginning, of course. When Felix was the solo developer, he got to make all the decisions, but now we all have to be very mindful when implementing a new tribe. Each new tribe needs to feel different from the existing ones, aesthetically and lore-wise, as well as have a distinguishable gameplay idea that makes choosing them different.
Cubed3: Do you have a favourite Tribe yourself?
Christian Lövstedt: Right now, I prefer to play as Solaris, a skin for the Polaris tribe, because of how it transforms the map. Otherwise, I would say it’s the Hoodrick tribe because with them I get to start a game with archers, making it much faster to inflict range damage on my opponents.
Cubed3: The Battle of Polytopia was ported to PC in 2020 and Nintendo Switch in 2022. What hurdles did you face when bringing a game designed for mobile to more traditional gaming platforms?
Christian Lövstedt: The biggest challenge in porting is ensuring the game works well on a new platform while maintaining the same core experience. We expanded to multiple platforms to reach a broader audience, and cross-platform play is vital for the multiplayer aspect of the game. The game’s low-poly art style has also made it easier to play on multiple devices. The simple yet deep core game design also helps it translate well to new platforms.
My main advice for developers considering a multiplatform release is to plan how your pipeline will evolve if your game is successful enough to warrant porting. It takes a lot of effort to manage game maintenance across multiple titles. Every new update becomes more complicated since it has to work on multiple platforms. Our team has been able to handle this by staying small and focusing on a single project for a long period.
Cubed3: The game is on Nintendo Switch but not on its competitors, PlayStation and Xbox. Is there any specific reason the game didn’t come to those platforms?
Christian Lövstedt: When it came time to begin porting it to other platforms we had to think really hard about which platforms to focus on first. With every port we release, we need to spend more time and money maintaining and updating the game so that every version is the same. As The Battle of Polytopia was designed as a mobile game first, the Nintendo Switch made a lot of sense as a platform to port the game to, as many of the same game design philosophies are shared between it and mobile. Both platforms also have a similar core playerbase.
Cubed3: We’ve seen many Nintendo Switch games receive Nintendo Switch 2 updates this year. Is that something you might consider for The Battle of Polytopia?
Christian Lövstedt: We don’t have any plans to share at this moment in time, although we do believe the mouse controls offered by the Nintendo Switch 2 would lend itself well to a game like The Battle of Polytopia.
