Sim Empire

TLDR: I’ve played this game for about a month now, and I have to say that I ended up liking it quite a bit! It has a unique and rather fresh take on the town building games compared to similar titles. This being said, there are some pretty rough, less-than-finished components that really could use some work. Pros: I’m pretty weary of town building games because the AppStore is so saturated with games that copy and paste the mechanics of FarmVille or - insert whatever paywall heavy town game here - y’all might have played before. This game seems to have strived to break out of that mold a bit. While they do have an in-game diamond currency that can be purchased for real money, it doesn’t feel like the game becomes infuriating to play if you don’t choose to do that. However, there are a few caveats to this which I’ll summarize below. Aside from that, the game art is really nice! It strikes a great balance between stylized and realistic. I really appreciate the detail on all of the buildings and decor objects. I also like that the entire style of architecture changes based on what region you decide to build in. I currently have a city in Persia and Greece going simultaneously and it’s neat to watch them both grow as my buildings upgrade and see how different the styles are. There are a diverse selection of buildings for industry, commerce, agriculture, and decor which really makes leveling up and unlocking more items a rewarding challenge. And lastly for the pros, the devs were also pretty thoughtful about their skill building mechanics. The skill tree offers so many different technologies to choose from. Even if you’re playing the milestone version, you have quite a bit of freedom to shape the direction you go with learning new things. There was also a lot of thought put into the friendship system, especially the inclusion of the ability to use friends to help you learn new technologies for half the cost and time. You also have the ability to trade goods with friends and send emails. I’ve yet to have a weird interaction with another player, so I’m not sure what’s in place to prevent creeps or bullies. It does seem like an open chat system could lead to some issues in that regard, though. Cons: There is essentially no incentive to play the sandbox version. In fact, it is made so difficult that the game warns you against choosing it. Because there are no milestones, it doesn’t seem like it’s possible to earn the diamond currency? So I guess you just have to pay for that if you want to enjoy this. You’re also unable to earn the rewards that level unlocks provide in the campaign version.. so you’d have to pay for those too.. because they cost diamonds. And then making general income is more challenging without the above two benefits, so yeah. The price and resources needed for the buildings is not listed anywhere. Like….anywhere. The game simply lets you know if you don’t have enough of something to build it. So there’s no way to decide whether or not it’s a good idea to spend 90% of your money on something because you won’t realize it cost that much until you build it and see the gold withdrawn. Similar to this, the building listings don’t tell you what technology is needed to build them. Again, that’s something that you can only find out from a pop-up message telling you, “sorry, nope. You need X”. (And I guess you can peruse thru the skill tree which includes dozens of technologies and see what each one unlocks). For some reason I have to log into my App Store account manually each time I open the game to play. I have no idea why? I’ve never had to do this for any game. Characters from other countries can add you and send you messages and requests, which is cool! Except for the fact that their requests are sent in their language, rather than the one I have my game set to. Perhaps this is trickier with a personal message written by the player themselves, but not so much for the automatically written help request messages. I mean, I literally had to screenshot a message sent in Cyrillic and pull it into a translator to discover that they requested some grain. Most people probably wouldn’t waste time doing that and just choose to ignore it.

It’s a good game, the only thing I don’t like is that it requires you to pay for stupid stuff. Like they make you pay for certain civilizations. They also give a weird player name and you can’t change it unless you pay. Overall , the game is fun, but they want you to buy stuff.

I hope fix version on iPad used, because has flashback issues!

Just suddenly it stopped connecting to Facebook so I cannot access my account. It has been several days now.

I was having a great time playing, bought a few extra cities and now Facebook is saying app is not accessible and that the developer is aware of the problem. This is ridiculous. It has been three days I have been completely locked out. I paid for these cities.

Use to play it on PC. I like the game. Tried restarting account, but now it gives me an error ever time I try to play. Have sent numerous messages to developer to fix but no response.

Game is to hard to build. You do not allow enough materials to be mined. Then takes longer to make it in to building material. Allow us to make more lumber,copper,stone and clay. You do not produce what you need. They want you to spend money on resources you should be able to mine.

This is a remake of the classic PC games; Caesar, pharaoh, zeus and empire. Those are by far the best city builder games ever. This came sooo close to matching those game. The biggest down fall of this game is the timers on builds… I can see the developers used this as a way to make money. Spend money to accelerate the timer…. That totally ruins the game. Sorry but all this did was make me want to go play the originals again.

都还不错，希望图标搞好看一点

Cool city building, but there are major flaws. First of all, there are requirements to upgrade your houses, but it does not tell you what they are until you are trying to upgrade them to the next level. As such, there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY to know what you need, and to plan your city accordingly. “Build a decoration nearby to level up your residence” great. Couldn’t have told me that before I built other stuff near the residence? “Oh you can just move the buildings.” No you can’t. If your houses are filled to capacity you. Cannot. Move. The. Houses. You’re just screwed. Also I would like to change the name associated with my Sim account. It cannot be done. You cannot change your account name, which is absolutely baffling. Also, I straight up cannot use my Apple account anymore because something went wrong and now it says there’s an issue and I cannot login so my cities are gone. Furthermore, I purchased the Chinese option for $0.99, but I deleted the app to try and fix the aforementioned account problem, and there is NO RESTORE PURCHASE OPTION, or if there is it is soooooo hidden I cannot find it after a good amount of searching. Final thoughts: interesting game, but wayyyyyyyyy too many problems to be worth it, I may try it again in the future but I am so far beyond done and I’ve been withholding an astounding amount of curses from how frustrated I am at this app.