Nandonia vs Forge of Empires

What the two games have in common

Enough that the comparison is fair. Both run in a desktop browser with no download. Both are free to start and make their money from an optional premium currency. Both are built around a city that produces over time, collecting what it produces, and spending that on the next upgrade. Both are worlds with other players in them rather than solo games.

Forge of Empires is made by InnoGames, launched in 2012, and moves your city forward through historical eras. Nandonia launched in 2026 and stays in one medieval world throughout. If you are choosing between them, the eras are not the deciding factor. The sections below are.

One thing that is not the same: laying out the city

Forge of Empires is a city-planning game in the literal sense. You place buildings on a grid, roads have to reach them, and fitting everything in is a real part of the puzzle.

Nandonia is not that. You choose where in the world your first city goes, and after that there is no placement to do: buildings are built and upgraded, not arranged. If tetris-ing a layout is the part of a city-builder you enjoy most, that is a genuine reason to prefer Forge of Empires, and worth knowing before you start rather than after.

The differences, side by side

Every row is a fact about how the game works, not a judgement about which is better.

Can another player attack your city?

In Forge of Empires, yes. In Nandonia, no, and there is no plan for it ever to be yes. That single line is the reason most people end up choosing one over the other, so it is worth being precise about what each one means.

Forge of Empires

Once a player has researched Military Tactics, other players in their neighbourhood who have also researched it can attack them. A player who wins a battle may then plunder one building: residential, production and goods buildings with a finished production that has not yet been collected can have that production taken. Great buildings, cultural buildings, decorations and roads cannot be plundered. InnoGames' own support pages describe collecting your production promptly as the main defence, alongside a city shield bought with tavern silver. See InnoGames' support article on plundering.

Note what that implies about how you have to play: production sitting uncollected is the thing at risk, so the game rewards logging in on the schedule your buildings finish on. Plenty of people enjoy exactly that. Plenty of others quit over it.

What Nandonia does instead

The honest framing is not that a feature is missing. It is that the entire competitive layer is built on a different axis: instead of taking things from each other, players compete on how far their cultural influence reaches, and the ways to grow it are all things done WITH other players rather than to them.

• Commerce. Natural resources are finite and unevenly distributed, so trade between players is structural rather than decorative. You run trade routes, sell into other players' markets, and pay their fees when you do.
• Patronage. You invest in other players' cities and both sides are paid. Sponsoring an expedition or backing a venture in someone else's city is a real economic relationship, not a button.
• Exploration. Envoys sent out uncover tiles, ruins and wonders, and what they find enters the world's shared record rather than only your own.
• Scholarship. Recovering, reading and contributing lore is scored, and the community's readings are voted into canon.
• Diplomacy. Envoys live in other players' cities, form cultural bonds, attend festivals and raise Cultural Influence for both the visitor and the host.

Those are the five envoy skill trees, not a marketing list: Commerce, Diplomacy, Scholarship, Exploration and Patronage, 124 skills between them, to a level 50 cap.

The practical difference is what happens when you do not log in for four days. In a game with plundering, that is a decision with a cost. In Nandonia it is nothing at all: your city is exactly as you left it, with more in the ground than when you left.

Is there actually a story, or just flavour text?

A real one, and it is the half of Nandonia that a feature comparison tends to flatten into a single word. The premise: a cataclysm called The Twisting erased the old world. The people who came after, the Appeared, arrived with no memory of any of it. The game is the recovery of what happened, to the world you are building in and to the one that came before it, and it is uncovered by the players rather than delivered to them.

There are over 900 lore fragments in the first phase of the story alone, with further phases planned to open each year. Nobody holds all of them, and they are not read in order.

• Exploration is the bulk of it. Every tile of the world has something to give up, so the map is a text to be read rather than a space to be crossed.
• Ruins are delved under a timer, at real risk to the envoy doing it, and hold fragments found nowhere else.
• The 10 wonders are the rare end. Each has to be discovered, then investigated through mechanics of its own that no other wonder shares, and each pays lore that exists only there.
• What players read is argued over and voted into canon, so the community's reading of the history becomes the history.

Forge of Empires has quest lines and a historical setting, which is a different thing and not a lesser one. The distinction worth drawing is that its history is known and yours is a progression through it, whereas Nandonia's history is unknown and finding it out is the activity.

What does the money actually buy?

Both games sell a premium currency. What separates them is how tightly the list of things it can reach is drawn, so this section is specific rather than reassuring.

Forge of Empires sells Diamonds, used across a broad range of in-game purchases including speed-ups and items. If you want to know exactly what Diamonds buy at any moment, the in-game shop is the only accurate source, and that is precisely why we are not going to characterise it here.

Where Nandonia's Gold can and cannot go

Gold is both earnable and purchasable. It is paid out by 97 achievements, worth 945 Gold over the life of an account, and by a daily login streak. Those are capped, non-repeating faucets rather than a grind: you cannot farm Gold, and no other mechanic in the game creates it.

• Gold BUYS cosmetics, convenience and automation (Collect All, Auto-Collect, the Steward, Master Builder), insurance against a failed merge, and land claims and merges.
• Gold CANNOT mint resources. No purchase anywhere produces wood, stone, clay, metal or diamonds out of money.
• Gold CANNOT buy Cultural Influence, in any form: no grants, no copies, no multipliers.
• Gold CANNOT have a random outcome. There is no gacha and no paid roll.

The exception, stated plainly

Gold does reach two of the 10 leaderboards, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it. Land claims and merges can be paid for with Gold, and those feed the Land Ownership and Merge Masters boards. Those two are patron boards by design: they exist so that someone who wants to fund the game can get their name up for it, and they are presented as such so no free player spends months mistaking them for boards winnable by play.

The other 8 boards are the firewall. City development, cultural influence at both city and empire level, achievements, envoy levels, players welcomed and lore fragments discovered cannot be advanced with money faster than by playing, and no future feature is allowed to change that.

How much time does each one want from you?

Both are check-in games rather than sit-down games, but they ask for that check-in differently.

• Forge of Empires ties the timing of your check-in to your production timers, because uncollected production is what a neighbour can plunder. Guild events and expeditions add scheduled group commitments on top.
• Nandonia has cooldowns on collection, so there is a reason to come back, but nothing degrades and nothing is lost if you do not. A missed day costs you the resources you did not collect and nothing else.

Is there enough of it?

Nandonia is new, so the fair answer is a description rather than a track record. There are 10 building types across twenty levels, 10 leaderboards, an envoy system of 124 skills to a level 50 cap, finite natural resources that deplete and have to be planned around, land merging, player to player trade, ruins to delve and 10 wonders to find. That is months of play before anything runs out.

The part that is harder to convey is that the world is persistent and changes with the seasons according to what players actually do in it. Those changes are permanent: the world, how it plays, and its story carry forward marked by what the community did, rather than resetting to a fresh map. Nothing you build is temporary, including at the scale of the world itself.

So which should you play?

• Pick Forge of Empires if you want military progression, competitive fighting, historical eras, hands-on city layout, and a very large established playerbase with guilds to join.
• Pick Nandonia if the appeal of a city-builder is the building and the world around it, and combat is the part you have been tolerating rather than enjoying. Also pick it if you want a story to uncover alongside the numbers going up, or if you specifically want a game that cannot punish you for being away.
• There is no reason not to play both. They are free, they run in the same browser, and they want different amounts of your attention.