I agree with your mindset, but this game is one of the rare exceptions where I happily made a gem purchase. Not because I needed to, there really is no push towards it in this game. I bought gems as a thank you support to the devs for reminding me that it's possible to free, iap and still a well balanced enjoyable romph
I hated CoC and could not get into it at all, but I've made it through the tutorial of this. Not bad.
I haven't gotten far enough in this game to know for sure, but Clash of Clans required absolutely no IAP in order to be competitive for your level. I played a ton of that game for a few months and never spent a penny.
No they get destroyed in the battle but all rebuild instantly for free, you don't even have to pay to repair your mines.
Just a note which I don't mean to sound horrible or bad at all as I did exactly the same as Eli at the start of the game. If you put your base into the back corner and only have defences in front as Eli posted his base picture, the enemies can use flares to go down the opposite side of your island and come up behind your base and avoid all defences.
Most freemium games don't require you to spend money to play, they just make it harder to have fun if you don't spend. There are always a certain percentage of players with a higher than average tolerance for grinding or waiting, who can enjoy playing without ever buying anything. If that were the case for most people though, then Clash of Clans wouldn't be making $654,000 a day on IAPs. I'm not criticizing the game for this -- I have nothing against devs making money -- but I just find it a little misleading when I see this "spending is optional" defense of a particular freemium game, as if it's any different from other freemium games in that regard. Supercell is making the game to make money, just like most other developers, so they're obviously not going to design the game so that most people will feel no need to spend anything to enjoy the game. Again, I see nothing wrong with that in principle as long as it's all up front. I just think it's more realistic for people going into a game like this to realize that they're likely to reach a point where the game becomes tedious unless they spend money, because the game is purposefully designed that way. What's more, spending money will only temporarily relieve the tedium, so you need to keep spending periodically to keep the game fun. As long as you stay within a sensible budget then I suppose it's no different from spending money on any other hobby.
Is anyone else getting attacked by higher level players? I am level 10 and today I got attacked by a level 18, 24, and 25. Of course I lost to all of them and have yet to be attacked by anyone close to my level. I am really enjoying the game otherwise. I hope this doesn't keep happening.
Not even close to true, I'm level 13 and I'm getting raided by players 30+ every ten min. I can't even save enough resources for any upgrAdes. Game is complete garbage in its current state and not worth the effort in playing
