Age of Empires: Castle Siege

[ndboarder]

This is available on Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 and is a freemium game. If you have some patience and such it can be pretty fun. If you don't, it could probably get pretty darn expensive.

It isn't quite the classic AoE experience, but if you got nothing better to do and have Win 8 (or 10 I guess) on a PC check into it sometime.

 

[ndboarder]

The current state of my empire in AoE: Castle Siege is below. Basically you start at age 1, build a farm and lumber yard, they produce resources and you start building your castle. As you age up new fortification, military and economic items become available. You train troops and attack other players castle's to gain resources more quickly, and/or crowns (leaderboard measurement). Of course, some one may attack you and take some of yours as well.

Patience is key, as building or upgrading items takes some time. Initially measured in minutes or hours. You can spend gold, which you can either earn in game or purchase, to get resources or speed the build times. Again, patience. Eventually build times get to be measured in days. I'm currently in Age 6 in the image below, I have a few sections of wall to upgrade yet, most towers could upgrade one more time, but I may soon kick off the 4 day build to advance to Age 7.

I will say that when you first start playing it really seems like something you have to baby sit. Upgrades ending after 1-, 15, or even 60 minutes. You can only have up to 4 builds going, etc, etc. Once you get up a few ages though, it's more fun to battle others to gain crowns and resources. Especially if you get some others to join an alliance so you can compete for leaderboard placement in addition to just wasting a few minutes here and there doing the battles to gain resources.