Social Empires is a social network game that is Social Point's first combat and strategy game. The game, the first release by Zynga's Los Angeles studio, launched in twelve languages on June 1, 2011. G4TV.com writer Jake Gaskill called the release the "biggest launch of any Zynga title to date". The game is a freemium game, meaning there is no cost to play but players have the option of purchasing premium content. As of November 2011, the game has over 18 million monthly active users. Empires and Allies portrays a military cartoon world composed mostly of archipelagos with each player beginning with one island, and being able to expand to up to four other islands. Each archipelago represents an "empire" or militarized island nation, with a "world alliance" that the player can optionally enter, but by doing so forfeits an ability to attack other sovereign nations. The player's task is to recover their island nation's glory and defeat the main villain, "The Raven," and his commanders, who each have covered a separate archipelago that the player must island hop until the end of the "chain" which is the island that "The Raven" resides on.
The game begins with a massive enemy attack which all but demolishes the player's nation, in a quest for revenge, the player is dragged into a war against the aggressors, uncovering their reasoning for the attack. It is later revealed that the player's island contains a valuable ore that the enemy requires for a super weapon, which the player is tasked to stop at all costs. The player meets several advisors: a civic advisor, a military advisor, a construction advisor, and a mission advisor. Empires and Allies has the distinction of being Zynga's first graphics based (as opposed to Mafia Wars, which is browser based) game to portray violence and modern warfare. Although the game still retains the graphical style of previous Zynga games such as CityVille and FarmVille, neither of said games portrayed military hardware. Despite all this, Empires and Allies still maintains good humor with enemy commanders having often comedic portrayals and biographies, such as "The Raven" being named such for he couldn't catch an eagle and instead settled on a raven.



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