Goodgame empire strategies upgrade#

Rather than real-time battles, multiplayer in Castle Siege is asynchronous. To add insult to injury, even finding other players to fight costs resources, and the expense increases as your city grows. As previously stated, soldiers are good for one use only, and when you raid other players, you'll just about break even - at best. Fighting other players is a way to earn resources, but it's not a particularly good way. There are two ways to fight: skirmishes against other players and campaign missions, of which there are a whopping 10. Unless you micromanage every single squad, expect your axemen to engage in a suicidal charge against a castle while your swordsmen destroy a particularly menacing farm and your crossbowmen cheerfully stand around getting mowed down by cavalry. Units move and attack automatically, and never work with any kind of cooperative instincts. After all, what's the point of building a well-balanced attack force and directing each unit with meticulous precision when a victory-by-numbers suicide charge works just as well with just as much (or more accurately, just as little) reward?Įven when you get into battles, there's not much fun to be had. This makes building an army a joyless, monotonous task rather than a strategic pleasure. One must assume that in the world of Castle Siege, soldiers are highly excitable and, like Sherlock Holmes without a mystery to solve or enough cocaine to subdue a bull hippopotamus, spontaneously combust outside of combat. Castle Siege resets your army to zero after every single battle - even if your Napoleonic tactical brilliance spared the life of every swordsman, archer and siege engineer under your command. Remember that bit about needing soldiers? Well, you're going to need them, and you're going to need them more often than ever before. It was either that or wait approximately two days for everything to finish. While building up my city in the game's middle stages, I spent every last coin within 15 minutes. To give you an idea of how quickly the game encourages you to cough up dough, I had about $10 of gold provided by Microsoft to help me review the game. Require an army sometime before the soldiers are ready for veterans’ benefits? Pay up. Need some food and wood to meet the game's exorbitant resource requirements for structural upgrades? That'll cost you some gold. Want to finish building that cathedral before Islamic warriors sweep across the Middle East? Fork over some cash. Gold is the game's all-purpose 'speed-up' currency, and gold microtransactions are attached to literally everything in the game.

While you can earn a paltry amount by making war with other players or constructing roads, the best way to get gold is to fork over your real-world valuables to Microsoft. In addition to food, wood and (later on) stone, there's one more resource to collect: gold. Still, there are good and bad ways to ask players for money, and Castle Siege has some of the most manipulative schemes I've ever encountered. You need to pay to get ahead more quickly.Ĭomplaining about microtransactions in a free-to-play game is always tricky, since making games is costly and the developers have to recoup their expenses somehow. If you're wondering why the game places such draconian restrictions on the fun bits, the answer is simple: to make money.

Goodgame empire strategies upgrade#

Constructing a whole new building can take up to a day - and of course, you can only construct or upgrade four buildings at a time. Upgrading a building might take half an hour. As you get past the tutorial phase ofCastle Siege, training units takes three to five minutes. That means that everything you do takes time - and not the few seconds to a minute that buildings and units usually required in previous installments. So far, so good, but remember, this is not a traditional real-time strategy game: This is a free-to-play title. Earn enough resources, and you can bring your civilization into the next Age, which gives you access to new buildings, new technology and new types of soldiers. When you get enough resources, you can build military structures and recruit an army to wage war on enemy towns. You start with a limited number of resources (food and wood) and construct mills and farms in order to gather more. To be fair, the game looks a lot like a traditional Age of Empires experience, at first blush.