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There are other ways of getting the materials you need to build an empire by trading resources with other players I was able to get rid of some of my reserves of Fir wood planks, swapping them for much needed copper and marble. I started the process of clearing out the surrounding bandit camps and expanding my borders, but I did so slowly, coming in under budget, holding on to the rest of my blue jewels for use at a later date. I had a steady stream of resources coming in and I wanted to hold on to the credits I had left for entering into the game proper. I was a bit surprised.Īt this point I started to take things a bit more carefully. It turns out that in my spending spree, I'd pumped about £10 into my little villiage. You can buy different amounts of credit, but 5600 gems will set you back £25. You buy these in varying quantities, and use these gems to speed up action, buy units and stock up on resources. The in-game currency system comes in the form of blue gems. I left it late to check this on purpose I wanted to see how my attitude changed to the game when I could make a monetary assessment of how much each action was actually costing. I'd spent quite a lot of my allowance, and I wanted to see what this would convert to into cash. Having spent such a sizeable chunk of my funds, it was about time that I checked how much my credits were actually worth. It wasn't long before I'd spent nearly 40% of my credits, but at least things were heading in the right direction. I built a barracks and started the process of recruiting some soldiers (and for soldiers you need beer, so up went the brewery). It was at this point that I started to throw some serious money at proceeding. It's all very well playing an elongated tutorial, but I'd been using credits up and I wanted to get on with things. It wasn't long though, before I started to get a little restless. Slowly buildings started to spring up here and there my settlement was starting to take shape. I wasn't really conscious of the financial cost of these actions, I just wanted to get started. I quickly fast-forwarded up to slowly, and started using some of my credits to speed up the creation of some essential buildings.
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