Playing strategy games without murdering your battery

Strategy and tower defence games can be surprisingly heavy on a phone, especially the ones with lots of moving units on screen. A long session used to leave my battery gasping.

The biggest win is capping the frame rate if the game offers it. Sixty frames looks nice, but thirty is plenty for a turn-based or slower tower defence game, and it makes a real difference.

Lowering brightness and turning off background particle effects helps too. Many games hide a 'performance' or 'low' graphics mode in the settings that most players never touch.

Also worth knowing: idle games and colony sims that run simulations in the background can keep working when you think they're paused. Force-closing them between sessions saves more than you'd expect.

None of this is dramatic, but stacked together it got me a couple of extra hours of Colony Tide on a train trip.