Age Of Castles Review
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| Plays: | 2,337,495 |
| 5.0 (2,046 total) | |
| Our Rating: | 8.0 (1 total) |
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Summary
With some patience learning the basics, Age of Castles is an economic medieval turn-based game that will grab you as you steadily grow your castle into the mightiest in the land. Take special note, however, that playing it for free is the demo version. Once you reach level 5, you will be prompted to purchase the game for $6.99 their online store.
Objective
Its definitely nice to know what your objective is in a strategy game that you are playing, but you will not get any guidance in Age of Castles. Upon starting the game, you will be hurled headlong into the first turn of the game, with no help button or popup tutorials of any kind. Rather surprising to me, since this a very popular game on Addicting Games. Your goal is to steadily build up your economy of your castle so you can travel to new lands. Each land on the world map requires you level up your castle before traveling to the next one. Each new land presents stronger threats, and greater rewards.
Strategy & Gameplay
Your primary means of controlling the economy is selecting what proportions of your people do every turn. There are four vocations to split them up between, with each providing different bonuses. There are two ways to control allocation for these. By clicking on their portraits, it will auto allocate most of your people to that vocation, with the rest being allocated in lesser amounts to the others. Up and down arrows next to each also lets you directly control the percentages for each.
Merchants will provide you with a greater amount of gold during the turn. Clerics will increase your population. Builders will increase your castle size. Soldiers will increase your attack and defense strength when engaging monsters in the land.
In order to level up, your population must reach a certain goal amount. The fraction in the upper left corner shows you how close you are to leveling up. The greater your population, the more people that get allocated to each vocation to as you progress, making it easier to raise your money, population, and castle size more quickly. Of course, with greater population, comes greater expenses, which is where the importance of the merchants comes in.
There are some useful facts to keep in mind that control your economy. You gold capacity is equal to your castle size. So if your castle is at 230, you can only hold up to 230 gold. If you are at your gold capacity, and obtain more gold, you wont get to keep it. Increase your castle size when this happens by allocating more to builders. Castle size capacity is determined by population. The ratio is one person for every 2 castle. For example, if you have 150 population, you can have a castle size of no greater than 300. The purpose of gold is to sustain your economy. It is unclear to me exactly how this affects your development though. Running out seems to impede population growth. Creatures will randomly attack your castle. These enemies have lives, attack, and defense values.
If your attack value is not high enough, defeating them will be unlikely. Allocating a moderate percentage of your people to soldiers will raise your attack value and your defense value a little. Defense value is also improved with castle development. Defeating these enemies will reward you with gold and mana. Retreating will cause you to still lose people, and usually something else too.
The magic store has great improvements for your economy. Familiarize yourself with these so you know which to save mana up for. Most will not be unlocked in the demo, but there are still some great ones you can get.
As far as overall game quality, Age of Castles does a moderate job in this area. There is no music, at least in the demo. This would have added much to the game, almost being an expectation that most other free online games meet well. The absence of it here is noticeable. Sound effects for the battles get are too pronounced and repetitive. Rain and weather changes are impressive. The backgrounds and scenery details are excellent. As in other turn-based games, you should not be expecting thrilling visuals and animations.
What Age of Castles does to very well is pull you into a rewarding economic development experience. Leveling up your castle becomes challenging, yet fun to accomplish. Finding a balance for each of the demands placed on you requires ongoing attention and decisions to be made. In the demo, these do not get repetitive, but rather satisfying upon gaining the ability to travel to a new land. Its too bad that you have to spend money to play the full game, because the demo successfully peaks your interest.
Game Tutorial
On the official Age of Castles website, there is a manual available online that gives you some extremely helpful information on how to play the game.
Description
Build up your castle, recruit more workers, defend with soldiers, get merchants for more gold and expand.
Want to play Age Of Castles? You can find it at Addicting Games.