Dragons Of Atlantis

Introduction
Dragons of Atlantis by Kabam is a strategic game on Facebook (4M active players / month). You have to grow your empire by gathering resources, upgrading buildings, building an army and going to war. There are many other players on the same server which you can attack or form an alliance with. In summary, the games looks nice, is fun to play for a while but is plagued by imbalances and bugs.

Gameplay
You start 'in protection' and are guides by means of hints and goals. After that, you're on your own, with a lot left to figure out. Other players or external resources may help. Choose which buildings to build, improve research in various areas, train an army and use it to increase resource income by conquering 'wildernesses'. You can do this all without the game becoming a major time hog, but you will need patience because the bigger upgrades may take days or weeks to complete.

Boring
Over time, boring and time consuming aspects of the game creep up, which are nevertheless essential to increase your power. In other words: those who spend the most of their days playing the game will be the strongest. This mainly involves searching for dragon eggs (which 'drop' only once in many times you launch an attack) and gathering resources by attacking 'neutral' camps ('Antropous Camps') over and over again. There's a browser-plugin available to 'automate' these activities but this is against the rules and will probably be acted upon in the future.

Balancing & Strategy
Knowledge about the relative strength of various troop types seems to be quite sparse. Also, a big element of chance (perhaps driven by technical problems) appears to be involved. The major downside of the game is that relative power doesn't seem to play a role in player vs player battles. So, the more troops you have, the stronger you are and there is no penalty for picking on the smaller players. A lost battle will result in loosing all your troops (rebuilding may take weeks), but you can hide your troops: they will not defend your city but won't die. Almost everyone does this, and player vs player make little sense.

Leveling, Money and Friends
There are many online (Facebook) games these days that contain elements to make you spread the game, keep playing and spend money. Getting experience points and leveling up has been a proven incentive. In Dragons of Atlantis, your level is determined by the size ('power') of your empire, but your level does not affect the game itself. You have to appoint your friends as generals, but until now there's no need for them to play the game and if you cancel all feed requests the won't even notice. Perhaps this will change in the future but for now the amount of your friends that also play doesn't really matter. What does matter however, is rubies. Rubies are bought with real money and give a player huge advantage (speed up processes and buy resources and dragon eggs).

Bugs
Over time, the game is often hit by outage and (worse) bugs. These include minor or temporary glitches as well as bigger problems. The game is still heavily under development which means bugs will be solved. It also means new features are added which may introduce new bugs or hamper your strategy.