Shocking discovery of plagiarism!

What an utter shocking discovery I have made today, a user totally copy pasting my content on the articles section of GoldenTowns. . .

Beginner tips #5. . .

For those of you who don't know what happens when you totally run out of energy, here's a short post showing what to expect. . .

Idle workers pool. . .

In GoldenTowns, you always need to have a few idle workers on hand for building, upgrading, renovating, and demolishing buildings. Why? For the very simple reason that it requires extra idle unskilled worker in order to execute a build, upgrade, renovate, or demolish order!

Speaking of houses for the dead. . .

If you've read my post about how dead citizens would impede the process of recruiting new unskilled workers, here's an additional information that you wouldn't want to miss out on!

Warehouse fact + tip. . .

For those of you who made the mistake of upgrading your warehouses early, just leave it be. I myself made a far worse mistake by building another warehouse right off the tutorial. Why?

Beginner tips #4. . .

This may be an obsolete post for some of you out there but, I have a strong feeling that those of you lazy ones out there would overlook this feature provided in GoldenTowns.

So, where can you view all your workers' life spans?

An expensive experiment. . .

For those of you interested on what happens when you leave a building unattended (without an unskilled worker), I have done the experiment myself and here is my report:

1. A building left unattended still degrades just like any other building. There are no exceptions when it comes to degradation!
2. Buildings left unrenovated turns into a pile of "vegetation"!
3. As pointed out by Dona Kiza who left this post a comment, yes buildings which has missing influence still degrades as well!

So for those of you itching to find it out for yourself, take my expensive experiment report and don't bother doing it yourself! When your building's degradation level reaches 100%, it is magically transformed into "vegetation" and you need 50 resources of each, Wood, Iron, Stone and Clay, plus an additional 24 hours of removal time! Now you do know that is expensive, don't you?


EDIT: I found out that it doesn't take 24 hours to clear the vegetation as of now September 27th 2013. It only takes 6 hours to clear the vegetation.

Specialised worker's life span. . .

Just a heads up for those of you who have not trained any specialised workers.

I found out today that the life span of your unskilled worker gets carried over to your specialised worker! So an obvious move not to do would be to get specialised workers as soon as possible without having a long life span!

This would seriously injure your unskilled worker recruitment cycle. Wondering why? Then take a good look at → post!

Beginner tips #3. . .

For those of you observant enough with upgrading production buildings, you may find this post quite a bore. The following are my steps to upgrading my production buildings while maintaining very good balance between resource and energy expenses. For those of you unaware of how important balance is, feel free to follow the link.

As soon as you find your roads are of equal level to your production buildings, you might find yourself struggling to meet the requirements of upgrading it to the next level. And when you do, this is a good reminder that you should upgrade your production buildings. By upgrading your production building you gain two things, more resources and lesser energy expenses!

In order of importance, the upgrading process of production buildings should be prioritised in this manner:

1. Vegetable Farm
2. Animal Farm
3. Wood Factory
4. Stone Quarry
5. Blacksmith
6. Claypit

Why Vegetable Farm first? Simple, it doesn't take any resources to begin production, just time! Why Animal Farm second? Because it only takes vegetables and time! Why Wood Factory third? Because it only takes vegetables, meat and time! Why Stone Quarry fourth and so on? I believe you've already got the answer! I hope this post has helped some of you decide on which to upgrade first among your production buildings. Cheers!

Town Shares has been made available!

For those of you who don't roam around the website very often, you might not be aware of this yet. A feature has just been made available yesterday (Or today, depending on your time zone.) to everyone playing GoldenTowns. Simply put, it's a plain simple feature of investing. Town shares is what they're calling it and many of the top players in GoldenTowns have investors already buying a share of their town. As of now, the distribution of investments are either by the amount of 1 gold or by 100 of a raw material (As stated in their website).

Though the feature has been made available to invest in any town of your liking, I have no information regarding the distribution of investments. Whether distribution are actually working or not, I have not a single clue.

It's rather sad that I was unable to participate in this early frenzy of investing since it is very probable that it would bring in more profits than losses. . . The very reason for not being able to participate was having no gold at hand due to being misinformed. But fret not, I should be farming gold soon enough once I have upgraded my first batch of production buildings to level five.

The state of GoldenTowns. . .

Yesterday, I found out something rather disturbing. Mining of gold never had the restriction of 50% minimum town happiness as I once thought it had. How I came about thinking that there was a minimum town happiness restriction was from my own findings from GoldenTowns's very own site itself! Ironic isn't it? They stated their own restrictions and yet it wasn't true. It wasn't up till now that I realised how bad GoldenTowns's consistency is. For those of you who have read my post regarding referral taxes, I am beginning to think the ones running GoldenTowns isn't at all serious about their project.

I have found a couple of other inconsistencies which I deem to be less important yet crucial for players who are taking this GoldenTowns venture seriously. I just hope they are willing to revise their information posted throughout their own website. I sincerely apologise if I have mislead any of you reading my blog and I do hope that this incident would remind any of you out there who are planning to invest on GoldenTowns to be a little more prudent.

Taxes. . .

To think that I could get away with taxes in games! When I first started playing GoldenTowns, I only saw 10% taxation to my state. Then, after reaching level 3 in-game, I was charged an additional 10% to my anonymous referrer. Today (technically, it was yesterday), I saw an additional 10% newly implemented taxation which indicated payments to my town's shareholders fund! Shattered is my dream of getting away from taxes in games. . .

Down but not out, I found out that the maximum amount of tax ends at 50%. The additional 20% belongs to either your town being occupied or funding your state for war. Though as of now I am unsure of the specific breakdown of the percentages, I sure hope that GoldenTowns would not make any future amendments that would make the total taxation be more than 50%.

House for the living and house for the dead. . .

For some of you who don't already know, in GoldenTowns not only do you have to prepare houses in order to make room for Unskilled Worker recruitment, you are also required to provide "room" for the dead.

Let me elaborate what I mean by room for the dead. GoldenTowns made an interesting mechanic where you have to ensure that for every dead person in your town, there has to be room available for rent to accommodate that one corpse for ten days to live in the graveyard before they magically disappear from your town. And if your graveyard is full, you will not be allowed to recruit new Unskilled Workers for your town.

So for those of you who are obliviously upgrading your houses and merrily recruiting new Unskilled Workers at the speed of lightning without a thought for your graveyard, you should know what to do after reading this post!

EDIT: As of September 23rd 2013, I found out that you can still hire workers even though your graveyard is full! I have confirmed this with a friend of mine who is also playing GoldenTowns!

Beginner tips #2. . .

Though what I am about to write seems rather obvious, I am pretty sure there are people out there who've made this mistake. If any of you do choose to upgrade your roads, please upgrade outwards and not inwards! What I mean by upgrading outwards or inwards is to take your city hall and make it your HQ, the very centre piece deciding your upgrades. The very simple reasoning for this is the fact that the roads have to be connected to your city hall in order for it to be valid for your upgrade!

So let's say you want to upgrade a building and you hover your mouse over to the "Upgrade" icon. You will notice that it says "blablabla. . .you need a Q(x) road between this building and the hall.", where (x) can be any number depending on the level required. What this means is that you need every road stretching from the city hall to that particular building to be upgraded to a specific level before you can initiate that upgrade!

So don't make the mistake of upgrading inwards to your city hall as the roads will be deemed useless until it is connected to your city hall!

Interesting finds. . .

A few days back, I found something interesting. It seems like everyone who registers on GoldenTowns will automatically be placed under a referrer (yes, whether you like it or not!). But the question is, who is your referrer? I've tried to look around the website itself, but I still have not figured out who's getting my 10% taxes even though I didn't register under any referrer.

And while looking around the website, I stumbled upon the referral trading section. I then started to look for my user name in hopes of finding out who owns me. But it looks like you can only find yourself if you're actually assigned a gold price tag by your own referrer. In other words, you're being sold out there on the referral market.

So for those of you curious enough just like me, it is actually possible to find out who owns you! But under the condition that they place a gold price tag on you!

Beginner tips #1. . .

To upgrade or not to upgrade, this is one simple action yet difficult to execute due to our own imagination. If you've just started playing GoldenTowns and have been snooping around the forums or general guide/faq section. You'll be able to spot that in the first few weeks of your GoldenTowns adventure, you should not build any new production buildings! This is so true due to the mechanics and unique upgrade hierarchy that this game has.

Then comes the main question, what do you upgrade first? Where should the first upgrade be? Should the focus be on the market and the house that the horrible tutorial has left us with, or should it be on the roads, production buildings and the six houses? Well the truth is, there's no one right answer to this since in order to have the best possible town developed would require quite a number of trial and error process.

But, one thing's for sure and that is balance! In order to develop your town pretty well, you'd have to find the perfect balance between upgrading, collecting resources, and energy saving! Obviously, this balance is for those who wants to play this game without investing a single penny.

To execute this balance, you'd have to have your own understanding of the upgrading mechanics in GoldenTowns. Here, I will list in order from the most important to the least:

• Upgrading roads is the first key factor to upgrading your buildings.
• Upgrading houses is the first key factor to upgrading your production buildings as you require more workers to man a production building with each upgrade.
• Upgrading production building is the first key factor to upgrading your roads as you need to have a steady flow of resources to ensure you can keep up with the upgrade costs! (Do you start to see how it's all in a loop? This is why I stated that there was no one right way to do it.)

If you keep in mind this basic idea, I'm very sure you'd have no problem balancing your upgrades! But do take note of the number of clicks that you are executing as each click takes away one energy!

Referrals Fact. . .

I was wondering why I wasn't receiving my referral's taxes even though they were already level two. As stated in the GoldenTowns website, you will start receiving taxes when your referral reaches level two and above. Sad to say, I found out that this information was bogus once my referral reached level three! The taxes from my referral started flowing in, and so was the shocking findings that everyone is linked to a referrer, ignoring the fact that they signed up without a referral link!

So I would advice anyone who plans on registering without a referral to just ask around if any of their friends, family members, relatives, or whoever they can find to give them a referral link so that you wouldn't end up giving those 10% tax to the admins (this is just my personal guess, I have yet to confirm this!).

The beginning!

It's been about a few days now since I've joined a web based flash game called GoldenTowns. Though like all games, it's suppose to be fun, entertaining and what not, this particular game is promising money(in Euros) and real 24k gold that can be earned just by playing it.

Though I'm honestly quite sceptical as to how much I can earn from this, I've decided to give it a shot! I will be posting as much details I can get a hold of and anything that would keep you guys hooked on coming back. (^.^)

Let's have one hell of a ride together folks!