The latest free online game I have been messing with is Travian. Think of it as a simpler version of Sim City or Civilization: one village (to start), build up resources, make buildings, raid your neighbors. It plays slowly, but there is a 3x speed server. I am told that it is not so slow once you are into the raiding game, since you have your resources and those of your (potentially inactive) neighbors.
Tobold played for about a month. Looking ahead, I can already see myself going through the same progression, except that I have some fairly aggressive neighbors already (Ha! Eat my cranny! Wait, that sounds wrong…). Neat little toy, but will it hold my attention for long? Wars of conquest over other players rarely excite me, and I am sure that others have far more time to spend on this than I do if I wanted to be competitive at any point.
It is kind of hard to get that romance started when you can see the break-up coming. Is it fun to build things that you expect to fade with no closure? I lack even the illusion of permanence. I am still playing around with Rule the Seas, for some reason.
: Zubon
Zubon,
What server are you on? I have been meaning to give this a go since Tobold’s journal last year and just sort of forgot. I’ll roll my village on your server and we can pillage and burn togethr if ya want.
I can appreciate that feeling of wanting to quit before you start. Each time I started WoW up again, I’d be like, “This is fun, but in 60 levels, it’s going to be raid after raid,” and then about two weeks or a month later I’d cancel, even tho I’d already have a character to 30 or 40, just because I didn’t feel like getting to the end game and being disappointed. Now that they’ve knocked the raid sizes down and emphasized the dungeons again, I’m having pretty much no problem staying engaged. I’m sure in an update or two, the big thin will be the new raid they’ve put in, and myabe I’ll part ways again, but for now, it’s all good.
I made a village on 7, then on that 3x server once I hit the wall of “oh, I’m supposed to play for 5 minutes a day?” I don’t know which I’ll stick with (for a while), maybe both.
The problem with these games is it just takes far too long to do anything… then when you get to do something it is against someone that has been around for a year and totally wipes you off the map. Then you just become a farm for them until your account times out.
I tried Travian and gave it up after a week. I usually enjoy these sorts of games, but Travian was just way too slow for my liking.
I am Cyndre on Server 1 and the 3x server. My wife is Abryn on the 3x server.
I was rather stunned by the speed of the 1x servers… so what to do today.. ohh update cropland from 1 to 2… ok wait until tomorrow? WTF
So you can imagine how devastating it would be on the normal server to have someone destroy a few buildings. “It took me a week to get those resources!”
Reminds me of the Starknights game. There are multiple levels of tick speed, so you can play games with 1, 5, 15,60-minute ticks (at each tick, planets produce, ships get move points, etc.)
I played there some, then realized I wasn’t around enough to play speed games, and not patient/skilled enough for slow games. Plus 13-year-olds in England were killing me.
At my most pathological, I was logging turns in the morning right before work, coming home over my lunch hour to shoot up pirates and raid, then logging in right after work to try and get the most out of the speed games.
In a fit of “WTF am I thinking,” I have set both accounts to delete after mailing my stuff to random people. Those merchants will never make it home. If I had a way to delete the Pirate, I might. I am not yet sold on any other games, so I have no idea where I am going. It’s kind of freeing.