Before you start playing you may want to read this before sinking a lot of time and maybe money into the game.I’ll get right to the point about the cash grab aspect of the game. You don’t have to spend any money, but you will soon find out that you will be insanely handicapped if you do not.1. Inventory(bag) space. You get 15 slots to hold items. This gets filled up very fast, and like most games when you are new; it is nice to collect stuff. You are not sure what equipment to keep depending the build you are aiming for. You also collect a lot of boost items and consumables. On top of all that, your inventory slots get filled with random stuff like “treasure” and “strange” coins. Before you know it you have to start selling off things you want to keep. You will end up reserving slots for random stuff and consumables that eat up the majority of your inventory. Also, you are often running back to the stores cause you can’t carry more. Expanding bag slots is a must in this game, thus forcing a purchase.2. Appearance, cosmetics, etc. This all costs more money as most games. The cosmetics are pretty worthless, so don’t bother.3. Troops….These guys die off fast if you are unlucky and take forever to replenish. You can spend money to replenish them.4. VIP well the benefits to this is huge. You get double experience on every fight and even quests. This is such a huge benefit that if you don’t do this, you will find yourself insanely behind others. Don’t play the game unless you plan to purchase this.5. Speeding up building constructions. Early off this does not matter, but eventually you might want to pay for this.6. Resources….argh. You often times run out of these and you can either grind grin grind for them. You can buy these so you can focus on playing the game.7. Want a pet? Yep you are buying that too.8. Want some better items, boosts, etc. Yep buy that too.9. Building permits. You want to build more stuff and get ahead of the game….yah that too my friends10. Garrison. Well this allows you to store troops so you don’t have to wait. But the limit is 70 troops per slot. This will fill very fast. Unless you want to….ya you got it. Spend more money.11. Walking speed. Wtf, why not just let players walk fast? Do you really have to charge for this? So if you are not paying for anything, you are already leveling slower, grinding for resources, waiting for quest permits, waiting for troops to replenish, spending time going back to the shop to sell off bag space, and now moving slower. It’s like the devs set up the perfect storm mechanics and to really really screw the free players.I’m actually going to stop there, cause it gets even worse. I am trying to write a review for newer players. This just gives you a minimal guess at what you have to pay for. I am not against cash games, but this one goes pretttttttty far.Other issues with the game.1. Right when you start a new player as a necromancer, the chat window actually blocks your way out from the beginning map. I am not sure if it happens when not in full screen, but it took me 20 minutes of asking until someone said it was a bad game design and told me to close it.2. I never knew that building permits were only purchased only through money or the main quest. In the beginning I had gotten a few and started upgrading buildings and took a break from the main quest line. Well then I started doing the main quest again. My next step was to upgrade the wood building. Well I had no more permits. So I had to actually destroy one of my level 3 troop buildings. Upgrade the stupid wood building, and then rebuild the troop building up to level 3 again. That is a HORRIBLE game design. It set me back quite a bit, cause early off you have minimal resources and I also had no more troops. And then I had to wait for the troops to replenish after rebuilding it all over again. So word of advice: DO NOT stray from the main quest. You o NOT have the ability to build early off as you wish.3. The lag. I have 3 computers in my house, and only one seems to be able to run the game. If you don’t have a decent computer, don’t expect to be able to play at all. Even when you lower the quality it can still be brutal. There needs to be an option to be able to turn off animations. On one of my computers, if there is a rain effect on a battle map it freezes up bad. I posted a link to where you can download a plugin to force the quality of a flash game to go as low as possible. It helps a bit, but still can be rough.4. Replenishing troops. This coincides with the cash grab. If you want to try a hard battle and fail: you are screwed. Your troops are gone. The time it takes to get them back is quite long. Also if you grind on fights that cause casualties, you find yourself really short on troops. Word of advice, grind fights where you take no loss. This game especially early off rewards players who fight easy quick fights rather than hard risky ones. Unless of course you want to spend money.5. The easiest method. Make a high level best friend or multi on two accounts with two computers. You can join fights with friends. This makes the game VERY easy for those who can work together. The low level player can keep their troops in the garrison while just letting a high level player kill all their hard fights.6. Loading times/crashes. The reason I put these together is cause they create an evil combo. The game takes quite a long time for me to load. I know new games have crashes and bugs. But when they game freezes or bugs outs and you have to refresh it makes you want to smash the keyboard.The game itself has huge potential, but the devs seem like they want to cram the cash shop down your throat and setup mechanics that makes the game not fun at all unless you want to spend money.