Always pillage *before* you burn!

SO here I am, in delightful southern Afghanistan, with only a few active Facebook games. I play Fish Wrangler and FarmVille daily, and occasionally (now anyway) Vampire and Mafia Wars. I've refused to play FrontierVille, and am actively resisting looking into CityVille. One of the IT guys here has been playing a game called 'Realm of Empires' for a bit and told me about it.

I decided to give it a shot ... I mean, really. Who doesn't love pillaging the villages of random people around the world? It's fake war, in a war zone. The nice thing about this: no one actually dies!

The general premise is this: build your village up, make friends, join a clan, go out and kick some ass. But apparently, there is strategy involved with this. One cannot just randomly build things willy-nilly and expect to be successful. This is where JB (the IT guy) came in handy for me ... he is guiding me in what to build and how high to level things before moving on to others.

Here's what my village kind of looks like at the moment:


And here's what it'll eventually look like (yeah, that's right, I'm going to have a palace):

I like being able to see my village. It gives me a sense of accomplishment ... well, a much of a sense of accomplishment as one may achieve whilst playing Facebook games at work.

So cool things you get to play with: citizen militias, cavalry, knights, trebuchets, rams, etc. Oh! And spies! Once you have a tavern, you can recruit spies! Who doesn't love having spies at their beck and call?

Here's what the nice developers at www.realmofempires.com say about the game:

"Realm Of Empires is a medieval-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy Game - MMORTG.

You start with a small village which you grow into a mighty fortress as you struggle for dominance of the realm playing with, and against real people. It’s a game of diplomacy, strategy and war.

The game is intended to be played as little as just a few minutes per day, over many days, weeks and months as you make friends in a medieval world."

You guys know I am not a gamer, so for something like this to hold my attention longer than 10 minutes, you know it has to be fun! What I am digging most at the moment is my Level 20 Headquarters building. Once you get to Level 20, you can queue upgrades, so you don't forget to come back to upgrade more. So at this particular moment, I have like 15 upgrades queued, and in 6 hours, I'll go back and upgrade some more!

So check it out ... especially if you are my FB friends, 'cause having allies is a GOOD thing! If you are one of my Tweeps and you don't have a FB account (7), go get one!!

Off to check on my upgrades and see if the silver JB sent me has arrived yet!