Oracle

The Oracle link is under the Castle Age banner. There is also an Oracle button on the Oracle page. This is where you can buy monthly specials and six other additional offerings.

* Energy refill is limited to 2000 and Stamina to 1000. **Only 2 army members below level 20. ***Actual formula appears to be (4 x net income) + ($2k x level), rounded (down?) to nearest thousand. **** Only available during the Arena event.

At the bottom of the Oracle page, you will find ways to buy favor points.

/Monthly Specials/
Every month, the Oracle offers four "special items", most often a new general and some related equipment, magic, or soldiers. For a full list of purchase numbers for these generals, their equipment, and the level required to purchase them, please see the Monthly Specials page.

Latest General Offered
Ravendor - Available at level 440 or higher.

Reinforcements
Newest addition to Castle Age by the developers. Currently, you can either increase your army to a higher level (regardless of your current army size -- you have to add up to 20 new members), or by using Favor Points, "Claim" Darius and his bonus weapons/items. The first item requires 4 new army members, and increases by 2 additional army members until you get to the Mythril Gloves, then the number is increased by 3 additional army members. Darius, will cost you 20 new army members, or 30 Favor Points.

Note: The Crusader set is the latest Reinforcement offer but for some reason, it goes back to show Darius' set once you have claimed everything from it.

Demi-Power
Demi-powers are the Castle Age world's five deities. Each one is tied to a stat, and every 24 or 48 hours, you may receive a blessing from one to gain demi-points and a stat point of the their alignment.

Treasure Chests
Treasure Chests are special items you can buy with favor points. Each Treasure Chest contains equipment, magic, soldiers and heroes. Most of the heroes and items are extremely rare or exclusive and can only be found in the chests. You can "pull" from the treasure chests from either the home screen or the Oracle tab. When pulling from a chest, you do not get to choose the item that you get. You can either get 1 randomly selected item, or 3 randomly selected items (depending on how many favor points you are willing to spend). However, Heroes are unique, and if you pull one that you already had, you are refunded some favor points. The amount of favor points that you receive is the same amount as it would cost to pull 1 item from that chest. For the Alpha Chest, this would be 20 favor points (even if you pulled 3 at once).

There are currently ten types of Treasure Chests available:
 * Alpha Chest Chest_alpha_on.gif
 * One item for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Vanguard Chest Chest_vanguard_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Onslaught Chest Chest_onslaught_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Oblivion Chest Chest_oblivion2_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Annihilator Chest Chest_annhiliator_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Ascension Chest Chest_ascension_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Wrath Chest Chest_wrath_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Conquest Chest Chest_conquest_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Phoenix Chest Chest_phoenix_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points
 * Battlelust Chest Chest_battlelust_on.gif
 * One for favor points
 * Three for favor points

Item Rarities
There are 4 tiers of item rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Epic.

Your chances when purchasing a chest:
 * 55% chance for Common
 * 30% chance for Uncommon
 * 10% chance for Rare
 * 5% chance for Epic

Epic Generals
All of the chests contain four epic chance Generals that are unique. If you get the same General twice, you will be refunded 20 or 30 favor points (depending on which chest you pulled from) as you cannot possess multiples of one general. However, because of this, it wreaks havoc on the drop rates.
 * If you've never purchased a Treasure Chest before, you have a 5% chance of getting an epic General.
 * If you already have one epic General, your chances of getting another one drops down to 3.75% (5% * 75%)
 * If you already have two Generals, your chances drop down to 2.5% (5% * 50%)
 * If you already have three Generals, your chances of getting the fourth General is 1.25% (5% * 25%

[update]

Note that while the preceeding analysis is accurate as far as the drop rate per draw is concerned, it fails to take into account the increase in drop rate per expenditure when you already have multiple Generals, and/or other unique drops (such as Guild Abilities) from a chest, assuming you draw again with your refunds.

If you're drawing from a Chest such as the Annihilator Chest that has lots of unique items, your chance to win the 4th Epic General is increased by the number of unique items in the chest that you've already won. For example, if you were drawing from it for the 4th Epic General, and had already obtained unique items filling exactly half of the available slots, your odds of drawing the 4th General per expenditure would be 2.5%, not 1.25%, as described above, i.e:  (5%*25%)/50%=2.5%. Still not good, but not quite as bad as the above analysis would indicate. A precise calculation would be very tricky, as you'd have to take into account the odds of each item owned being drawn based upon it's rarity (Epic/Rare/Uncommon/Common), and also the fact that if you're drawing in multiples of 3, you actually have a change of having _more_ favor points after a draw (80 fp draw yields 90 fp if you hit 3 uniques you already own), but as a general rule (pun intended), the more unique items there are in a chest, the better your odds are of obtaining additional unique items from it if you plan on making multiple draws.

Note that the newer chests tend to have few or no unique Common or Uncommon items, so the odds of drawing multiple Epic Generals from them are not as good as some of the earlier chests.

[update ends]

Realistically, you can spend $50 which will give you 10 spins and still only receive common items. You will probably win most of the common items before ever seeing an epic general. Unless you have money to burn, buying favor points for treasure chests is not recommended.

Chest simulator
To get a feeling for chest rolls, you can try Defyeler's simulator at http://www.defyeler.com/ca/chests/. You won't lose FPs, but you also won't get any chest content.