City Building Games

Lately I have been entertaining myself with a city-building game called Elvenar.

You can play as either a human or an elf. There are several worlds (or servers), and I am playing one of each. Because, you know, why not?

I started the elf city back in late March, and the human city a month later. In this game, you can play by yourself but it is very slow going. You need to trade and that is best done through joining a fellowship of 25 other players.

My fellowship in my elf city (which I named Arcadia) was small and out of sheer desperation, I began inviting other unaffiliated players to join us so I could have people to trade with. We had our numbers up to 19 players and then the archmage (the person who started the group) and our other top player (I was #3) simply stopped playing. Soon I was the #2 player. The lack of trades slowed me down considerably. No one else seemed to be playing as hard as I was, so last weekend, I dumped my fellowship. I spent a day moping about it, and redid my city so it would look a little less frantic, and applied to a fellowship that had a single opening but had players ranging in points from 180,000 to 101. (I am around 23,000 now).



My elf city, Arcadia

To my surprise, they accepted me, and I went in at #16. Three days later, I'm now at #13, having jumped ahead of a few players already. I intend to keep climbing, although the top players have been playing for over a year so I don't think I will beat them. I might catch them in points, eventually.

My human city (which I named Riften - Skyrim players will recognize that name) at this time is nearly even with my elf city, even though I started it a month later. I began in a young fellowship but the top 15 players or so work well together and seem to be doing great. I am #5 in that fellowship at the moment.

My human city, Riften.

City building cities have always fascinated me. I loved Age of Empires when it first came out, which not only was a city-building game but also a history teaching game. Civilization games taught me that ultimately corporations would rule the world - and it appears to be quite prophetic.

Anyway, these days you don't have to spend money to play games with all of these free apps. Of course they want you to spend money so that is why some things are hard, but with patience, you can move forward without dropping a dime.