This has been one of the most asked topics since their introduction, here is the updated explanation.
Crowns
Grand awards them for various contests, forum games, participation in CEO community activities ...
They can also be bought in shop, along with rubies:
What do they do ? They generate Royal Power, at a rate of 3.5% per day. That means, if you have 200 crowns, they will generate 7 Royal Power per day.
Internally, the increments also keep decimal parts, so even if you have 20 crowns, and you won't see increment for Royal Power at first, once the decimal increments accumulate to a complete / whole point, you will get the Royal Power. Hence, the 20 Crowns will generate 7 Royal Power in 10 days.
Crowns can be thought of, or described as an asset / property, which once you own it, generates Royal Power from now on forever (until the end of CEO days, or a patch that changes their functioning :) .
Royal Power (RP)
It is the currency / points that are generated periodically by Crowns. It is capped at the amount of Crowns you have, so having 100 Crowns means your Royal Power can be accumulated to max 100. That means you either award it regularly, to get new RP generated from Crowns, or you "waste" the generation, and don't get all the RP you could.
Royal Power can be sent / gifted to other players, you cannot use it yourself. The best place to chat with other CEO players, trade RP, and participate / learn about other fun activities (in addition to this forum) is CEO discord channel.
Sending RP in game is done through this clickable picture (in lower right corner):
Additional options display:
You fill the ingame nick / ID of the player you want to send it to. The game will search him and once found, display his avatar. Then you click "send", and get confirmation (green text at bottom):
You might make screenshot of this as a recipe / confirmation, if you want to "trade" it with other players. This means you send Royal Power to someone, and he also sends RP to you. Currently, there is no ingame guarantee for this trade to be mutual, so you'll have to trust / rely on each other (mainly if you are the one sending RP first).
What Royal Power does - it gives the receiver contribution, at 1:1 rate (as you can see on screenshots above). Contribution, when accumulated to certain threshold points, rewards the player with rubies:
When Royal Power was sent, and you received the Contribution, the new value / number of Contribution will refresh / be displayed when any timer refreshes (info from past, when we had this added / updated into the game):
Or you can always refresh the whole game manually.
Currently, there is no way to see who awarded you Contribution, and how much. This means, if you want to know you have received it and how much, check your Contribution value before trading / receiving it, and after.
Summary
Crowns can be bought. They generate Royal Power, "forever". Royal Power is capped at number of Crowns, gift it regularly to take advantage of its generation. Gifting Royal Power is basically awarding Rubies to other players (through Contribution as intermediate step). If you mutually agree with someone to gift each other, you can basically "trade" and therefore gain Rubies from your own Royal Power.
Design goal + considerations
In the past, before we knew Crowns would exist or what they would be, Grand made a forum game for us, Greed's Game. It is worth reading what Grand intended to achieve with creating and awarding Crowns, and how he was searching for suitable candidates to reward Crowns to, with a twist :) - Greed's Game (link to old forum) .
Very nice and extensive guide.
I decided to give you some extra crowns,
and I figure appending an example may help:
This +100 contribution was given using RP that will now begin to regenerate over time, simply from having Crowns. The contribution given can equal various amounts of rubies depending on landmark level. Each landmark is worth 20/25/30/35/40 rubies depending on tier, so the RP generated by Crowns generally has more impact on real contributors rather than people trading RP 5 at a time or something similar. An exception here would be that giving some new player 20 contribution may have a significant impact on their collection compared to someone else. However it is important to note: the higher your contribution, the more the next 20 is worth, and if you are using crowns for their intended purpose of rewarding others, it is likely that will circle back around to you in the end, in one way or another.
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Thanks so much for making this, it is very helpful!
Edit: Would someone be able to pin this so that new players will always be able to see it?
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For thinking of us newbies :)
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This post has received a 58.57 % upvote from @boomerang.
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