It's interesting how there is a certain trend amongst the games labelled "strategy" in the Google Play Store. I opened Categories and clicked on "Strategy" and there was a sub-category called "Forge an Empire - Top kingdom-building games". I clicked on it and it came up with a list of approximately 30 games.
I checked every one, and every single one of those 30-plus games had in-app purchases.
Now, in-app purchases don't always have to be a bad thing. There are in-app-purchases that allow you to buy extra maps/levels to play to expand your game (expansion packs) as well as purely aesthetic costumes and donation buttons. Those are the good in-app-purchases. But as I've said doubtlessly many times, there are also in-app-purchases of in-game-currency based on making the game so boring and slow that you feel you have to pay to get rid of waiting times that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
I must have said this somewhere else, but strategy is where you plan and direct to achieve a certain goal. Don't ask me where this correlation came from, but there seems to be a trend that all empire-building games are chock full of IAPs. The basic game idea of an empire builder is that you get your own base which you need to build up and upgrade to produce resources and defend it against attackers, and to attack and conquer other players' bases on the map.
I still don't know where it came from, but these empire builders have a tendency...if it can be called a tendency...to be monetized to breaking point. If you wanted to build cannons or towers or walls or mortars or any other similar defences, it will cost resources to build. That's perfectly fine. But the thing is that the buildings and defences take long wait times to upgrade. If you want to upgrade, say, a tower, the game will come up with a timer saying something like "4d" and you'll have to wait four days because you can only build one thing at a time unless you pay.
Of course, developers want customers to bypass the waiting time by paying real money.
I haven't had the time or effort to try out all of those so-called "strategy games" but out of the 10-odd games I tried, every one of them had some kind of premium currency, like "gems", "gold", "coins" or similar, that can be gained exceedingly slowly in-game.
Developers try to defend themselves by saying:
"It's not pay to win because you can earn gems by playing the game for free."
But it is, because even though you earn a very small amount by playing the game, it will never be enough to skip a four-day wait time.
The main point of this article is that developers don't know what strategy is. As I said, it's when you plan and direct.
There are usually 2 different situations. For these situations I'm assuming the premium currency is gems.
The first situation: In quite a lot of these games, there is a "main building" in the base that caps the amount of buildings you can have. For example, if you have a level 3 main building you can only build 2 resource buildings of each resource upgraded to a max of level 2, and you can only have 3 level 1 towers and 1 mortar. And you can build up to 20 walls, and upgrade your army camp to hold up to 30 soldiers. You'll have to upgrade your main building to level 4 to build more.
Usually it takes a ridiculous amount of resources to upgrade your main building, and with the limited resource buildings you have, it will take a really long time to get enough resources. At the same time, other gem-buying players will be looking at your base and loot all your resources just when you're about to have enough. You can't get more resources quicker because there's a limit to how many resource buildings you can have at Main Building Level 3, and you can't loot them from the gem players because 1. they have a higher level main building because they bought the resources with gems and 2. you have a limited amount of soldiers and they will never be enough to beat a MB level 6 player no matter how good your strategy is. It's kind of like trying to beat 10,000 enemy troops with 2 soldiers. Even if you're the best military strategist in the world, it's not going to happen.
So developers try to force you to buy the resources with gems.
The second situation: There are 2 versions of everything. 2 versions of troops, 2 versions of tools, even maybe 2 versions of defences.
The first version costs regular currency, like wood, stone and gold. The second version costs gems. Unless you pay, you're not going to have enough gems to buy the second version.
The thing is, the gem versions are significantly stronger than the regular versions. As in:
Battering Ram
Reduces the opponent's gate protection by -15%
40 wood, 20 stone, 15 gold
Premium Battering Ram
Reduces the opponent's gate protection by -75% and gives troops raiding the front a +50% strength bonus
500 Gems
With this abomination of a game model, it's quite clear that the gem buyers will crush the free players no matter how good their strategy is. Developers are trying to make the game extremely pay-to-win by basically selling guaranteed victory for real money.
So the free players feel like losers and the gem buyers feel like winners no matter how good or bad their strategy is.
There is no strategy here.
These developers have completely lost the whole concept of strategy and it takes away all the gaming involved.