by Anonymous Anomaly

Created on: May 21, 2010

Having never played an online massively multi-player game before or a strategy empire-building type of game since my childhood, I was actually very excited when I saw SquishyCash offering ten cents to sign up to a site called Empire Craft. I proceeded with alacrity, and eagerly began building my capital city. My instant impression was that the graphics were extremely plain, though they have since been altered. It raised my fears that the game would match this rigidness, previous experience with strategy games had left me tired of there way of confining the player to just one possible successful strategy. To a very large degree this is true of Empire Craft - success is determined much less by intelligence and creative thinking than effort and investment. In Empire Craft, energy trumps genius, without question.

You begin by choosing the your name and the name of your capital which must be no longer than six letters, and the most common name is ‘city’. A more important decision to make is the Race of your empire, with a choice of Orcs, Humans and Dwarves. Orcs make better fighters, Dwarves better city-builders and Humans between the two. My choice would be Orc, because you can catch up with the more efficient builders over time, and have an advantage in war remaining. There are four resources that you use to build buildings and soldiers - wood, stone, iron and food. Players usually begin by using the beginning rations to upgrade their sawmills, quarries, mines and farms to ensure faster accruement of these resources, simultaneously building their granaries and warehouses to ensure they have adequate space to hold these - lest they be wasted. Later in the game most of your resources will come from raiding local cities but to help you find your feet for the first seven days you cannot raid or be raided.

You should be constantly building, and you should time the more time-consuming buildings to be built overnight. When you are deep into the game buildings will take days to build, if you don’t time them correctly you will waste time. More than once I have gone to bed regretfully at 11 because I mistimed my schedule; if a building takes 146 hours to build, my mind is normally to tired to realise it will mean staying awake until one o’clock, on what will hopefully not be a workday. Most buildings are not really more important than each other, but some need to be built before you can build others that you want to. Priorities of players may vary,

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