[ZoFreX]

There's a very good reason to make it run only on Facebook - it's a "Facebook game", through and through.

To be clear, this isn't a real-time strategy game. It is no different to any of the hundreds of "skinner box" games already on Facebook. I let the app access my Facebook, but refused to let it post anything to my friends (make posts from this app available to: only me). Every time I reach an action where it wants me to message my friends or post to my wall (these are frequent) the app crashes and I have to restart it to continue. Probably not a coincidence!

In addition you can click on buildings in progress to speed them up, initially for free but I've played enough of these games to know soon that resource will become limited, unless I spam my friends or fork out cash.

From a gameplay perspective, you just click on what it tells you you need to be clicking on next, and then do quests to unlock more items that you can click on. You collect resources from your resource harvesting buildings by clicking on them periodically when they are full, an absolutely classic FB game feature that is completely absent from any actual PC game or RTS game.

Lastly, it doesn't even leverage the HTML platform well. One thing I expect from HTML is for things to be at least semi-usable on many devices, and in particular I expect sites to work well on reasonable resolutions. I'm on a MBP and even in fullscreen mode, I couldn't get the whole game to fit on screen, and so had to scroll in the browser to be able to click on some of the buttons. This really negatively impacted my experience of button clicking, especially as sometimes it took me a long time to figure out which button I was being told to click.

Edit: Played on for a few more minutes, and sure enough, time, money, or friends. I can really, really recommend that anyone on HN who hasn't played one of these games creates a throwaway Facebook account and tries one out, just to see how vacuous and manipulative these games really are.

[azakai]

Thanks for the explanation.

That's worse than I expected, you saved me the effort of trying it out.

[ZoFreX]

You should still try it out, because a) you shouldn't trust just one person decrying something and b) because everyone should witness the awfulness of skinner box games first-hand at least once!

[azakai]

Ok, ok :)

I registered and tried it. Technically the graphics and gameplay looked smooth, but as far as 2D games go, I thought that was already normal in HTML5. Despite the comment in the article, lots of people are doing stuff like this, and even 3D content that looks very good.

As for the rest, the constant nagging to connect to Facebook friends was highly annoying. But I guess that's the same as any Facebook game these days?

Otherwise, the game didn't really appeal to me, not sure why, I used to like this genre. Something about the tutorial felt overly contrived perhaps.

[ZoFreX]

I wouldn't judge your like of the RTS genre on this game - if you are looking for a good one, StarCraft II is probably the best recent one. Going back a little, Dawn of War (I and II), Company of Heroes, and World in Conflict are all worth a shot too.