Gnome Empire

Gnome Empire

March 21, 2011

I have had a lot of down time with my leg injury so along with FrontierVille, I also discovered CityVille, FarmVille, Cafe World, and Mafia Wars.  I'm quite active in both FrontierVille and CityVille as those are the two I enjoy the most.  At any rate I was surprised I enjoyed CityVille so much.  The premise is you build the city of your dreams.  That includes community buildings, housing, decorations, and commerce.  To supply goods for commerces you need to grow crops as well as bring goods in via shipping and rail.  Expansions are possible with each expansion cost more and requiring more permits that can be given by friends or purchased.  That's one thing about Zynga games is all of them have an option to purchase the currency (eg. horseshoes in FrontierVille, city dollars in CityVille) or you can wait and let the currency build as you move up levels, earning one currency per level.  I have spent $10 on the game which is considerably less than what I would spend at a casino or even buying a video game and I can play it 24/7 if I want.  The thing is you don't have to buy credits if you don't want to.  The more neighbours you have the more you can hire for positions in your community buildings rather than paying for the position but you do need the community buildings as they determine your population cap.

Pictured is my city, Gnome Empire as it looked yesterday morning.  The look changes on a daily basis as I twaek and expand.  My city has a population cap of 1840 with 1170 as the current population so I can still add more housing.  As you can see I have expanded quite a bit.  My next expansion will cost me 43,000 (coins not city dollars) and  9 permits or 9 city dollars.  I have 6 permits so far and am hoping some of my friends send me more.  Yesterday I added the shipping piers to my newest expansion.  I'm finding that this game has a bit of finesse to it.  It is not as easy as plucking down buildings and hoping for the best.  Of all the Zynga games this is likely the one I will continue playing on a regular basis.

I have encountered one problem with the gam and that is loading my friends and neighbours.  The game simply refuses to do that even though they load fine for the other Zynga games so it is a problem specific to the game itself.  As a result I can't hire my friends or send gifts to them from the free gift section.  I contacted customer service who is working on the problem.  Other than that I really like the game!

Garden Gnome
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