Forge of Empires Review - From Stone Age Shacks to Space Age Stacks—How Far Will You Grind?

Imagine SimCity and Civilization had a love child, and that kid grew up addicted to freemium upgrades and hex battles. That’s Forge of Empires. You start with a handful of huts, collecting coins and supplies every few minutes. Research unlocks new buildings and pushes your city into the next era: Bronze, Iron, Colonial, and beyond. Each age shifts your tech tree, army, and how you manage space.

My Kingdom for a Forge Point: First Hours in Forge of Empires

I Built a Hut and Immediately Regretted It

Day one. I'm staring at a scrap of grassland with a couple of tents and what looks like a campfire some intern forgot to animate. Welcome to the Stone Age. My job? Turn this prehistoric trailer park into an empire. No pressure.

The tutorial hands me a building menu and a polite suggestion: “Construct a hut.” Cool. I place it down. It finishes building in seconds—nice. Except, surprise, it eats up my only free population. Now I can’t build anything else. No workers, no production, just me and a hut. Already stuck.

This is Forge of Empires in a nutshell: you’re constantly running into limits. Build too fast and you’ll choke your economy. Build too slow and you’ll never catch up. It’s a strategic dance where every step costs coins, supplies, space, and—most painfully—time.

Time Is a Premium Resource (And So Are Diamonds)

Forge of Empires is built around the forge point system. Think of them as turn-based actions: you generate one point every hour, and you’ll need loads of them to research tech, level buildings, and trade. They’re the fuel of your entire empire, and the game hands them out like rationed candy.

At first, this creates a nice pacing. You log in, spend your points, build something, maybe fight a battle, then log off. But soon the gaps between progress grow longer. Want to unlock Bronze Working? That’ll be 16 forge points, so unless you’re sitting on a stash, come back tomorrow.

Of course, there’s a shortcut: diamonds. The game’s premium currency is generously teased early on: complete a quest, get 50 diamonds. “Hey,” you think, “this isn’t so bad.” Until you need 250 to unlock one slot in a building, or 1,000 to speed up tech. Suddenly, you realize those free diamonds were just your first hit.

I resisted for a while. But then the tech tree dangled Iron Age in front of me like a steak in front of a starving dog, and I caved. Just five bucks, I told myself. For science.

Battle Tactics on a Budget

Let’s talk combat. Most city-builders automate their battles or skip them altogether. Not this one. Forge of Empires hits you with a hex-based battlefield where you position your units, move them turn-by-turn, and actually fight.

My first skirmish involved a couple of spearmen versus some tribal warriors. I clicked around, moved into cover, and stabbed someone in the face. Simple stuff, but satisfying. As you move into later eras, unit types diversify and positioning starts to matter more. Cavalry can flank. Archers can pick off enemies from a hill. Siege weapons are fragile but deadly.

There’s strategy here, especially if you play manually instead of using auto-battle. But even in combat, the resource grind looms large. Training troops takes time and supplies. Losing them in battle means more time rebuilding. Eventually, I started avoiding combat unless I was sure I could win.

That’s the paradox of Forge: it rewards smart play, but often punishes experimentation. One bad move can set you back a day’s worth of production. You end up min-maxing even the smallest decisions, like which road tile to delete.

Guild Life and Spreadsheet Diplomacy

By hour six, I’d built enough of a city to unlock guilds. Joining one was like walking into a high-functioning cult: charts, guides, Discord channels, and arcane wisdom about which Great Buildings were “worth leveling.” It was overwhelming and incredibly helpful.

Guilds are where Forge shifts from casual game to economic simulation. Contributing to others’ Great Buildings gives you blueprints and forge point rewards. The most valuable building? The Arc. It turns guild contributions into an investment game, multiplying your rewards if you can get one built.

But building the Arc requires goods from the Future Era. I was still in the Iron Age. Solution? Trade. Or more accurately, beg. I traded away half my city’s output and spent hours clicking through messages to secure the parts I needed. It felt like I was running a medieval hedge fund.

Still, once I got the Arc placed, everything changed. Forge points flowed faster. Progress sped up. And the guild, once a mysterious cabal, started to make sense. There’s a deep meta-game here, hidden behind the pixelated facade. But it takes commitment, and probably a spreadsheet.

Events, Quests, and the Never-Ending To-Do List

To keep you logging in, Forge throws events at you like it’s running a medieval carnival. There’s always something happening: summer quests, fall festivals, soccer tournaments, whatever. These events offer unique buildings and rewards that are (shocker) extremely useful.

The catch? You’ll need to log in multiple times a day to complete the tasks. Some are simple: collect coins, fight a battle, research a tech. Others are absurdly specific: "Spend exactly 47 forge points, build three blacksmiths, and polish a neighbor’s statue during a full moon."

Okay, I made that last one up. But you get the idea.

These events are fun, but also a bit manipulative. You start planning your real-world schedule around forge point generation and quest timers. I found myself logging in during meetings just to click a button and not miss a daily bonus.

That’s when I realized: this game isn’t just about building an empire. It’s about building habits.

Progress, Paranoia, and the Slow Climb

After a few days, my city looked like something a Roman contractor might sketch during a fever dream. I had thatched-roof huts next to medieval breweries, next to futuristic shrines glowing with particle effects. That’s Forge: a historical mash-up held together by grid lines and pure stubbornness.

I had figured out how to loop production, time my forge points, and plan my next ten tech unlocks. I felt like a genius. But then I opened the world map and saw players with cities four times my size. They had fully maxed Great Buildings, armies from the Space Age, and guild ranks that looked like elite hacker groups.

That’s when paranoia kicked in. Was I behind? Was I wasting forge points? Should I be sniping Great Building rewards more aggressively? Should I start spending real money?

The answer, eventually, was no. I was fine. But the game does an excellent job of making you feel like you’re always one step behind. That’s the genius of its design—and also its most toxic trait.