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.

Google Develops a Facebook Rival

If you like social gaming, then Facebook may not be the only platform that serves you in the future. According to this journal article, Google is investigating on the social gaming business, and is developing a rival to Facebook on social gaming:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703292704575393531040685308.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection

Social Gaming Is A Serious Business

Business are putting more money into and gaining more money from social gaming. I would like to share an article with you, published on CNET news:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20011946-36.html?tag=nl.e703

My City - A Very Simple Game

Sometimes I like really simple game, games that you only need to spend a few minutes a day. This can be fun.

My City is a very simple game that I like. What we do is we start with a city with no population at all, then we start to add citizens to it day by day, until you get a big city. Sounds boring, huh?

The fun is you can add different kind of citizen to it, depending on what is your city's current attribute. There are 7 attributes to a city: prosperity, safety, workforce, culture, science, entertainment and health. Each citizen you add, the citizen contributes to the attribute of the city. For example, if you add a hospital doctor to your city, you add +1 safey, +1 science and +1 health to your city. With different citizens added on and on, your city will build up with certain attribute and therefore develop into a certain style. You may have high entertainment and culture, but with low safety and health (like mine); or you may have high prosperity and high workforce, but with low culture and science, etc.

With different attributes to your city, different citizen will be available to your city, and some citizen will become unavailable. For example, serial killers come into play when your city have +10 safety and >= 10 population while hospital doctors disappear when you have > +40 health, etc. The fun of the game becomes trying to make some new kind of citizen available to you and so as to increase the demography.

You can also add citizens to your friends' city. The number of citizens that you can add per day to different cities depend on your population. The high is the population, you can add citizens to more of your friends.

Here is my city:
http://apps.facebook.com/virtualcity/526091044/default.aspx

Please come and add some citizen to my city, and I will return the favor to you~

Enjoy and happy gaming!

Why Facebook games are so successful?

Facebook games are growing very quickly these one or two years, from very simple games for simple social connection to very sophisticated one, with a lot of players. What is the reason for it's success?

1. Natural traffics - yes, Facebook is almost the most public website on the web. If you put a game onto Facebook, you are already potentially accessible by billions of users in the whole world.

2. Easy to promote - Facebook has its own very simple way to "Create an ad", and most importantly, it is cheap. When you create an ad through Facebook, then potentially billions of Facebook users will be able to see your ad and get interested into the game.

3. Integrated login - a game can use Facebook's login framework, i.e. a user just login into Facebook, and go to the games application, then he is already login into the game. This simple authentication process had reduce the user's reluctant to sign up a new account. He is naturally drawn into the game when he feels interested, without any concern.

4. Social network - of course! Facebook is a social network site after all. What is the biggest fun in playing browser games /Facebook games is, of course, playing with a group of friends. Sending gifts to your friends and getting gifts back from them; helping out in their game world; joining adventures together etc. are actually the biggest fun in browser games above all.

5. Word of mouth - most of the games will put a post onto the player's wall when the player is playing, or when gaining some achievement in the game. In this way, all of the people in this player's friends list will be able to see it. This had become a natural word of mouth network, and natural advertisement, that will be able to be trusted as it is found on a friend's wall. This would help the game spreads very quick.

What do you think are the other success factor for Facebook games? Please give your comments and share your idea~

The rise of FaceBook games

I have not been writing on this blog for some time, I really miss you all!

Besides really busy with my day job and daily life, I have been playing quite a lot on FaceBook games. I have thought of opening another blog specifically on FaceBook games. After some thought, I decide to put it to this blog as well. After all, FaceBook games are browser games, right?

The benefits of using FaceBook as the game platform is it contains natural traffics, and automatic free advertisement. If one of your friends is playing a game, you automatic know the game, and instinctively attracted by it, since you are sure you can play together with your friend. Then, quickly a network of players grow.

It had become a daily "ritual" for FaceBook game players to send gifts to friends who are playing the same game. In this way, both you and your friends grow quickly in the game, and it is more fun to share the joy with friends.

Currently, the most popular games are mostly Flash based simulation games: Happy Farm, Farmsville, Cafe World, Restaurant City, Social City, Hotel City etc. just to name a few. The fun of these games resides in receiving and sending gifts to and from friends, and visiting friends game world.

Do you also play FaceBook games as well? Which one do you like? Come and share with us~

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!

What makes a successful browser game?

There are more and more browser games built to the market each day. Some of them becomes successful one, while some of them do not and disappear into dust. Actually what makes some of them successful and distinguish with the others?

There are several criteria to determine whether a browser game can be successful, namely:

1. Overall game idea
2. Graphics and game play
3. Game community
4. Ability to make a player come back at least twice each day
5. The way to make profit from the game

The first 2: overall game idea, graphics and game play are just too obvious.
A successful game must have a great idea. For the vast amount of browser games in the market, some of them are quite similar. There are large amount of Travian clones or OGame clones out there. To be a successful one, there must be some new and amazing idea to make itself a different and make the players think that they are playing a new game.
Of course, for the technology nowaday, the graphic is very important. No one will like to stay on with the game any longer if the graphic is poor and cannot convey enough of the game idea and feel.
Surely game play is a very important criteria too. Whether the game is easy to learn, the player is easy to grow, whether the interaction with the game world is smooth, inter-player interaction is interesting...etc. is very important for people to like the game. Game balance is the most important too. Whether in the game world, the weak one can ever be catch up with the strong players; whether new player have a chance to survive when all the experienced players had established their character/base. This is always one of the hardest part to maintain in a successful online game.
In the next few post, I will talk one by one about the other ingredient for a successful browser game, which are actually equally important, if not more, as game idea, graphic and game play.