There is a paid aspect to the game, where if you are willing to spend real world money you can complete tasks faster and gain access to items and buildings that are far superior to those a free player may use. This should have been my first clue that I wasn't going to last all that long in this game. Some of the times you can buy are many times more powerful than the free items, so much so that it is impossible for a free player to even stay without shouting distance of a paying player. This created in essence two separate games, one for the free players and another for the paying players. The problem is the paying players still see and interact with the free players, they just get to roll over them whenever they wish.
This wasn't a problem for a long while, seeing as I didn't pay much attention to the PvP (Player versus Player) aspect of the game. I was only interested in building my city and making it look nice. My goal was to have the city remain looking like a city, functional and interesting, while still utilizing the best buildings and units I could.
Turns out I was one of only a few that had this goal. Most players were going for the "borg" type city where roads were barely, if ever, used and the only buildings in play were the very best. This makes for a very cluttered and ugly city but allows the player to get the most benefit for each square used. So I wasn't even able to compete with free players in regards to anything either, since I wasn't willing to do this. As such I simply went along my way ignoring everyone else and building what I liked.
After a while the developers were done adding content to the main city and they branched out to colonies.
The first colony was a port type location where landmass was restricted to only a quarter of the available squares. The available content here was quickly completed and I remained away from any military buildings due to my aversion to a borg building setup. Here is where another thorn in my side occurred. The developers released research that required real world money to unlock. Once unlocked everything inside could be used with game credits, but you had to pay up front first. Since I had no inclination to pay for this game, I was locked out of large swaths of buildings and units and as such this colony was barely used once completed.
Which lead to the last colony the developers released before I stopped playing. This colony was a military camp where the PvP aspect was in the foreground.
The goal here was to train units and then attack other players. Simple and easy to do, except I had two problems with the concept. First was that the paid buildings and units were ten times more powerful than anything I could create. Not the biggest of issues since those that paid would get so far ahead of me in a day or two that I wouldn't be competing with them anymore.The second problem was by far more aggravating. It took time to build each unit, and they get lost quite quickly when attacking. As such you need to replace the units all of the time and for someone like me that plays once per day, it would take me weeks to replace all of the units I lost in a single hour's worth of attacking. So I would have to build up my force for weeks, then attack for a couple of minutes and repeat the process all over again. I could see the game was quickly moving away from being a casual game and more geared towards those online all the time who could login often. That simply wasn't something I was able to do.
So that coupled with the fact that I wasn't happy about having larger and larger amounts of content locked due to my unwillingness to pay sealed my fate and forced my decision to give up the game. Don't get me wrong, it was an interesting game but it required more of a time commitment than I was willing to give. As such I redesigned my main colony to be a rural one, and then deleted the application from my profile.
