Thursday, June 12, 2008

Battle formations!

A while back (I don't quite recall....let's say March), I joined in with a bunch of coworkers playing a free online game called Ikariam. If you have ever play the great Age of Empires series, you will find this game pretty entertaining.

Basically, you join and are thrown onto an island. You need to start building your colony, gathering resources (wood on all island, plus a luxury resource of either wine, glass, sulfur or marble) and generally expand. You gather, build up your buildings, expand and research. In time, you are able to plant new new colonies to gather other resources as needed thru the game. You will find you need wood and marble to build, sulfur to construct your army, glass to research and wine to keep your people happy. At first, you are spending money to get this, but as you expand your cities, you can plant your butt on a new island with the resource you need, then just ship these goods as needed through your world.

Or - you can just build your army and kick the snot out of your neighbors and take what you need. That tends to be more fun. From puny, weak slingers (don't tell Goliath), up to gyrocopters, and from weak ram ships to submarines, this game has quick the range of military units to recruit and use in battle. You also can form or join an alliance for protection and coordinated butt whoopin'.

It's not real time, and you are really just the king of your towns, telling people where to go (mostly to their death), so it requires less active play time. Heck - by the time you are level 17, some things take hours or even days to upgrade. So you can just queue it up and walk away.

If you have some idle time a like to push people around (usually 11 year old kids in Poland), check it out. You can find me on the Eta server.

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