AoZ Primer: Globes, Nations, and Alliances
What is AoZ?
Age of Origins, or AoZ, is a mobile first, massive multiplayer online ("MMO") game by Camel Games. It is free to play, but pay to win. Have excess money? This game is the perfect money pit for you. On a tight budget? I recommend the five dollar golden hammer as your only purchase (comes in real handy). After you get past the first twenty minutes or so, you come to the real game, a city builder war game.
"What do you mean free to play, but pay to win?" The game is completely free to play, but as you will soon discover there are many, many ways you can spend money in the game. Simply put, those who spend more money can have a much stronger city than those that do not. I say "can" as there are plenty of ways to spend money without growing your city, such as the cannon, rocket, drag racing, and fishing events to name a few.
I can hear you asking now, "why would I play such a game, I don't have money to spare?" Fair point. I know plenty of people who play the game without spending more than five dollars on the golden hammer (which lets you build two buildings at once). I won't sugar coat it, this game is complicated and the number of online resources are scarce, so let's dive in.
Globes, Nations, and Alliances
Within each globe there are nations, within each nation there are alliances, and each alliance is made up of players. Globes and nations are numbered, starting at one and incrementing for each globe or nation opened up. Each globe has a limited number of nations, but outside of events, nations don't interact with each other. New players are funneled into new nations, however new nations are not just new players. Sometimes more experiences players want to start anew (since typically the first few months of a new nation are the most exciting) and will bring their knowledge to help new players grow.
Globes
In your day to day playing, you typically won't look at the globes, or visit other nations in your globe. Why? After city level 8 or 48 hours, you can't switch nations. The only time globes come into play is during an event called Global Conquest, where you can teleport to a special battleground and battle against other nations. This is an important event, but it's worthy of a full writeup another time. For now it's enough to know globes exist.
Nations
Much more important than globes are nations. As mentioned in globes, once your city is over 48 hours old, or your Main Hall is past level 8, you can't teleport between nations. When you first start the game, you are placed in a new nation, so you'll be in a pretty level playing field. Each nation is the same size and has the same basic layout, a square map with three "cities" and a "capital" (better left to another section around events). Each nation has a nation chat, where anyone in the nation can post for others to read. Nations are essentially like families, early on you fight, but later you realize you need each other, and let bygones be bygones.
Alliances
Alliances are the backbone of your play experience. Early on, there are many alliances to choose from, don't spend too long trying to figure out which to choose, just pick one and go for it. If you are lucky, the alliance you chose will either be a top 3 alliance, or merge into one a larger alliance. Why is top 3 important? Early on, the top alliances are "protected", meaning anyone who belongs to one of those alliances can't attack members of other protected alliances. This has nothing to do with mechanics of the game and is better left to a "politics" article.
What do you gain from being in an active alliance? Alliances make or break your gaming experience. Remember, this is a war game, where each city is able to be attacked at any time (unless politics get involved, and they do), so your alliance is essentially your backup, and vice versa. An attack on one member is an attack on all members. Beyond protection, it unlocks many alliance events to participate in which, after the first few months, keep the game from getting too boring.
When you join an alliance, you'll notice that a new "alliance chat" appears, this is a pretty neat feature of the game. In all the games I've played, this is the first where there is baked in translation for supported languages using Google Translate. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a perfect translation, and I've nearly seen civil wars break out over it, but it's pretty cool chatting in real time with someone from Korea while you both speak your native language. For example, in my alliance the main languages are Arabic, English, Korean, Japanese, German, and Vietnamese, but for me they all appear in English. How cool is that?!
Your City
Your city is where you spend all your time, and there are two ways to view it, on the map, and internally. The map will show you the same view as everyone else, where more powerful cities are bigger and more imposing than smaller cities, but no real useful information. Inside, there are a number of buildings which a future building guide will cover in more depth. For now, the most important is to follow the quests to upgrade your Main Hall.
Why is the Main Hall so important? It determines the max level of your other buildings, which in turn limits the troop level you can recruit. Very generally speaking, the higher the troop level, the stronger they are, the better you'll do in battle. Many, many asterisks on that sentence though, but that's better suited for a battle guide series (yes series, battles are complicated.).
Summary
In summary, AoZ is a MMO war game that you can't thrive in alone. Pick a nation, hope there's a couple of strong spenders (people who spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on this game), and that they are good people to play with. Don't be afraid to hop around alliances to start, though I strongly recommend not starting your own as they are very complicated to successfully manage. Before you start your own spending journey, I urge you to find someone to coach you, or read some more guides here, on where you should spend your hard earned money to maximize your city growth.