This is a commentary and tips for you to survive in the new update that Zynga has placed on 11/23/11. This update had made many significant to the game play which can affect your strategy and built. Below are some tips for the older players on how to adapt to the new changes.
Stone Brick and Wood Plank Crafting Time
The stone brick and wood plank times have been increased to 1 hour instead have 5 minutes. This means that you will now rely more on requesting materials from your friends than to create the materials on your own. This will put less weight on you going to other people’s kingdoms to take their woods and stones. Also, you will now receive more gains by tending people’s other items from coin gains. With 1 hour crafting time of such a basic material, you are sure to have a stockpile of them. The key to adopt to the stone brick and wood plank to one hour is to play their game and add more friends.
On a side note, although there is a limit on how much you can make requests to, it is reset for different items, meaning that you can do a full request for most of the building materials.
Building Material Changes
There were various building material changes which I will make to my list at a later time. Some of the buildings now request Coat of Arms that can be requested. Although this Castleville building material list is no longer 100% accurate, you can still use it as a general guideline on the materials that you need to build.
Expansion Crystal Requirement Increased
The crystals necessary to expand your kingdom has now been dramatically increased. It has doubled in the majority of the gloomed areas outside of some basic areas. What this means is that you will have to dedicate more crafting time to expansion crystals more than ever. Consider logging in at lease once every 1.5 hours to start crafting those. Follow up feeds to get more crystal shards in Castleville like you were doing before.
Minor Food Cooking Item Changes
Some additional information has been added to the cooking list, specifically some foods that give you XP. Gamelytic’s cooking list has been updated and can be found at Cooking Recipe List for Castleville
Conclusion
Overall this update is designed to slow people down in terms of progress. That is a bad way to put it. Before the game was not balance in terms of coin generation and expansion crystal. Now they slow down the rate of you gathering crystals in hopes that it takes roughly the same amount of time for you to gather coins and castleville expansion crystals to explore. Another side note is that this update might be used to increase temporary sale of expansion packs, 25 Expansion crystals plus some other coins and bonus castle item for $15 for the starter pack that is now on sale.
For the Stone brick and wood plank time increase, the update is designed so that you would send out more material requests to each other which helps the game grow.
This is not a killer update that should stop you from playing Castleville, however, you simply have to alter some of your playing strategies. Good luck!