Online Game: Castle Age

Recently I've gotten involved in a Facebook application named Castle Age. It's a realtime text-based game centered around the medieval age. In this game the player is king and hires soldiers and buys land as well as equipment for the soldiers. The main point of the game is to complete a series of quests to reap the rewards given as well as engage other players in combat. Players can choose which aspect they wish to concentrate on however, as neither combat nor questing is absolutely required.

A player has a certain amount of health and energy available to them, and these regenerate over time. The energy is used to complete quests, a certain amount is necessary to attempt a quest and a quest needs to be completed a certain amount of times before the player may move on to the next quest. This is called gaining influence in that quest, and the player needs to reach 100% before they can move onto the next quest.

Health on the other hand is used only when battling another player. This can be done in one of two ways, either invading or dueling. Invading involves bringing your entire army to combat the other player, winner takes all. Conversely dueling is a one on one fight between your general and the other players active general. After each fight both sides lose a random amount of health and if either reaches zero that player is "eliminated". Being eliminated doesn't affect the player more than making them lose six experience points. A player can be eliminated multiple times with no derogatory affects onto their account.


Personally I'm not so interested in battling strangers for the off chance I can steal some of their gold. Instead I only concentrate on completing the quests and building my defenses to repulse invading armies from my kingdom. As a result this means I level my character slower than others as I'm not gaining experience from fights and only from quests. As this game isn't really a race, this is fine by me.

To this end I've invested some of my stat points into Energy to ensure I can perform multiple quests at a time. I wanted to make sure that I could leave the game for extended periods of time and not have to worry that I lost energy, so I plan on having 120 Energy total that means I can be gone for ten hours with no ill effects. All of the rest of my stat points go into Defense, in the attempt to win more battles than I lose when defending. I am willing to retaliate against those that attack me, but if I can't when I notice the attack, if the other player is too low in health, then I ignore them and continue on my merry way with questing.

Overall the game is pretty entertaining, and not too much of a time sink. In the beginning one is forced to login often to use up the small store of Energy that accumulates, but as stat points are put into Energy logging in becomes a less frequent occurrence. It is a fairly quick game however, as after a month of playing I have completed four of the five currently available quest areas. The last one should take two months to complete but with no reward at the end isn't something I have to worry about much. So as long as I don't concern myself too much with my battle stats or win/loss ratio it is a decent distraction from time to time but not something I have to feel is taking over my life, as I am rather limited in terms of what I can do in the game.