Robert

Bioware - We love story! (Proceeds to destroy lore)

I once killed a man.

@Deliverator

Joshua Is right. What happens is your kingdom is persistent, you get one town. From there you can put your villagers to work at your home, wood cutting, stone collecting, gold collecting and foraging/hunting/farming. From there they gather three resources whether you are online or not (offline at a reduced rate). With those resources you build buildings ranging from 10 minutes to hours of build time again progress while offline but at the same rate as if you were online just won't start new segments (for walls) if you are off line. At the same time you can make camps and place them anywhere on the map but certain places gives bonuses. You can use the camps to heal units or basically work camps where you put just villagers to work, you can not actually control the villagers like you can in your home village you just give them jobs (wood, stone, food, gold). You can train soldiers are your home base or higher mercenaries at any major town or even in your camps.

One a unit is on the world map it is open to invasion. The map is not a multilayer map, everyone's map is the same exact map you cannot see other players towns or units however if you want to initiate pvp you go through the match making process which evaluates your army strength and looks for others of the similar strength. Like I said all of your units on the map even on your home town are up for invasion. If your town is invaded any building destroyed is not destroyed for good you can repair them at severely reduced costs, only thing not replaceable are units (you just make more). Every unit can level up making them significantly stronger, each level gives you stat points to increase (armor values, health, speed, attack damage, possibly range). You also have a hero that also levels up. Many units have abilities that can heal, increase resistance, scare enemy units etc...

There are a series of quests simple as make a few villagers or a hut to siegeing NPC villages. As of now there is no cooperative play, you can not play with people or even trade resources.

The draw to PvP is another resource, crowns (honor I think). This can only be gained from quests and killing other players units, you still recieve a good share even if you lose in PVP. This are required for research to increase the effectiveness of your units as well as late tier buildings, such as certain barracks and most importantly your walls.

There are build plots, limited amounts so everyone's cities will look the same for the most part save for where you decide to put buildings.

The only persistence is persistence that does not matter on a grand scale. There is no grand multiplayer pvp map, races are not interlocked into alliances, you really have no bearing over the world. But nevertheless, it is a fun RTS with some minor RPG elements thrown in.

@BrongStrong
American tanks employed the same doctrine, they just had thousands of them.

More Work != Better Work

World of Tanks is an interesting game, a great on in fact. Its rare that you will find a game with such an easy pick up and play nature that keeps your attention for greater than one or two weeks sprees. The content of the game is phenomenal and it really brings out the mad man in me through my maniacal laugh as a take my tiny little Sherman and do circles around a heavy tiger and ping rounds off of it doing slightly less than a scratch each shot but coming out on top or engaging

Stop speculating and just let the game do what it does... I'm getting tired of this one million number, has the history of MMO's not taught us that subscriptions are a rising part of a successful MMO having 500k-1M at the get go proves nothing and then retention becomes the problem, I'd rather a game start with 50k, and work its way up to 500k...

@Silverangel
I'd agree but keep AoC's combat system, nothing like it in any other game, absolutely amazing.

its a mad lib...

Dynamic content, Rift flaunted it, sounded great in theory but in practice it is hard to consider it dynamic.