User:Kimelea/Grepolis

Grepolis is a massively multiplayer online browser-based strategy game developed by the German software company Innogames. Grepolis allows players to build a classical city and raise armies consisting of land, naval, and even mythological troops. Players may then expand their empire by founding and building additional cities or by using their armies to conquer cities constructed by other players.

Overview
Grepolis is a browser-based strategy game set in ancient Greece. Players start with a tiny ‘polis’ or city and must build it up into a thriving metropolis. All player-controlled cities start on the coast of one of the many islands that populate the world. Inland towns are NPC-controlled and may be looted or traded with by players. The material resources of wood, rock and silver are generated by buildings in a player's city, and can be spent on expanding buildings or training troops and ships. Additionally, each city can worship one of five Greek gods, and their favor is an additional resource that can be spent on mythological creatures or god powers that benefit the player.

Buildings
Players must build and expand buildings to improve the economic and military strength of their cities. Buildings serve various functions, such as unit recruitment, resource gathering, defense etc, and can be expanded in levels to improve them. Each completed building level earns the player points. If a city is conquered by another player, all the city's points are transferred to the new owner.

Units
Players must build military units to attack other cities or defend their own. Units may be ships or land-based troops, and there are offensive, defensive and hybrid units of each type. To attack a city on a different island, a player may send offensive ships together with offensive land troops carried in transport ships. Defensive units are used to protect a city from other players' attacks, and may be sent to support other cities belonging to the player or an ally. Killing other players' units through attack or defense earns the player battle points (BP).

Culture
The number of cities a player can own is dictated by the player's Culture level. Culture points are generated by running events in any of the player's cities. Battle points can earn the player Culture in any city. In an advanced city, events can also be run by spending resources (wood, rock and silver) or gold (see Premium).

Alliances
The game heavily favors cooperative play. To survive and build an empire, players need to work with others in an alliance; players without an alliance are more likely to be attacked, as they do not have the diplomatic and military protection of a team. Alliances are organised, led and policed by the players, and each alliance has a private in-game forum. Alliances may forge friendly diplomatic agreements with each other, or compete in wars, which can be on a huge scale in advanced stages of the game.

Structure
Grepolis is organised into worlds, which are released periodically; each world is an independent run of the game, with settings such as game speed varying between worlds. There are dedicated local servers for speakers of many languages, but the .en (English) server is open to players from all around the world.

Premium
Grepolis is free to play and does not use banner advertising. The game is supported by players who spend money to purchase in-game 'gold' through the Premium service, which can be redeemed for various significant gameplay benefits, including bonuses in battle, faster resource gathering and more efficient empire management. Premium becomes more important in the later game as competition becomes more fierce, but it is possible to do well in the game without spending money.

Aims of the game
Each world has a set of live rankings boards where players are ranked individually according to their overall point level and battle points. Alliances are also ranked, based on the combined points and battle points of their members. Certain milestones and special achievements in the game are recognised through awards which a player may display on their in-game profile or share on Facebook.

Grepolis is a war game, with the ultimate logical goal of conquering the world. As this would be practically impossible for a single player to achieve, the competition for world domination is between alliances. When a long-established world meets certain criteria, alliances can race to complete 'World Wonders' based on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The members of an alliance are named Rulers of that world if their alliance is the first to complete four of the seven Wonders, but this does not automatically end the game. Innogames has stated that worlds may be shut down when their number of active players falls below 1000, but as of January 2012, all .en worlds launched since the game began in January 2010 remain open.