User:Simsilikesims/Castleville

CastleVille is a Facebook game that is a hybrid of Farmville, Cityville, and Petville, only set in a medieval type setting. Instead of battling other players, one battles the "Gloom", which is a mysterious force that has darkened the area outside your kingdom. This "Gloom" is not as dreadful as it may appear at first, for it can be banished by combining shards to make exploration crystals. However, the Gloom periodically sends beasties to invade your peaceful cute little kingdom. The beasties may be rats, wolves, thieves, orcs, evil tree roots, yetis, evil trees, or even dragons. Since it is a medieval game, there of course had to be dragons. Like Farmville, you end up with withered crops, or gloom rats that want to eat your crops. You also have animals that you raise, which are constantly being attacked by gloom wolves. This uses up your daily supply of energy that you have available to you for game tasks. Gloom thieves do not actually steal anything, they just block your access to the buildings that you were trying to tax, and anything surrounding it. They should have called them "Gloom Tax Protestors", or "Gloom Goths with masks" since they dress all in black and cover their faces. But if you collect enough of their cloaks, and other ingredients, and complete a quest, you can magically turn them into chickens.

All the characters in the kingdom are cute in one way or another, even if they are fat. Even the chickens are cute. You have Yvette, a full grown woman that sings like a little girl, Rafael, a man who is cute but in love with his own mirror image, Alastair, a good wizard who is scholarly and intellectual but also cute, Sonja, a treasure hunting woman who never actually goes out and finds you treasure but is cute anyway, the Duke (who is your ally) who likes to eat strange combinations of food but is cute, Mia the cook, who is also into BDSM (she ties people up with rope when it suits her), Kathleen (a lost sheepherder that wandered in from another kingdom), Ulrich the blacksmith, who is cute but doesn't know it, Giovanni, who tunneled up into your kingdom from underground and is a wacky inventor, and Tom, who is a knight that literally fell out of the sky singed because he was foolish enough to actually go looking for dragons. Then there are the cute chickens, cute cows, cute pigs, cute sheep, and so on.

Like Cityville, you have a limited daily amount of energy, and you are constantly running out of space to put new buildings and decorations requested by various game quests. However, you find you still need the old buildings in order to complete your quests, or complete new buildings, so you cannot get rid of most of your buildings, with the exception of generic cottages since you can replace them with chateaus once you reach a certain level. Some of your decorations you also cannot get rid of because they add to your "castle level" which enables you to "explore the gloom", adding an expansion to your kingdom. But there is a limit to how many decorations that you can place, so that you cannot increase your castle level past a certain point until you reach a certain level in the game.

Early in the game, you build a workshop, and free certain characters, unlocking quests related to these characters. Some quests unlock new characters. The workshop is used to combine items to help you complete quest goals, make exploration crystals, and build other buildings, although you will need to beg your friends to complete nearly every quest at higher levels in the game. The Studio and Kitchen also help you combine different items to make new ones needed for quests. The Party Pavilion is used to create party related items, most of which require that you either pay real life dollars or spam your friends with help requests.

Each quest tends to unlock new game features. For instance, if you complete one of the quests, you can unlock a feature similar to Petville: a somewhat annoying (but still cute) puppy that barks constantly, and makes you search for his ball in all the plants, using up your energy. After you find the ball and give it to him, you have to chase the puppy around until your energy is used up and the puppy is only halfway happy. Then you have to wait for half a day until the puppy is ready again, look for the ball all over again, and repeat the process. Then the puppy will dig up some items that you would otherwise have to ask your friends for, like spider webs or dragon scales, or coal. This puppy has a strange idea of the definition of treasure. Fortunately, you have some use for what the puppy digs up later on.

Since Castleville is relatively new, the game hasn't gotten into its "milking its players for all the real-life money they're worth" phase yet, so completing buildings does not usually require premium content or parts that you have to request from your friends. They make up for this however, by periodically adding quests, that do require premium content or else lots of generous, patient friends that don't mind being spammed constantly with game requests. The developers decided that if one goal was good, four were better, and eight quests better still. The more quests at one time they could add for the players, the better they could keep up with their paying players (and players with 2000 friends), so they continually add new quests, even when the old quests have not been completed yet.