Civilization World becomes boring towards later part of the game

After writing my last blog post about Civilization World, I had completed 2 CivWorld games, and is currently playing another 2. For one of the games, I had been one of the top 10 players.

Before I can come up with a strategy guide, I start to get dull with the game.

It is a big problem with the game design, that the game become dead slow towards the end.

One of the reason that the game gets dull is the lack of building type. Each attribute can be boost by some building - population by granary, production by lumber mill, stone masonary, iron smelt and factory, science by library and university, culture by theater and museum, wealth by bank and market. And that's all! In the original Civilization there are so many building with more effectiveness when you advance your science, like sewage system, stock market, coleseum, etc. and etc. and you can boost up your growth with all these new bulidings and science advancement. However in Civilization World there is no more new building after industrialization (factory is latest building you can get), and the boost is not effective even if you building another building of the same type. For instance, I had tried to build 4 granaries in a row, and found that population growth just increase to double.

So, with requirement to advance a technology increase exponentially at later part (something like 500,000 science to research communism, for example), while the science gain for each harvest is around 80, it takes more than 1 week to research one technology at later era of the game. The case is similar if you want to win with culture or wealth victory.

Therefore it becomes dead boring once you get through after industrialization, and everyday there is not much advancement in the game.

And the game usually ends later than 3000 AD (my last game ends at 3160 AD), which is quite ridiculous to me.

I hope 2K Games can make some improvement on this.

A First Look At Civilization World

Civilization World is a Facebook based browser game developed by the original developer of Sid Meier's Civilization. It was launched on 6th July, 2011. After some messy time of server congestion, now it becomes stable for playing as an open beta.

When you go into Civilization World, you must choose a game to join. There are several ongoing game to be joint. You can look at the game year, which indicates how long the game had started. It is recommended that you join an earlier game.

Once you have chosen a game to be played, you will be directed to your city view. You will be in this game until the game round ended. In your city view, you can start building your city. A tutorial will be guiding you what can you do in your city. What you must start to do is to build houses for your citizens to live.

There are several occupations for your citizens: - Farmers, Workers, Scientists, Merchants and Artists, each of the occupations corresponds to one important aspect of your city. Farmers are for collecting food, which is for the growth of your population; Workers are for the collection of productions, which are used for building your city; Scientists are collecting science, which is for your civilization advancement; Merchants collecting gold, which is for your wealth; and finally Artists collecting culture, which are for producing great persons for you and in turn is for building wonders.

Besides that, there are three important mini-games for you to collect extra resources. A maze is for increasing your science. If you collect enough science points, there will be maze steps for you to advance your maze, and once you success, you can collect extra science points. A puzzle is for culture, in the same way, once you complete parts of the puzzle, you can increase culture points. A road connection game is for collecting extra gold.

Once you understand what can you do in your city, you should start considering joining a civilization. Civilization World is a game that you cannot play alone, at least you cannot win alone. You must join other players to form civilizations. Players in the same civilization share technology and great persons to build wonders. A wonder must be completed by having great persons from different players in the same civilization.

This is a social game which you can win. The game is divided into ages - stone ages, bronze ages, dark ages etc. which can be won by a civilization as a whole by several ways:- winning enough battles, research of a certain technology, complete a certain amount of wonders or accumulation of certain amount of gold, which all are counted in your civilization as a whole.

This is quite an easy game when compared with the original Sid Meier's Civilization, while still contains the main ingredients. I like this game in a sense that this is a special kind of social game, which involves co-operation within a civilization and competition between civilizations, which has found a perfect balance between co-operation and competition.

It is a must-play no matter you are a civilization fans or a social game fans.

I give this game 4 out of 5 stars.

CivWorld goes open beta with server jam!

The long awaited Facebook browser game Sid Meier's Civilization World (CivWorld) had started its beta on 8th July. The feedback is huge and there are large amount of players trying to get into the server in a short period of time.

I am one of them :-)

I think 2K Games had not anticipated the enthusiastic feedback of the public, or maybe they are lack of the experience to handle browser games, the hosting server had soon go to its limit, and many of the waiting people are not able to get into the server.

Well, I am one of them too... :-(

I still have not a chance to try this out yet, but I anticipate that this would be a great game. I have been a long time fans of Sid Meier's Civilization series ;-)

I will give a review on this once I have a chance to get into the server and try this out. Stay tuned!

For more information, please go to the official Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/civworld?sk=wall

Terra Militaris Announced

Terra Militaris, an empire-building strategy game, is announced and will be launched at the end of 2010. This will be available at the gpotato.eu browser game portal.

From the announcement, looks like this game will have a hero system. An interesting idea which is not available in all the empire-building game is the idea of trade route and the spreading of religion to increase political influence. This idea has come from Civilization IV. It is interesting to see how these ideas are implemented in an browser-based online game.

Reference:
http://www.pcgamersworld.com/2010/08/browser-based-strategy-game-terra-militaris-announced/

Game site:
http://terra-militaris.gpotato.eu/

Mythopolis Opens Its First Alpha Test Server

Koramgames has just announced the launch of the first alpha test server for its brand new browser SLG game - Mythopolis.

Mythopolis - Where you decides the Fates of Gods and Men

This game is also integrated with Facebook, you can access the game with:

http://apps.facebook.com/mythopolis

Happy Gaming!

Top 5 Popular Empire Building Browser Games

I would like to compile a list of the most popular empire building browser based games in the web. Here is a starter, if you have something to add to this list, please comment to this post.

1. Travian - I guess this is the most popular medieval empire building game in the web.
2. OGame - The most popular space simulation type of empire building game.
3. Evony - Recently arising hit
4. Empire Craft - The one I like, with good story quest and hero system
5. Ikariam - Another famous one, treated as one of the original

Any more to add?

Empire Craft

Empire Craft is one of the browser based empire building game that use Facebook as a authentication platform, but does not belong to the genre social gaming.

Empire Craft is quite a typical empire building game, with all the elements you can think of in a typical empire building. You build up your resources fields, you build the building you need for various purpose, you advance your technology, you build up army and conquer other players etc.

However, there are a few things that I like that make this game different from other typical empire building games - quests, stories, use of heroes and private dungeons.

Empire Craft has a nice quest system. It got typical tutorial quests that guide you step-by-step to building up your empire. Besides that, the quests go into "advanced" stage as well. Even when you have build up things far from a novice do, the quest still guide you forward to building a strong and success empire.

More interesting, these quests contain stories. There are quite a number of neutral cities, which allow you to explore and provide story quests for you. This had made this game something different from standard empire building strategy games. This has given some favour of RPG into it.

The use of heroes is another point of interest in this game. Besides leading an army into conquering other cities, your hero can be the governor of your city, which helps the resource growth of your cities, and improve the defense and build speed of your cities as well. Moreover, there are private dungeons associates with the story quests as well, which you must use your hero to venture into the dungeons to complete the story quests.

Besides other players' cities, there are wandering monter armies in the fields for you to fight, which can help you get treasure and experience point for your heroes. These wandering monsters are associated with the story quests as well.

Finally, military ranks and nobility titles are something worth mentioning of. While you complete story quests and some associated daily quests associated with your military, you gradually improve your fame and ranking, and you can get higher nobility title and military rank. With this ranks and titles, more advanced story quests are opened to you and you can venture into deep level of dungeons.

These elements had made Empire Craft a much richer and interesting game than other empire building game.

I rank 5 out of 5 for this game.

Try it out and let me know what do you think!

Success with Browser-based Empire Building Games

Have you played Travian? Ikariam? Evony? Imperial Ages? O Game?

You notice that there are quite some similarities in these empire building type of browser games?

Yes, basically you start with nothing, with an empty city, or base, to begin with. You start with minimal resources. With this, you start your empire.

This blog post aims to guide you to success to browser-based empire building games.

1. Resource - yes, of course resources is the most important thing in empire building games. Everything need resources. Building need resources, technology advancement need resources, army need resources. Therefore the first priority is to build up your resource "mines".

2. Technology - most of empire building games consists of a tech-tree. It is very important that you have good enough technology advancement. Technology is important for you to have new buildings and army.

3. Army - no need to mention, you need a large and advanced army to protect your cities or bases; and you need your army to expand your empire. Always leave enough resource to expand your army.

The above 3 are things that every players know. Now comes to something more.

4. Guild - yes, join a guild, and make a lot of friends. In online games, you cannot success without allies and friends. Guild, and friends are your best support in the game. When you are continuously attacked by someone stronger than you, friends are the only way to help you out of trouble.

5. Raid inactive neighbours - no matter how well you build your resource fields, resource needed to build up your empire will never be enough. An unlimited resource is your inactive neighbours. Raid them at least daily to get the resource from them. This way you can build up yourself faster than others.

6. Spying - know thy neighbor, and thou shalt win. Upgrade your espionage building as high as possible. Most of the games provide you more detail spying reports with higher level espionage building. On the other hand, your enemies are more difficult to gain information from you when you have high level espionage building. This way, your enemies are hard to know how you are doing, and dare not raid you, while you know everything from them, and know how to prepare a war on them.

7. Expand - build up your second city, third city and so on as soon as you can. More cities means more resource fields, in turn means more resources for your building, technology and army, in turn, means success.

8. Complete quests - for those empire building games that have quest system, remember to complete the quests as much as you can. Quests usually work as a good guideline for your building sequence. Most importantly, completing quests comes with rewards, which means more resources for you.

9. Go online often - usually there is a cap on the resources you can store. If you do not go online for long while, all your resource reaches cap and there is no more resource growth. Go online often to use your resources wisely, to upgrade your buildings and armies.

10. Keep watch of the top list - you need to know how yourself is positioning in the game and how others are doing, so that you know how and where and how much to improve yourself.

Here is the top 10 way of ensuring success in browser-based empire building games, which are very popular nowadays.

Can you think of more? Please come and share with us!

Two Game Guides Promotion

Mafia Wars Blueprint by T Dub

Did you ever play the browser game Mafia Wars? Find it hard to ever make a success in the game? Here is the game guide that you may want. The game guide for this hot game: Mafia Wars Blueprint is offered by T Dub.

Evony Secrets Guide by James Ruben

Evony is another famous Medieval world empire building game. You build your city, you build your army and you conquer the world. If you want to have quick and big success, please try the Evony Secrets Guide as offered by James Ruben.

Please write us a comments if you like these products.

First Impression about Conrohl

Thanks Frank for the leaving a comment, and introduce us a quite nice browser game: Conrohl

I have tried it for a day, and found that the concept of the game is quite nice.

In some way, it is quite a standard game. Building up your resources, researching technology and conquering other planets. However, there is one concept of the game that I found quite interesting to me: leaders.

After building the academy, you can have your leader. You can have your leader working on some mission, gaining resources and experience. Missions are available once per hour, which make the player wants to come back to the game often. Also you will be able to train up your leader with variable skills which are useful for working on contracts given by other planets. Also, when you have more than 1 planet, your leader will be useful to defend and adminstrate your planets. I think the leader concept of this game is quite valuable and is a good point be explored and developed.

The game has a nice walk-through, which helps a lot for people to learn how to get started on the game. Also when you follow the steps of the walk-through, you will gain resources along.

One big drawback of the game: growth rate. Resources gaining is already very slow at the very beginning. Once you have gone through the walk-through, and tried out a few things, you already have run out the resources, and need to wait for another day so as to build other resources, building and technology. This would make the player easy to be bored at the very beginning, and lack the time and interest to explore the game on the very first day. I think making growth easier at the first stage of the game would help to keep players stick around and be addict into the game, before they feel bored and leave... this is my two cents.

Overall I will give this game a 3 out of 5 star rating.

Introducing SECT

Thanks Zloj for leaving a comments on my last blog post, and that had made me playing SECT for a while.

SECT is quite a simple Facebook style game. You played as a sectant, which you have 4 classes to choose: Fighter, Psychic, Contractor and Landlord. You gain experience point by doing missions and by fighting other sectants. Earning enough experience will earn you levels, with enough levels you can buy new items and new mission are available. You will also gain statistic point during level-up, which of course would make you stronger as you go. Quite a simple game and fun game.

To be successful in SECT,  you have 2 main directions to go. If you are a kind of static player and would like to avoid conflict as much as you can, you should focus on adding up your PHY and PSY energy when leveling, and stack up your defense when choosing your items. This will enhance you to complete your mission and avoid loosing battles when others attack you. If you are a kind of aggressive player and would like to fight others and gain glory in the game, you should focus on building up your stamina and HP when leveling up, and stack up your attack when choosing your items. This will help you have more resources to fight others, and win a battle during attack. Just remember not to go middleway, this will bring you nowhere...

The most important aspect for you to be success, is by inviting more sectants. You can do so by adding the sect codes of other sectants who are already playing the game. Also you can give your invitation links to your friends who are not already playing. By inviting players outside the game, you can gain credit points which you can buy some exotic items in the game. Here is my invitation link, or called widget in the game:



Hope you enjoy!

Zorg Empire launched! O Game gone?

Zorg Empire, a new space online browser strategy game, was launched on 25 Januaray, 2009. I was excited to give a new try to this game, and surprisingly found that it has exactly the same interface with the famous online browser space game OGame, with a little bit improvement.

I had stopped playing OGame for a while, and I was surprise when I go to what is the previously the URL of OGame - http://www.ogame.com - that the domain name no longer belongs to the famous space game. Looks like the domain name is bought by some domain name selling business.

The new incarnation of OGame - Zorg Empire - now appear as a brand new game, with restarted players and new community. I will play it a while too, and will update you all with new experience and news of this game. Stay tuned!

Legacy of Holy Castle: Disaster...

On the 15th October, Wednesday, The Legacy of Holy Castle had made major change to the game during the maintenance period. Here are the changes as announced by the admin:

The adjustments of The Legacy of Holy Castle:

1. Occupancy. Currently the winner of the attack will get 75% gold and 25% food within 24 hours from the loser instead of 50% gold and 50% food.
2. Units. The price decreases greatly for level 3 units.
3. Hero's quest. The experience from adventure will increase greatly.The gold and wood from adventure will be canceled.
4. Battle experience. The experience from battle will be adjusted to avoid some improper behavior.

Most of these changes had made this once nice game impossible to play, especially the occupancy rule.

Once your castle is occupied, your gold production drop to 25% for a whole 24 hour period. You lose the ability to rebuild yourself and is not able to attack others to gain back what you lost. This had made the game a boring game during these 24 hours, and easily make the player lose interest. After 24 hours, it is quite probably you will be occupied again due to the inability to rebuild. A player being occupied the first time would sooner or later quit the game.

The Hero's quest rule had made the occupancy rule worse. As before the patch, you can gain gold by adventuring which compensate a bit on your lost in battle and occupancy. Now you had lose your another ability to gain resources.

The battle experience had dropped a lot, which make your hero even more difficult to grow. This would make late comers even harder to catch up with the already top player, which separate the strong and the weak apart more. Weaker players will always be a farm and has no chance to survive.

I am deeply disappointed with the change in this once great game. If these changes are not reverted for a week, I would probably say goodbye to Legacy of Holy Castle as well.

The Legacy of Holy Castle Guide: The Importance of Formation

Never under-estimate the importance of formation in The Legacy of Holy Castle. For the same number of units that can handled by your hero and the same number of defensive building you have, how you place your buildings and your units is the only factor that you win or lose a battle.

My castle was attacked everyday recently and it is a very good chance for me to experiment with several defensive formation.
I tend to rely quite a bit on the usage of defensive buildings, especially the self-detonating towers, as they can deal quite some amount of damage to enemy units. Putting the line of self-detonating towers right at the front has the advantage that they can destroy quite an amount of enemy units right at the beginner, weaken them so that they can deal less damage to our units. The disadvantage is that if the enemy knows your formation, he can produce weak units with amount 1 at the frontline to take the damage from the self-detonating tower, which can waste your self-detonating towers.

That's the reason why I put a line of elite hoplites the front to take down weak units first, and allow stronger units next taken down by the line of self-detonating towsers.

Next are the ramparts and the arrow towers. Putting arrow towers right behind the rampart as the ramparts are extra strong in defense. When the enemy units take several rounds to destroy your ramparts, they had already taken up quite an amount of damage from the arrow towers and the archers.

Putting hoplites and self-detonating towers around your hero is important, as whether your hero survives determine the win or lose of the battle. These are the last line of defense, so that any enemy units approaching your hero should be taken down by the body guards.

This formation has proven effective for some time. It had an disadvantage though, is if your enemy is patient enough to give you consecutive attacks, your defense building will finally all broken down, and he can finally occupy your castle...

Do you have any good formation to suggest? If so, feel free to leave a comment.

Imperial Ages News: Gunpowder Age Launched

The Gunpowder Age, which is the second age promised by Imperial Ages, is launched yesterday.

Here is the requirement to upgrade to the Gunpowder Age:

• City Hall lvl 20 (in the lvl 20 City Hall you can make the upgrade to the second age)
• 2 Villages
• Population 600 minimum total for your account
• 30,000 Gold, 30,000 Iron, 30,000 Wood, 30,000 Stone
• 10% of the cost of all troops you have in your villages.

The resources needed for the upgrade is taken in equal percentage from all the villages of the player. The benefit of the upgrade is stronger troop which increases the speed by 1. Also they promised that in later stage there will be new building which increases the merchant capacity.

For a complete story, please visit the Imperial Ages Blog: http://www.imperialages.com/blog/