I suggest you start up with building your city, build buildings that let you recruit troops to your army. It’s important to get a decent army as quickly as possible, as this will help you when travelling around the world map looking for resources. Later on you also want to upgrade the other buildings in your city, like the magic tower, town hall, market, arena, etc. If you’ve played Heroes of Might and Magic before you will learn Castle of Heroes really quickly, and I think you will really enjoy it.

Once a day when playing you may visit the windmill on the world map to get resources. This building is not defended and you can get 200 to 400 resources each time. You should also visit the Water Wheel to receive 2000 gold, it is not defended either. When it comes to scouting I suggest using only one hero for this hero, and equip this hero with a lot of scouts. He will be able to move quickly around on the map. You should try to level a few heroes up to really high levels, since a higher level hero will be able to have an army of larger force. Your cities can have an unlimited number of one unit type in a slot, but there are only ten slots total. I will write more in detail about this game in another article soon.

You start out having to select to join one of three companies, and you are friends with all other players inside your company. You could compare it to horde and alliance of world of warcraft, apart from the fact that there are 3 factions in Dark Orbit and all fight against each other. You start out with an introduction to the game in form of quests you have to do. This is a very common way for browser games to teach new players how to play.

You control your ship both with your mouse and the keyboard. I found the controls quite different to get used to at first, and sometimes it is hard to see what is really going on cause of pretty poor graphics. Eventually your starship will get drones beside it, and with many ships shooting in the same area with drones and everything the whole screen will be filled with laster shots, bombs and explosions.

Dark Orbit is a PvPvE game, and your PvE enemy is all the alien ships flying around in the galaxies. The aliens are very weak near the home sectors where you start out, and they increase in strength as you move further away from home. There are lots of sectors in the game and a pretty large area to explore. Levelling is done combining alien griding and doing quests, and leveling is fairly quick. In several quests you have to PvP as well. As you gain levels you can upgrade your ship, get better weapons and other useful items.

The money in the game is in form of credits and uridium. You can make credits just playing the game, killing aliens, etc. Uridium however, you have to buy for real money, and that’s how BigPoint make money of the game. To get the best ships and weapons out there you have to spend quite a bit of money on the game.

Overall Dark Orbit is a pretty cool game to spend a few evenings with, but I don’t think many players will find the game interesting week after week. Out of the 30 million players I believe less than 5% are active players. The graphics are also not great, really ugly at times to be honest. Also, once you are done leveling there is not that much to do in the game.

What I really enjoy with Ikariam, apart from the beautifull graphics, is the way the world is set up with lots of islands. Most browser strategy games only uses ground units, but in Ikariam you have a whole set of naval units in addition to the standard combat units. I also enjoy the way battle in Ikariam goes over several rounds instead of just being finished in an instant showing the result in a battle report. Big battles can go over several overs, with lots of players bringing in reinforcements on each side.

Another good thing for casual players in Ikariam is that farming isn’t as heavy as in most games of this type. You can attack other players, but the number of ships that you have severly limits how many resources you can steal. There is also something called the bashing rule stating how many times you can attack a neighbour within a given time frame. Overall Ikariam is one of the best massive multiplayer online browser games in my opinion, and you should definitly check it out.

Anyways, the games itself is pretty cool. You start out with one city and limited resources and expand from there to a large empire. You start with doing quests to expans your resources fields, construct buildings and then train troops. You troops will be used to defend yourself against other players, attack other players for resources and also attack NPC village for resources and other rewards. The graphics are pretty cool, there are lots of units, buildings and technologies to research, but the game being based in flash makes it quite laggy. You have to spend a lot of time on the game to be successful.

Evony LLC claim that Evony Age 2 will launch soon, and I’m looking forward to that. The game now is hurting a little too much from all the botting and lack of updates in my opinion. The last 6 months pretty much nothing have happened to the game at all. I can recommend checking out the game, but I wouldn’t spend any money on it until Age 2 comes out.