These discussion topics worry me.

[Gargoyle Girl]

I have been playing this game for slightly less than a month now. At first, it seemed like a good game, and I was enjoying it, but now it's begun to severely slow down in many ways that I don't understand, and I've been driven to come here in order to see just what's going on. What I'm seeing is not encouraging.

A lot of the people who have played this say it's a terrible "pay to win" kind of thing... and my play experience is making me think this is true. I find myself unable to research the skills I need in order to advance myself any further, yet unable to complete quests or engage in any kind of combat in order to increase my level. I don't have cards to use, and though I've spent money, it was only to open up the queues for building and research... neither of which I can do anymore. I'm honestly about to report this game as some kind of scam, as it has narrowed down to my having to pay my way to the next level in both of the towns I have going.

Is the game really this bad? Are you supposed to be able to get overrun so easily? Are so few people playing it?

For example. My first town is up pretty high; many resource and food buildings in place. I have some scouts, and... that's about it. I can't defeat even wolves in a fight, and I can't command large enough forces to really start a fight in the first place. My castle is still wood; enemies just walk right through it, basically. The town is almost pointless now, as all that is happening is people are working... for no obvious reason. I'm not gaining resources, or gold, or anything.

My second town is worse. I thought I would start a new one in order to use what I had learned from the first one to make a better town. Instead my town is now in the influence range of no less than 7 wolf lairs, an enemy base camp, two AI towers and more. And my parish has disease going on, with the owner apparently not around to do anything about it.

What's going on?

[The Chaos Dungeon Master]

In 4 months, I have been conquered once and I am a knight, I have a wooden castle and no archers, no one attacks me because I am part of the winning houses' lead faction and I have a friend crown prince 9 villages and 3 parish capitals around me, all you need is to suck it up, blunder forward blindly, yet told your doing it wrong, and then learn how to play and get your extra villages. That is what I learned in the 2 weeks I have recently played since being inactive BUT my friend still protected my castle as I came in like once a week to make sure I was still counted active. I have spent 0 dollars on the game and would plan to if I was earlier in the game, I am about to conquer a village and then spread my army of pike men around to actually help my faction. My other friend got pay to grow people to send him resources and he may have 2 villages and slightly farther in tech but I am a whole ran ahead of him and my village and castle are more developed, as I focused on food and production and let myself get raided by AI early on because I was making so much stuff it didn't even matter.

[MazmjlobeimOutlaw]

Did you not look at the strategy guides? They do help. Like some have said on here, research everything for stone fortification at the beginning before you rank up to high. Second, this is a game where you have to socialize with people. Other players cannot read your mind you have to ask for help. Hope this helps.

[Mikells]

Personally I subscribe to the honour route of early gameplay. Just forget the military tree altogether-ish. Research Tools, Forestry and Quarrying to max as early as possible to give you the resources and decreased build requirements as you can. then build as many quarries as your recources/stone availability allows, and woodcutter huts all along the trees.

Stagger a few points in mathematics as your research time starts getting out of hand. Research scouts until you unlock Horsemanship for the scouting speed, then max out the speed. # of scouts and foraging capability isn't important yet, because the goal is the beat the nearby players to the ? piles within your honour range. Each is worth ~500 honour, and gets you levelled pretty quickly.

Research the food tree until you can build all 5 of the lowlands food types (everything except fishing, essentially). Max out everything in that tree except bakery, brewing, butchery and fishing. Keep your food at max, build about 3 of each type around your granary, an inn and about 5-6 hops breweries around it, and keep ale consumption at max. For honour gains here, keep your tax at 0 or the lowest possible income (no bribes or you bust).

And always, ALWAYS research arts, literature and decorations as soon as they're available and place those buildings at absolute closeness to the hall. Houses don't need to be locked in on the hall, which is the mistake I made my first run through on a world other than the one I'm playing now. You only need them at a distance that gives you 2 more than you have industry running.

Once you've got that sorted, stockpile and granary research points about 3 a piece, markets and merchant speeds asap. That should set you for honour, as long as you're making sure to grab those ? piles before your peers.

Not a carder and doing pretty well for myself this time around by doing that. Been on Europe 2 for about 4 days and already halfway down the Alderman rank just from scouting ? and keeping my taxes low. Though, the true challenge of a non carder, even a non premium token player, is the wait time for research. Much worth it imo.

[dr46onfusion]

Messaggio originale di Civ Forever:

Ok, it's somewhat true. This game does have a built in rl monetary system but it's not pay to win, it's pay to grow. This is a very important as you can be in on the winning without investing much in the game besides your time but the play style for free to player players differs from "carders" or paying players.

First off as a free to play player you need to focus on your economy, forget the military aspect of the game with the exception of building and fortifying a castle. Since you will not be using cards to boost your production you will need to use research. Max at least 3 types of food initial research and move on from there, max both wood and stone techs, and most importantly, max tools.

You see what you are doing here is creating a center of industry in your village and it will be quite self reliant. For honor generation you need to make sure your popularity is high as possible. This means feeding all food types if possible, max ale rations, all entertainment buildings and deco buildings. You also need to research arts research whenever it unlocks in the research tree.

Banquets can also be used to boost your advancement in rank, but can be a hassle because they require different village types for all the different goods. For now ignore the quests, the quests cater to a "carder" player build, it wants you to focus mainly on army and scouts.

One very important thing to remember is that the game slows down after the initial two weeks, you will make new ranks slower, learn techs slower, build buildings in your established villages slower. This is not a mistake, the fast pace draws players in but it is false, while you may make the first 50% of overall ranks in the first month the remainder will take you 3/4 of a year to attain.

This is an epic paced game, don't get discouraged, if epic pacing isn't your thing then go play a FPS. I'm sorry but in SHK things take time.... especially for a "non carder". No sorry, buying premium tokens don't make you a carder.

I too am on world one, I purchased crowns twice to unlock my 14 free cards per week. I have 14 villages, 6-7 parishes, and a county.

Remember, easy as it is, don't blame others for your shortcomings. If you are not good at the game it's not the fault of the game company.

Just stick with it, no, you won't be leading the head house (at least not for a year or so) as a lowbie low investment player. That is not a problem in this game, I'd much rather be left out of the politics of the officers/generals in a faction. I've been there and it takes away the time you have to actually play the game. All of a sudden you are spending 2 hours every day just sending mails to other players and brokering deals for your faction/house. The politicians in this game do not have much time to actually play it.

Hope this helps

The fact that you buy card packs, with cards having huge sets of abilities depending on rarity, means it's possible for someone to drop a ton of money and be ahead of the group. Now imagine this being a faction of paying players?

That and premium giving you 5 slot queues is a huge advantage... Who's going to login to the world and build 5 buildings exactly after one another ends after 2:30 hours?

Auto-scouting isn't a big deal, until you have like 5-6 villages with maxed scouting capabilities, not to mention paying for constant 3x scout speed and capacity meaning you'll steal the stashes sooner and in greater quantities, oh and this is a mmo so you have like 10+ other people in your faction or region doing the same thing.

Auto-reinforcement is the biggest game changer mainly due to how villagers are recruited and how you have to manually assign them. When you let unemployed villagers stay in your village, they eat up food and gold, and will give negative popularity if their number builds up too much. Auto-reinforcement resupplies the troops without letting your villagers go up too high, but for a p2w player, they just gotta buy cards to add villagers, it's relatively cheap given how much money one booster pack is.

Also, the developers rewards winners of the maps with booster packs that are rarer, and the 'more' faction member in the house, the more card packs that are distributed.

So what say someone who makes like 10 accounts for the sake of this game?

Also: There's a freaking card that instantly completes research, expensive, but someone with deep pockets won't mind.

[Mikells]

I get your concern there Kai, but that's not necessarily the status quo. The most I spend on this game is enough to remain in premium for the auto scouting and the build queues. I don't go buying card packs through the wahzoo, and I gotta say that I don't think I do too badly. Sure, there are plenty of players shooting ahead of me because they're dumping $100s on card packs ... which in my mind makes absolutely no sense since I bet 9/10 of those same people whine about how hard it is to stay on top of their bills, but go figure, but not being a card junkie doesn't mean you fail.

As for your point about someone making multiple accounts, I guess it's possible if they have multiple machines. Friend of mine had three accounts running for about 3 days on the sly before he had all three closed for doing so. Not saying that there aren't people out there getting away with it, but the people running the game are keeping their eyes out for that kind of exploiting.

[BloodiedChrome]

cards arent the be all and end all, if you think you can buy victory, go for it...but if your not experienced then a technically superior opponent (or group thereof) will hold you in an "even" contest to grind off your money until you stop spending then destroy you ...

[Strygald]

Player A - recall/repair castle infrastructure, play 5x castle build speed card, play 6hr castle construction card, play 6 hr castle construction card, woot! 60 hours of reconstruction done in 10 seconds! play 1.5x stronger towers card... NEXT ATTACK WAVE SUCCESSFULLY REPELLED!

Player B - naw this game ain't p2w... RESET!

[BloodiedChrome]

powerful defense but v costly...it wouldnt stop me getting in, mainly because the flawed assumption is that youd survive the first assault and even whereas thats the case, your spending like £30 an attack whereas im throwing peasants...its not a sustainable defensive strategy

[Strygald]

you'd need 100s of catapults to bust through 3 layers of great towers while being shot at by 10 ballistas and 100s of archers in defense, as well as being burned by dozens of boiling oil pots.

using peasants to take down such a castle in 1 wave? don't make me laugh...

[Greywolf74]

Its called money vs. patience. If you aint got the money then be patient. Your post strikes me as "Im not leveling fast enough cuz I cant afford cards so the game is unfair" type post. Cry me a river.

[Jared]

You can rank up really fast with the right research.
Arts , Decorations and honor buildings really rank you up quickly.
Just need to think outside the box brah.

[Defender04]

Hi all, I will pick on one of the most important things in the game and that is banqueting. When you get into a faction ask who are the big banquet players and do they help the smaller players to rank up if they do then you will be ranked up very fast. So what I do is ask a player to put a village near mine and do research on Hall capacity or I have to go back and forth a millioion times. Its very effective and once you are ranked up then you will have more villages / resources etc.

Dont get discouraged by players ranking faster as players have different levels of money they can spend its more important build a castle and get a LL that will give you 360 archers and 40 pike as with 360 archers up anyone that scouts cant get a report and if you are in a faction then less of a issue but some players stay neutral and thats daft as you become food for all.

In the end its about team play but as with every battle in game and in real life you have shock troops that make a big impact then the body that populates and provides small arms fire to hold and kill the enemy mid ranks. As was stated previous if you dont know how to fight does not matter how many cards you have you just waste them.

[Veritas]

Hm...
I don't know how things look on English servers, but the German community is very helpful towards new players. Started playing after 9 months of absence (so all my villages got deleted) and hence had to start all over again. Like 5 hours into the game I got poked by a fellow close to me, asking me if I'm active. When I told him that I recently returned he immediately sent me over ressources and weapons to help me out.
Overall I found it a lot easier to start all over again now, thanks to all the ability points I've spent before stopping for a while. Note: Investing into the religious / popularity trees helps you out a lot
With the popularity you get more villagers incoming faster and you can increase your taxes later on without fearing that your villagers will run away. The religious tree helps you out massively if you're in a hostile enviroment thanks to all the different abilities you unlock, e.g. you can make yourself immune against attacks or increase the popularity in a zone :)

Sorry if some terms in this comment seem a bit off, I'm playing the game on German, hence I'm trying to "freely" translate the terms I'm used to :)

[Errol Flynn]

Technically the game is P2W. However the more you learn the more you realise that payment is by no means necessary to dominate other players.
I have had fairly average players throw cash at me trying to wipe out my villages only to fail miserably.
IMO there is not much need to pay in this game once you understand it.

[*Swat*|KryTeK|*SurvivØr*]

I wouldnt define this game as pay2win, i feel like the money spend only speed up things. Ive been playing for a long time and dont really a problem with premium