Welcome back, once again! I’m going to return to my guild for a bit, and then continue my reflective thoughts from last blog. At the end, I’ll also update you a bit on my Viking settlement!

Guild – Messages

I did, in fact, end up switching out of my guild. It turns out that doing so is actually somewhat difficult: I actually had to Google “how to leave guild in Forge of Empires” and use a wiki page to figure it out. I am not sure if this was difficult for me because I am simply not very literate in FoE guilds or if the game designers intended it this way. I cannot imagine any reason why the game designers would want players to stay in certain guilds; I do not see any gameplay differences between my previous guild and the one I am in now. Therefore, I am leaning towards my own illiteracies.

Another interesting note about guilds: once you leave a guild, you cannot return for seven days. Also, from what I can find, you cannot search for guilds; this means that if I did want to return to my previous guild, I would have to leave my current guild and then siphon through the “suggested guilds” list until I found my previous guild. I could probably also message one of my former guildmembers and ask them to invite me back into the guild. No matter which way you go about it, unless I am missing something, re-entering a guild is difficult. Why is it that both leaving and re-entering a guild is difficult? Just a question to ponder.

Anyways, back to the message boards. It turns out there are actually multiple messaging boards and centers. The messages that I was looking at in my previous two blogs turn out to be the guild “chat”, which is not active in my new guild. Inside the messaging center, however, there is another guild message board, as well as individual and group messages. I joined this new guild because the description said, “Wolf’s Den: Hope you will stay and participate. Sharing your needs and willingness to help.” Upon entering the guild and discovering the guild message board, however, I found that they had not been active since the end of April. These messages were simply players (somehow) sharing their Great Buildings and asking other players to donate Forge Points. After that, the only activity was people joining and leaving the guild. I decided to stick around for a week or so and see if anything kicks up. If this guild stays stagnant, then I will switch out and try another.

One new development in the genre of messages came in the form of a group message. I did not know that this was something a player could do until I received one, so that will be interesting to explore at a later date. The message I received read: “GB in the sticks if you could please help it would be appreciated”. Say what now? As you can see, other players shared my confusion. Thankfully, one of the more experienced members took pity on us and explained this cryptic first message: “This thread is used by players asking for help. As in adding [Forge] points (fp’s) to their Great Buildings (GB’s). In the sticks means that a Great Building has been started & [the] player is looking for help to get it built.” Thank you, sheepdog!

Reflection: Part 2

I covered a lot of ground last time around, so this time I would like to focus on the evolution of my strategy. When I started out, I was trying to balance both fighting and production. I remember thinking to myself, and I think I wrote about this as well: I’ve been playing chess for forever, I can figure out how to coordinate battles with different types of fighters, their strengths, and their locomotions! Boy, was I wrong. Negotiating and producing good quickly became my favorite strategy: I could start production of both supplies and goods before class, before I went to bed, or before I settled in to do homework, and then walk away from it. It is the virtual version of multitasking! I am able to advance my empire while I am away doing something else! I stayed vigilant with rotating my 4 hour and 8 hour cycles in order to match up with when I woke up, when I had free time, and when I went to bed so I could harness the most efficiency possible. Battling required me to sit down and dedicate a chunk of time to coordinating the fighters as well as continuously training new units after the battle ended. Instead of babysitting these processes, I found that the time I sat down to engage with the game was maximized the most when I focused on trading, rearranging, building, expanding, and researching. All of this could be done through my goods, and allowed me to continue to advance my city.

Even though I only have one military building, my military actually continued to grow. Through rewards chests and especially through the archaeology event, I unlocked multiple types of soldiers and military support characters from various eras and various specialties. This means that if I ever come across an area that I simply cannot negotiate with goods, or I need to progress quickly and cannot produce enough goods in the limited time, I have the ability to attack with a large arsenal of power. This is also exciting to me because I do not have any attachment to these units; if I lose them, it did not cost me anything to produce them in the first place, and I am no worse off in my quest than I was when I attacked. It is much harder to find chests and rewards with specific goods, so of the two, winning military units while producing goods has turned out to be a highly functional system.

Progress Report

Not much has changed in my actual town over these past few days. I have been producing plenty of goods, negotiating for areas in my continent map, and improving my settlement. I recently negotiated my way through another area on my continent map, which unlocked a reward land expansion! I added the land to the very south end of my empire; I have found the building new expansions along existing exposed roads allows me to maximize my space for buildings without having to build new roads. I am currently building a limestone mason on this new plot of land; after that is constructed, I only need the cloth mill to have all production buildings from the Bronze Age and Iron Age! I am currently researching the newest goods for the Early Middle Ages, so this timing works out perfectly.

Going back to the continent map for a second: conquering this most recent plot of land has now unlocked two large sections of the map! I am currently scouting one of the areas, and will scout the next area immediately after the current scouting. I like to have as many areas available to negotiate as possible, because this allows me to see all of the goods I need to produce or otherwise acquire all at once. Not only that, but sometimes conquering one region will give me a production boost for a good needed in the other area, so I am able to capitalize on that.

Finally, I am halfway through completing my Viking settlement. I recently built a “beast hunter” (far right) to produce horns, which is the third of four total goods able to be produced in this settlement. I am continuing to build runestones wherever I have the space in order to increase my overall diplomacy; if you remember from last blog, diplomacy is one of the gatekeepers for progressing in the settlement’s version of research.