Tutorial - First steps in Goldentowns (Part 2)

When you have gone over that first little bump in Cashtowns and are actually starting to understanding the game mechanics you can move on to this step. This tutorial is the followup to this tutorial where I talk about the very first steps in cashtowns. But let's continue with the game!

In this cashtowns tutorial we want to expand our town to something like this:

This is where we're going in this Cashtowns tutorial

But how will we get there? 

Let's find out.

Tutorial - The City Hall

The City Hall is your main building in your Cashtowns town.The only purpose of this building is to produce unskilled workers (citizens if you will). But just because it only has one purpose doesn't mean that it is not important. In fact it's one of the most important buildings in the game and should not be neglected.

Without those new unskilled workers your town will never grow more then a couple of levels. You need new citizens to come in regularly because the old ones will die (not the initial ones).

When should I upgrade?

Tutorial - The market (The building)

First thing's first - this tutorial handles the market as in the market the building. Not the market where you can buy and sell raws. Now when we got that out of the way we can focus this tutorial on where and when you should build your first market. The market is the first building you should build in your town and is essential  for the start of your cashtowns town.

Placement of you first market in cashtowns.

Where should I build it?
In the image above is where I think you should place the market and I think you will agree and these are the reasons for that:

Tutorial - Police station When & Where

This tutorial covers the police station which is one of the first administrative buildings you should build in your cashtowns town after the market and the school. When you build the police station you unlock the possibility to upgrade the market to level 2 and the houses that are covered by the influence which means more happiness - the key in cashtowns.

Your first police station placement in cashtowns

Where should I build it?

Tutorial - Start of a Goldentowns town (First steps)

Check out part 2 here!

When you have registered your account in Cashtowns you start with 6 houses, 6 production buildings (one of each raw), 1 town hall, 1 Warehouse and 1 graveyard. Your main focus should be to get your houses to level 10 as soon as possible but you gonna have to see this as a long term goal and you have to develop you town in many different stages before you can achieve this goal. 

What should I start with?

1. The first thing you should do in my opinion is to start with the production of wood, stone, vegetables and food. Iron and clay is not needed in the beginning of the game.

Tutorial - School is important!

After some changes in the game where specialists changed from being trained in their respective buildings to being trained in the school the school became immensely important for every town big or small.

The school works a lot like the town hall with the difference that you train specialists (doctors, cooks, hookers, etc.) instead of unskilled workers (normal citizens). It takes the school 24h to train a specialist so you should plan in advance and be able to see when you need one. (Like everything else in cashtowns ;))

Nice drawing eh?

New rule changes from admin (27/2 - 2013)

Just came across these rule changes on the CashTowns forum. These are some small rule changes for the game but in my opinion not that bad at first glance.

Quoted from the forum:

"1) all buildings must be in the area of the required maintenance buildings in order to be renovated. Up until now many upgraded the houses, demolish all administrative buildings and build other buildings in their place.
I think this is a good change, it will make life harder for those who have gotten that far in the game but I think this is how it should work when you think about it.

2) all towns that have houses that are NOT in the area of their required administrative buildings will loose happiness points. This measure was taken because there are some towns that have the initial 5-6 houses at q10 and no administrative buildings surrounding them. Since the initial buildings do not require renovations, the first rule would not affect them.
Again, this is probably how the game was intended to work from the start.

3) all towns must have 100% happiness in order to sell workers/soldiers.
Another change to prevent the market from dropping encouraging new players to buy raw's.

4) Also starting today the population bonus is increased from 0.001/citizen to 0.005/citizen. This will help small towns to grow.
This is now a proper bonus that will get you some real gold amount even if your town is a bit smaller! Nice one!

5) also a bug that required q10 roads in order to renovate q10 houses was fixed.
Nothing to say, bugfix, good.

6) also the school's display bug is now fixed (the images were not accurate)
Incredible annoying bug that finally has been fixed. Personally I lost a building because of this and that is freaking frustrating!"

All in all, good changes! Nice to see the game progressing after a few weeks of nothing.

Tutorial - Houses and happiness is everything

Houses are the core of your town in CashTowns and should not be taken as anything else as the top priority. And with the new changes the admins have added it's more important then ever. Read about the new rules here. So here is some information that you need for developing your houses in your town.

Houses are the only buildings that can be upgraded to level 10. Without empty space in at least one house, you cant recruit new citizens. Every citizen needs a house to live in. The houses accommodate up to 20 citizens at a time, depending on the level. If you want to find the house capacity multiply the level with 2.

Serious rule changes to save the market implemented

The dev team has implemented some heavy rule changes to save the raw-materials market from getting out of control and I thought I should share it with you.

Quoted from the cashtowns forum:
"In the last 5 weeks, the players number grew from 900 to 10.233 ....yesterday. Today we are talking about 11.000 players and the number is growing every hour. The nice graphics and the addictive gameplay payed off. The game is growing fast. But we have a problem !!!

This huge number of new players that started to produce tons of raws collapsed the markets in the wrong way. From an average of 50 wood / gold we have reached an average of 1500 wood / gold.
The never ending stream of free players that sell raw materials for gold and never sell gold to buy raws are affecting players that invested time and money to build their towns.

In our initial design notes, the market was NOT build to bring profit to players. It was a nice and easy way to EXCHANGE STONE FOR WOOD. But in the same time we need to protect the investments of our paying members.

We have received a big number of requests from those members to limit the access of free-players on the market. This is the full list of measures to stabilize the raws prices:
1. Only players with a happiness of 100% can sell raws for gold

2. The players that sell raws for gold are limited to an ammount of n=Pop*10 raws / day, where Pop means population. A town with a population of 1000 citizens will allow you to sell up to 10.000 resources / day (combined !!!). So, its not enough just to have an 100% happy town. You also need a balance between the population and the number of factories.

3. On level up there is a bonus of 0.1 gold (for beginers up to level 5 the bonus is biggers ). Also introduced 2 new bonuses. The population bonus (0.001 gold / citizen / day) and the occupied towns bonus. Those 3 measures will push the market down on the long run.

4. All production increase advantages (+25%, +50%, +75% and +100%) are suspended.5. Energy is growing with 1 point / hour for everyone. This will also limit the production output. On the left we have a large mass of players with small qty of gold that can only SELL the gold. On the other hand we have a smaller group of big towns that will sell raws. On our simulations, those measures will stabilize the markets in the next 2 months.

The most important aspect is that actual free players have a GOAL and a real REASON to have a "happy town"...."

Link to the forum post here.

These are some big changes to the game and they strike at the new players and favor the older and many players is going to hate these new changes, but I think they are necessary for the games development in the long run because the raw-market is really getting out of control.

Let's just hope that these changes is enough so the devteam doesn't have to make any more drastic changes.

Tutorial - Basics of Goldentowns - Which country should I choose and why is this important?

So you are pumped? Ready to play and earn some real money? Easy there sailor, if you want to make some real cash in this game you have to be patient and know the game. So I hope this tutorial will get you going!

First, I want to say that the rules of the game are changing sometimes when the devteam are making updates so when you read this some things may have changed. But anyway...

New browser based strategy game that you can earn real money in

For those of you that are familiar with the idea of earning some extra cash on the internet this is probably nothing new and for those of you that are anno1777 veterans or some other browsergame where you have the possibility to earn real money this will be very familiar. But anyway there is a new game out there from the makers of anno1777. It's called CashTowns and are only in ALPHA version at the moment (4/2 -2013) but it has already got a couple on thousands of users and are some of them have already started to cash out some money.

 The game is expected to go into full version in a couple of months and anno1777labs (the makers of the game) are expecting the users to storm in and so will the possibility for you to earn some extra money while having some fun at the side! 

 This blog will focus on giving you the help and tips you need to get started and settled in CashTowns, if you have any suggestions or anything to say, please do! If you like strategy games and enjoy the challenge of making some extra money this is something to check out! 

You wont need any invite or nothing like that just sign up and start --> CashTowns