I started playing on En32 (Irapuato) on 19 March 2022, and I played for about 8-10 hours per day from 19 March-10 April 2022 inclusive. Here is my review.
Firstly, I love the casualness of city-building games, and the idea of an authentic Mayan society to build up excited me. There were many aspects of it which I didn't know too much about and which looked great.
Except that some of the things weren't authentic.
Mayans never rode horses. They didn't use lances. They never referred to anyone as "barbarians" (that's a Greco-Roman word for "foreigner"). And they referred to corn as "maize".
There are probably other ones besides that, but those ones were glaringly obvious. For all of the attempts to create an authentic Mayan game, they fell down flat when it came to some of the names and descriptions. Perhaps the guy doing the Mayan authenticity bits was on holiday that day.
Next we come to the general city-building structure of it.
I loved that there were all of these guides and rewards for each quest as you went through, but I hated that then you had to press "produce" to make anything. While most games have produce generate automatically over time, this game doesn't. You need to set it to 10 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours or 8 hours, and then remember to come back pretty much exactly then. If I am active, I want it to be 1 minute but there was no such option. I would have loved to have been able to set my own time, like 15 hours or 9 hours, but there was no such option. I couldn't do 30 minutes or 2 hours either. There were just those 4 options and if I forgot to set it to produce then came back 8 hours later then I was out of resources.
That lack of user-friendliness was a problem that was compounded by the fact that many of the lists for what you needed in order to build something just had icons with no description of what they meant. Was that people or cacao? What does that orange thing mean? Needing 4 ambers to create a city when I thought that ambers were used to spin the wheel was a bit confusing. It almost seemed like it was deliberately misleading with an aim to get me to spend money.
And then we get to the player versus player battles.
I don't want to participate in player versus player battles and yet it was forced on me. I didn't get an option if I wanted to fight against other players or not. It's just like at a certain point you have to do it. Great for the PVP people but terrible for those who want to just do PVE. And the destructive nature of PVP battles has to be underlined.
Players can attack you if they are 4 times your strength. While I don't know the absolute limit, it seems to be around 3-4 times your strength level, leading to some very lopsided fights, and that's before you consider that they can get aid from tribe-mates (so can you, of course).
But then there is a way out of it - by walking your troops away just before they fight. In fact, you can sneakily do this by going away on a fake spy mission that can take all of your troops and all of your resources that makes you untouchable.
It would seem to me like that could all be avoided by not letting someone 4 times stronger than you attack you so easily, and maybe having smaller gaps between player strengths and maybe only allowing so many fights per day. Maybe 1 or 2 per day and only within double your strength might be a way around it. And, of course, allowing players to pick PVE, with obviously a 7-day turnaround between changing from PVE to PVP etc to stop from abusing it, and perhaps not letting someone switch to PVE if they have just attacked someone.
And therein lies the problem. This little trick comes with a problem. If you click on the wrong thing, which people don't tell you is an issue, and spy on someone a bit too high while walking all of your troops and all of your resources, you lose absolutely everything you have, every troops, every resource, everything.
But perhaps the bigger issue is the attitude of the players.
By forcing PVP when some people just want to enjoy a PVE world, and then allowing such a massive gap between player strengths that you can attack, you encourage a sort of bullying environment, and it should come as no surprise that within that bullying environment you are going to have some bad behaviour. People who think it's perfectly okay to pick on someone 4 times weaker than them aren't going to care about how upset people are when they lose everything. Why would they care?
And this creates a situation where the only people who stick with the game are the older players, the ones who have tolerated all of this and just keep going on. New players come, excited by an authentic Mayan experience, then leave soon afterwards in frustration at the mechanics.
This is something that could be good, but you need to fix up some of the major issues.
(1) More authenticity is desperately needed.
(2) Have more flexibility with production of resources.
(3) Have some kind of automatic production of resources as an option.
(4) Allow PVE as well as PVP.
(5) Have smaller gaps between players who can attack each other to stop bullying.
(6) Limit number of attacks per day.
(7) Remove the "walk troops and resources" option (but only after fixing the above issues).
It has potential but right now this game isn't there yet.
I didn't mind it and played it for 22 days in a row, 8-10 hours per day, enjoying it most of the time but being angry at it at other times.
My worst points:
(1) When someone 4 times my size attacked me while I was sleeping, wiping out all of my troops and stealing all of my resources.
(2) When I was walking my troops and resources away to be safe from attack while I slept, and all of them were killed and stolen for no reason.
Both of those issues are very negative experiences, but the bigger problem is that these could so easily be addressed by having a PVE option and having better restrictions on PVP play.
My best points:
(1) The smoothness of the game.
(2) The game helper.
(3) The simulator.
The game has potential but for now it is not a game I am interested in playing. I got to 44,000 points in my 22 days and up to number 29 on the en32 server but for now that is all I am willing to do.
Thank you to the Silver Shields (Silver) tribe for all of your help, though I left the clan and server in anger today after you laughed about my losing everything, having previously laughed about my being attacked (though at least that was my fault).
I won't blame the tribe for my issues though. I blame the game. The tribe was a part of the game and it is the game who are to blame.
For me, this game is not quite there, but perhaps with a bit more work it could be.
My rating: 6/10
