actually ... that's a little inacurate.  In this game ... time spent in the game is well earned.  Basically everything comes down to traits and gear for your units. 

Premium accounts only get 2 more bonus's a day to your shards (money), no taxes on sales to your items in the market (normally 25%), and you get your premium traits for free as long as you are a premium member (not retroactive sadly) .... even after 5 era's you can still be really set for traits.  But it's not required .. some of the best players aren't premium and have never been premium.

Tribute is another matter.  While you can get free gear for your Dreamlord ... to get anything that gives a considerable bonus ... requires real money and when it comes to unit gear ... you can get some beefy gear for tribute ... but it's the same as charmed gear you can get for free if you have a semi decent Convergence (your guild).  So really the game can be played no problem without money ... it's just that by the time you get to a point where you can can go against the old players .... the game is really boring and old ... since they only slowly add to the game.  Best bet is to not plan on playing for more than 6 months since after that you want to almost shove a steel rod through your head from being bored out of your skull having to grind the same maps for months on end.

First off, this is a rather good game. It's overall a game of managment based on persistent research via a web browser so you can't just grind for 3 hours and jump a couple lvls. It's also truly not an MMO in the fact that you can play WITH other people, as much as the game has a built in chat, pvp and guild system (called convergences). The game is also free to play and it has a premium subscription (which is absolutely worth it if you are an active player in the game) and an item mall which is wonderfully priced ... though you can play the game absolutely without it just fine. Gameplay is set into 2 aspects, pve (player verses enviroment) and pvp (player vs player) and you have 2 seperate lvls determined by your research in those categories to determine lvls.

PVE ... these are random single player maps with 5-7 mobs with various objectives, but mostly it is "destroy enemies" You can bring upto 7 squads + your dreamlord into combat for the map.

PVP is 1vs1 (though they are trying to develope it to be 2vs2 or more) and you can bring out as many troops as you have hired ... spawn rates for the troops is determined by your strongholds tactical point generation ... which is increased by research along with the strength of your troops. There are also two ways to pvp ... on islands which are lvl restricted and are unranked but get rewards, and in the Dueling Ground which isn't lvl restricted, ranked and uses a progressive chess ranking ladder to match you to opponents.

The game also has era's which reset every two months. Trait points you get from research and various DL gear and other stuff stays, but you can choose a new race and all your research starts over (since after 2 months most players can complete whole buildings and have no where else to go) It also brings all players to lvl 1 and the game play is lvled for a short while until traits (ment for various bonus's) and player skill make things seperated again.

The bad:

Even though the dev's are great and are constantly introducing new stuff to the game, gameplay is fun and varied, and alot of the players are great in the game ....... THIS IS A GRIEFERS PARADISE! Unless you use blatent racist remarks, it seems you will NEVER get banned. This means there are undesirable players who are socially inept and will gladly show you this fact.

Also, the game is full of cheaters and people who exploit the game for pvp purposes and nothing is done about them either. If you pvp .. do so not as your whole purpose in the game .. cause you won't get anywhere on the ladders with so many cheaters.

The good:

If you want a game with varying difficulties and can lazily play off and on ... fantastic game ... there are lots of players who will help you out, lots of guilds that are filled with fun people to chat with and for atleast 3 era's (6 months) you can fully explore all the races, upgrades and maps without feeling too bored with it.