From a humble town to a great kingdom decide the course of your Empire.
Build your city and armies then sweep across the land.
Play with or against your friends as you take over the world.
You start with a small village in the stone age, with nothing but huts, by using research points you unlock new technologies that allow you to build new buildings as well as advancing you through the ages. Every hour you receive a new research point and you can also purchase them with gold if you want to hasten your development. There are many technologies to unlock and the need for multiple points per technology makes town development rather slow which can be a bit frustrating.
Town development is pretty simple, there are three types of basic resources to collect, residences generate gold in fixed intervals according to their type while in the supplies production buildings you need to choose which supplies to create, each type generate a different amount of supplies and has a different production time, allowing you to monitor your supply production according to your needs.
Once the resource is ready to collect you have to collect it manually, and if you use the basic gold generating buildings which generate gold every 5 minutes it requires constant watch in order to collect them right on time. This makes the game a bit annoying until you can switch to better houses that will take longer to create gold, but they also make less gold overall.
The third type of resource is population which is provided by your residences, every other useful building requires an amount of population in order to be built. You also need to keep your population happy by building decorations to increase their morale, add enough moral boosts and your population will be enthusiastic and will generate additional resources, but if your population is unhappy then your production will suffer.
Some buildings allow you to train army units, there is a limit of 5 units you can train of each type, which is reasonable in the Forge of Empires combat system. Combat in Forge of Empires is rather unique for this type of games and is similar to the combat systems of games like Heroes of Might and Magic. You choose which units you want to use in the battle and enter a grid in which your forces are on one side and the enemy is on another. Each unit has different stats which determine their movement, damage, defense and terrain bonuses. Each troop has a turn in which you can move it on the map and attack enemy troops if they come in range. The combat system is pretty well designed, in order to minimize losses you need to use tactics and good positioning as well as using the right units to counter the enemy composition.
Most of the battles in Forge of Empires takes place on the world map, where you’ll find plenty of sectors you can conquer. Each sector will give a special reward and sometimes grant you access to unique valuable resources such as marble and stone which are used in certain aspects of the game. You can also interact with other players by buffing a building once a day or attack them and plunder their town if you win.
Forge of Empires is rather different than other strategy games with it’s hands-on approach on resource management and combat, but the game feels so slow which can take some of the fun from it. There aren't many quests to do and it seems like most of the time passes by waiting for another batch of resources, units or research points.
There is a lot of dead time between collecting resources and since you need to constantly be online in order to not lose resources, the dead time is noticeable and annoying. Even though Forge of Empires has some good features, they are overshadowed by it’s boring parts, making it a game for hardcore strategy players who don’t mind it’s slow pace and progress.