Fantasy Baseball Meets Sim City in a Fantasy Setting
Everyone starts out with a randomly assigned town with four types resources scattered around it. You're the only one with access to these resources and you collect them by erecting specific buildings next to them. You're only able to build a limited number of buildings, so it's important to carefully choose and place your buildings to meet your needs and maximize your collection of resources. As your stockpile of resources grow you use them to upgrade your town, build additional towns, or build and support an army. Once you have an adequate army, you can send them out to raid dungeons and NPC bosses.
The player-versus-player (PvP) is pretty forgiving, albeit inescapable. Each new town is protected from other players for seven days. After that, anyone with a castle can pillage your town and steal the resources you've stockpiled. Most players will ignore your town if you build up your defenses and garrison an adequate army, but there are no guarantees. Another safeguard is to join an alliance (the same as a guild in an MMO). Almost everyone belongs to one mostly because alliance members are more likely than a complete stranger to send support if you come under attack. Alliances will also work together to attack other players since the resources needed to overcome a well defended town are enormous.
In order to spy on or attack other players you have to build a castle in your town. However, building a castle allows other players to assault and lay siege to your town. (This is the only way you can lose a town to another player.) That being the case, most players wait until they've built a few towns before building their first castle. The basic strategy is to dedicate a few towns solely to collecting resources. These towns then send their resources to the town with the castle, which is dedicated solely to militaristic endeavors. Those who don't follow this strategy are usually taken down fairly quickly. If you do lose your town(s) you have to start over from scratch.
Combat uses a system slightly more complicated than rock-paper-scissors. Units are assigned numeric values for attacking and defending against specific categories of units. Defenders can increase their defensive numbers by hiding behind town walls and in towers. Additionally, attackers receive a penalty to their number if they attack during late-night or early-morning hours (east-coast time). The game then plugs these numbers into an equation to determine the results of combat.
Units are categorized as infantry, cavalry, casters, blessed, siege, and ships. Each category has three types of units. Some units are strong attackers while others specialize at defending against specific categories. For example, in the blessed category Templars are the strongest defenders against casters if garrisoned in a Templar Tower, while Paladins are very strong attackers. Since the size of each town's army is limited by the number of barracks you build and how much food you collect from your farms, you have to carefully allocate your resources to meet your recruitment goals. Additionally, while each defensive unit only requires one bed in a barrack, units that are strong attackers generally require two while powerful siege and ship units require as many as 10 to 400.
Lord of Ultima is a persistent world. Time and events continue while you're away doing other things. Since recruiting units and erecting buildings take a long time, you'll probably just log on for a few minutes to fill your recruiting and building queues. It can also take units several hours to reach a dungeon or NPC boss. You don't directly control units as in conventional strategy games, so there really isn't anything for you to do after you've issued your orders other than watching the clock tick down in your queues.
Although you don't have to pay anything to play this game, spending real money on items will give you an advantage. For example, you can spend money on a "minister" that will automatically alert your alliance members and ask for support if one of your towns come under attack while you're away. You can also spend money to gain extra resources or prevent other players from attacking you. None of these are necessarily game breaking.
I suppose the graphics are okay for a browser game. They're redundant and the animations are almost nonexistent, but definitely functional. There's no sound effects at all. At launch there were some problems with broken game servers. This seems to be fixed, although there is a noticeable lag of a few seconds between when you issue an order and when the screen changes, even with a cable modem. To register you have to submit an e-mail address to set up an account, but thankfully there's nothing to download.
All in all, this is a fun game when graded on a curve because it's free. If you're looking for an abstract strategy game you should give it a try. It's free and you've got nothing to lose except your time. This is the type of game that will be rewarding to patient players who find satisfaction in slowly building an empire. However, if you want to do something more than click a few buttons once a day, you'll probably find Lord of Ultima incredibly boring.