Zen Seeker's Evony Page

 

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Evony

 

You may have seen the many adds for Evony on the web.  It's a game set in medial times and the internet ads often show beautiful ladies in dresses of the middle ages or fantasy lady warriors with elegant handcrafted swords and skimpy attire.  And despite the wonderful image shown above and on many of the adds, you won't see any fairies, elves or prostitutes dressed in battle gear while playing this game except for the following image scene before you load Evony.

 

 

What Evony is, is a brilliant Flash Media Based internet program and franchise that allows literally millions of players from around the world to play a very simple game that allows you to build a virtual "kingdom", complete with forts, castles and armies.  You then get to wage war against other players in "real time".  And even while you are offline, you kingdom will gather and use resources and other players are able to wage war and battle to take your cities and lands.  It is in many ways a 24 hour a day multiplayer Risk board game similar to Age of Empires.

 

What is interesting about the game is that it takes a considerable amount of time to build your kingdom.  At first it only takes minutes to build the small cottages and farms when you start out, but you are only allowed to build one building per city at a time.  And as these buildings, structures, farms, technology and troops get more and more sophisticated, the time to build increases to hours, days or even weeks for the higher level technologies you will need to research to be successful in this game.  And since you can only build one certain item per city at a time, it takes an enormous amount of real time to build up your kingdom...not hours or days, but weeks to months to get prepared for real and meaningful battle.

 

This investment of time in the "waiting game" is perhaps what makes this game so psychologically addictive for the millions of plays who spend countless hours on virtual battling.  Losing a battle or city may represent the loss of weeks of "hard" work.  This can create that psychological high many get when gambling for money, love or life.  And this may in part account for why Evony is able to rake in the enormous amounts of money they receive each day as players spend real money for Evony Cents to purchase virtual items that will give them an edge over other players or just to stay in the game.  So for the serious players who spend cash to play, the stakes of success and failure are raised even higher as these players are not only investing  time to play, but also real money which are now both at risk of loss at  the hands of other Evony players.  The time in money invested in Evony is actually already lost, but nonetheless, the positive feedback loop progresses.

 

There also seem to be many players that take this game to a whole new level of seriousness.  They take personal offense to attacks on them and set out to "erase" and punish those who insult their name in the forums and Evony chat.  A few will even seek you out in the game, attack you and publish the results on Evony forums to ridicule you.  And for this group of players, Evony is probably a safe outlet for them and keeps them off the streets and hopefully out of the real world gun shops.

 

Another group of sick players are those who play to taunt those that take the game too seriously.  And this group makes it fun for everyone else as everyone likes a good fight.  And it is a war game after all.

 

And for the more psychologically stable players that try Evony and continue to play, they probably do so because it's actually a fun, albeit time consuming, game.  It's a Sims game based in medieval  times with princes and barons and with the added feature of war with other real players.  And the money that many player opt to spent on the game is also small compared to many other entertainment options, especially given how much time such a game can consume.

 

This all makes for a fun group of "opponents" and allies and a very profitable and simple internet based game.  Nice job Evony.

 

 

 

As there are a number of web sites and forums that cover the various technical and strategy aspects of Evony, I have opted not to create a comprehensive resource site for this game.  I have already spent way too much time to reach the goals I set when I first started playing the game and the following are simply a abridgment of a few goals players may set out to accomplish.

 

Links to other Evony Sites:

 

 

Prestige

This is your "score" in Evony.  Players with higher prestige are generally considered more formidable than those with low prestige and are generally not attacked as much as the newer players with lower prestige.  Generally, the higher your prestige, the less likely other players will try to attack you out of fear of loss or counterattack.  This is a good thing if you have high prestige as the thousands of other players in your game environment can attack your cities 24 hours a day.  This is bad for those with low prestige as they often become the target for every hungry player city around them.  Higher prestige will also make it easier for you to get into a "good" alliance, which will further increase your potential for success and potentially fun in the game.

 

You gain prestige every time you complete building or researching anything.  This includes, buildings, farms, troops, fortifications and technology.  You also get prestige from attacking and winning.  Prestige gains and losses also appear to be inversely related to the total levels of all your town halls.  So as your "kingdom" grows, you have to do more to get prestige.

 

Early on, you have a single city with a level 1 town hall and can only build a handful of farms (for food, iron, wood and stone) and level 1 and 2 cottages.  Level 2 cottages allow for only a small population, which is needed to man farms and build troops.  As you are very limited in regards to accumulating resources with a level one city, Evony is programmed so that you gain much more prestige when you win a battle with this low level city compared to a higher level city.  But of course, you are only capable of attacking very low level targets given the limited amount of troops you can build and the low level heroes you start out with early on in the game.  As you increase the level of your Town Halls, you are able to increase the level of your cottages, build more farms, amass more resources and build more troops.  These increases are exponential in nature, so a level 4 cottage isn't 4 times as more significant than a level one cottage, but can hold more like 10 times as many people as a level 1 cottage.  As you grow, the previous small battles become insignificant and no longer allow for gains in prestige.  You now have to fight larger battles, attack higher level targets and expend more troops to get prestige.  And after you get several to many cities with level 9 and 10 town halls, you become able to amass massive armies and prestige seems almost impossible to come by unless you are constantly churning out tens of thousands of troops several time per day and attacking high level NPCs regularly.  As your Evony world matures, you end up needing to build 100K archers and attack multiple level 10 NPC cities per day to keep your prestige increasing at a rate comparable to those of the high prestige players.

 

In my prime, I was creating over a 100k archers per day, stockpiling resources and drafting over a 100K of troops per day with my historic city.  This kept my prestige in the top 20, while only logging in to Evony once or twice a day.  The problem was that my massive armies consumed enormous amounts of food and needed to be "fed" at least once a day.  This required that I log in, move food around and check into FaceBook to get Food Buffs.  Early on, the Food Buff feature on facebook didn't work and only allowed for a single 5% drop in food usage.  Later they allowed for up to a 100% decrease in food usage but very shortly later went back down to a maximum of a 50% decrease in food usage per day.  That allowed players to double the amount of troops you could feed per day, but forced them to log into Facebook at least once per day if they wanted to capitalize on this feature.  This really seems insane and it's amazing that so many players subject themselves to the slavery of such a game.

 

I would imagine that many of the big players spend a lot of time playing, either at home and/or at work.  There were in fact several big players in my alliance (most in their late 20s to 40s of life) that played at work or while "watching" their kids.  Many of these players also spent a good deal of real money on Evony, which was evident with the "bonus" packages that kept showing up in my inbox.  Each package meant that one of my alliance members had spent 30 US dollars for 300 Evony cents.

 

The top players in each world would be very hard to beat out without spending a lot of time online and/or actual money.  The number one "top player" in the world I was playing in already had most of the coveted and powerful historic heroes in that Evony World and that alone would give him a huge and insurmountable advantage over all the other individual players in the game.  This top player could build buildings and troops faster than anyone around and overwhelm enemy troops with very minimal losses with every attack he performed.  And to a ridiculous level!  And because of this alone, there was no way I was going to beat him out with only occasional play time.  Oddly enough, I later joined his alliance as my own alliance collapsed and this same true "top player" even sent reinforcements and a historic hero after I was attacked for protection.  What a guy.

 

But prior to joining the top alliance and befriending the top player, I developed a plan that would potentially allow me to get to the number one spot without too much of a time investment.  My plan was to build a level 2 city and abandon all my other cities.  This would allow me to have a single very low level city while still allowing me to have an Academy (not upgradeable with a level 1 city) and therefore allow me to keep my technology benefits.  So an attack from a level 2 city would be faster (Compass Technology) and more deadly (Attack, Defense and Archery Technology) than from a level 1 city and with far less casualties (Defense and Healing Technology).  The the low level of the city itself would hopefully allow for inflated prestige gains from attacks at high level NPC cities.

 

The only delay would involve my level 12 historic city.  It was the gem of the alliance and one of the very few controlled by a player at that time early on in Evony 2, but no one was strong enough to protect it alone once I made movements to check out of Evony.  I didn't seem right to just abandon the historic city as the alliance could really benefit from having it.  I actually waited several months, just checking into Evony 1-2 times per day to feed my troops until someone was willing to take the 12 off my hands.  Once someone was willing to take and defend it, I moved everything to my level two city and abandoned the rest.

 

Previously I was getting less than a thousand prestige from hitting a level 10 NPC cities when I had 9-10 high level cities.  But the first attack on a level 10 NPC city from my single level 2 Town Hall City yielded over 50K in prestige!  To conserve my troop count, I later changed the mix that I used to attack level 10s, which significantly decreased my archer losses while also decreasing prestige gains per attack.  During some of my trial runs, I discovered that using ballistae in conjunction with infantry to attack level 10 NPC cities drastically decreases overall losses per attack, but seems to have a very significant negative impact on prestige gains.  Therefore, ballistae should not be used for prestige attacks.

 

Many more attacks from my single level 2 city at every level 10 NPC I could find yielded a prestige of over 15 million in a very short amount of time.  I stopped at 15 million as more would just seem ridiculous.  I then conquered 9 level 10 NPCs for the hell of it.  This made my stats look more "real" as the player with the highest prestige generally have the max of 9-10 cities.

 

That's me "Blain" at the top.

 

 

I later decided - what the hell...and bumped up my prestige to 30 Million before truly "Checking Out".

 

 

This was done by NPCing all but the the level 2 prestige city and hitting level 10 NPC cities until the prestige was above the target of 30 Million.  I then took 3 level 10 NPC cities to get a 300K population and built 8 "empty" cities so that I had a total of 10 cities.  This makes it look like I have 10 fully built cities on the Statistic and Poling pages.  Most of the Evony players will be perplexed as to how it is even possible to attain such a high prestige, unless they Google "Blain prestige Evony" of course.

 

One player by the name of "D00M" got fed up as I started increasing my prestige at several million per day.  Not able to convince anyone else to attack me, he ported in adjacent to my city and sent a huge wave of around 70K ballistae led by a historic hero.  Since I had amassed millions of troops, this wave had only a minor impact on my troop size and wiped out his entire mechanized force.  He followed up with two rainbows (archer waves with a few other troops to decrease losses) afterwards, losing both battles and causing only a very insignificant loss of a few hundred swords and pikes in the process.  He ported out and the top player's reinforcements were later sent in case he decided to return.  He also used many stratagems on my Prestige city, to include the Burn Food Stocks Stratagem that day and the following day.  This did burn up between a total of 1-2 billion in food, which is a lot, but had no impact on my plan to get 30 Million prestige and to check out of Evony for good.  Sorry D00M.

 

 

Title

The highest title you can achieve is Prinzessin.  This ranking may mean more than prestige alone as the highest prestige player can easily be a newer player hitting NPC cities with a single city (like what I did as a "veteran" player).  After title, players are ranked by Prestige. 

 

 

 

Population

Getting the highest population was never a real goal, but at the end - hell why not.  This was done by taking 9 level 10 NPC cities and setting the loyalty of each city at 10%.

 

 

 

Governor

Right about the time I was checking out of Evony, Evony started it's first real election for Governor (spelled Govenor) and Governess.  Since I had the highest prestige, my name came up first on the list and I have a significant advantage in this election over other players in NA2.  Kavorak was the leader of the STORM alliance, which had something like 6 sister STORM Alliances (STORM2, STORM3, etc).  His people pulled together and did rather well.  The alliance I was in only had a total of around 70 members, but I had several players that rooted for me and talked many players outside of our alliance into voting for me.  I don't recall the final vote counts, but I won by a narrow margin.  Not bad for a 70 member alliance versus over 500 members in the STORM alliance.

 

Screenshot early on in the first polls

 

The "crown" buff" (third from the left) seen below is the "Govenor" buff.

 

 

Being Governor gave me orange text in world chat, the title "Govenor" and a few extra powers that allowed me to penalize and reward other players.  This was fun for a few days but required that I actually log in and chat in World chat.  What was really interesting was that some of the players became very bitter that I had surpassed everyone in prestige and plotted to "take me out".  I saw on several occasions my coordinates posted in world chat and folks calling me a cheat.  And it's this type of vile human nature that in part makes Evony more "real" and human than just playing against a computer Warcraft type player-vs-computer game.  It can actually make it rather fun, especially when you are part of a successful group that pulls together to take out a common and despicable enemy.

 

Cheat or not, no one ever attacked me while I was Governor or shortly afterwards.  This is most likely because many players probably feels that having the highest prestige in the game may also mean having a large, if not the largest, army and it would be foolish to draw attention to yourself by attacking a biggest player around.  Truth be told, I wasn't the largest player around and wouldn't have be able to take on a massed attack by hundreds of bitter players.  But I could have wiped out several if they chose to attack me at that time.  : )

 

Someone actually later decided to attack my single city and had horrible losses.  Nice try D00M.

 

 

Cities

There isn't any great honor with being the top Cities player.  This simply means that you're a Prinzessin, as a Prinzessin can have a total of 10 cities.  At this point in the game, there are several with the title of Prinzessin and many players with 10 cities.  I am ranked number one since I also have the highest prestige.

 

 

 

Historic City

Historic cities were introduced to Evony 2.  These are far more difficult to conquer than level l0 NPC cities and allow you to draft troops and set other policies on NPC and Player cities alike within a certain range determined by the level of your historic city.  The also allow for larger attack waves, making them more deadly than any other city around.  It also makes you a potential target as others would like to have your city and may not want you to have such an unfair advantage.

 

Early on in the game, there was a lot of talk about them in the forums.  Conquering one was considered the most difficult and prestigious task of all.  I followed the forums for a while to figure out how others were planning on taking them.  One thread started by a "Satan" seemed promising.  But after a good amount of time watching him insult other players and babble about the proper formula, all without a single proven How-TO or even an attempt at taking one himself, I gave up and decided to give it a try on my own.  My timing wasn't ideal for several reasons and I saw why others were so reluctant to not even try this early on. 

 

First off, the first historic city taken by an alliance should be done by the alliance and not by a single player.  Unfortunately, no one in my alliance was near ready to hit a historic city around the time I was thinking about it (few were even capable of taking a level 10 NPC cities then).  It would in fact take many months for individual members of the alliance to get to the point where they could seriously considering hitting one.

 

Second, Evony was still working out many bugs.  One bug involved the food buffs available on Facebook.  They advertised "No Farming and No Bullies", which meant that you didn't have to log in three times a day, every day, just to farm and feed a small army.  The game also stated that you could stack up 20 5% food buffs for a total of 100% off of troop upkeep.  These buffs just didn't work back then.  And at the time I decided to take a 12, I quickly came to the realization of what it took to feed a large army as I started building up and those troops started eating.  My original plan was to hit with a huge wave maxed out with ballistae (plural for ballista), rams and maybe even catapults.  My cities were all set up to build rams and I started building rams and some catapults.  Shortly afterwards, I found out how much these troops eat!  I later stopped building mechanized units and settled with a much smaller force than my original vision of an epic mechanized attack wave.  Later I also found out that there was a bug that didn't allow for the defensive capabilities of my rams.  This made that wave far less effective, but in some ways also made the overall take of my first historic city more doable back then.  I was still at a disadvantage with my choice of attack mixs.

 

Third off, I underestimated what it took to take a historic city.  A historic is best taken by attacking from another historic, with maximum use of War Ensigns, high level hero gear and with several high level historic heroes.  I didn't have a historic city to attack from, decided that War Ensigns weren't needed on all my attack waves (opting to save the ones I won the Wheel of Fortune - which I still had when I checked out of Evony), didn't have high level hero gear as this necessitated real money or luck on the Wheel of Fortune, and didn't have a single Historic Hero - again because this generally took real money to get.

 

In the end, I took my level 12 historic city in part do to luck and with just the minimum requirements to take one.  But, I was one of the first in all the Evony 2 worlds to take one and got to take advantage of 10% drafting from the 4 level 10 NPCs within my reach each day.  This was later dropped to 5% per policy per day.

 

The city itself was empty and required a lot of work to build it up for defense prior to the 24hour truce period was over.  I used a good many Speedups Gifts from Facebook and stayed up way too late to make this happen.

 

The level 12 historic allowed for easy hits on all NPC cities as you can attack with 125k troops on every attack.  The extra drafted troops also came in handy for resource and medal farming and I was a Prinzessin in no time at all, without needing to purchase a single medal box.

 

Here is my forth wave (2 warrior only waves followed by 2 pikeman and archer waves then this wave) (you can also tell that this is before Evony fixed their Queen, King and Historic hero image glitch and treasure image bug):

 

Again, I had planned on a much larger contingent of mechanical units, but decided to cut that short given how much food they required for upkeep at the time.  I sent five rainbows after this wave without War Ensign.

 

Here's the final rainbow wave:

 

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I got 634 for prestige for the final Big Hit.  Yah, taking this 12 was a prestige lowering event.

 

And here is the final attack report with "Attack Successfully" on it:

 

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All that Hubbub for a report that only lasts about a week online and in our alliance War Reports.

 

If I were to do it all again, I would have sent a much larger mechanized force and used War Ensigns on all the major attacks.  Or, I would have sent 40+ rainbows from 4 different cities.  Or, I would have attacked from my 12 to get the extra troops rally point benefit.

 

Here is a Photoshopped screenshot of what my Historic City and supporting Cities looked like:

 

The three cities adjacent to the Historic city have long since been abandoned and I gave away the Historic city to someone in my alliance before I jumped to 15 million and later 30 million prestige, so the flag isn't yellow anymore (at least when I view the map).  Not too bad for a quick Photoshop job.  Makes you wonder if I made up the rest of the information on this page. 

 

 

Historic Heroes

I didn't even really try to get one of these.  It would require a bit of luck or from me to port in somewhere for a chance at one.  That would require some Evony cents to purchases the whereabouts of the hero and cents to port there and port back.  Plus, by the time I learned about Evony, it seemed that one player had already horded all the historic heroes for himself.  And if he already had all of them, I wasn't planning on trying to take one from him.

 

 

I spent 1,000 gold to get info about this hero and looks like I also completed a quest by doing so.

 

Hell, I have some Evony Cents...lets Enquire Details for 10 Cents.  And when I hit the Enquire button, I received a message in my Report showing:

 

 

So he's at 100,100 - a Capital Historic City.  Hmm...  I wonder who owns that one?

 

 

Yep - AlexGreat, the hoarder of all great Historic Heroes.  Good thing he's on my side.

 

 

Title and Rank

The higher your title, the more cities you can own.  The more cities you own, the more troops you can build.  In Evony 2, others can colonize your cites but can't take them from you and destroy them.  This takes some of the fun and risk, which often go hand in hand, out of the game and changes how various strategies will work in this gaming environment.  My thought is that one successful strategy in this gaming enviroment would be to take 10 level 10 NPCs, convert most of the cottages to barracks, and build up massive troops as soon and fast as you can.  This can be done with a strong alliance or individually.  In my case, our alliance never really got to the point of working together to take very many NPC cities.  But other alliances looked like they did.

 

You need certain medals for each title and rank advancement. 

 

Medals per Rank

Rank Nation Justice Freedom Wisdom Courage Honor Lion Rose Cross
Lieutenant                  
Captain                 5
Major               5  
Colonel             5    
General           5      

 

Medals per Title

Title

 Nation Justice Freedom Wisdom Courage Honor Lion Rose Cross

Knight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

10

Baronet

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

10

 

Baron

 

 

 

 

 

5

10

 

 

Viscount

 

 

 

 

5

10

 

 

 

Earl

 

 

 

5

10

 

 

 

 

Marquis

 

 

5

10

 

 

 

 

 

Duke

 

5

10

 

 

 

 

 

 
Furstin 5 10              
Prinzessin 30 15              

 

Each of these medals are hidden in various flats, valleys and NPC cities.  The Rose medals were difficult to acquire.  They can be found in many low level flats and NPC cities by sending waves of archers with no losses.  Another technique I used to attain Rose medals was to attack with scout waves.  This creates losses, but drastically increases the number of attacks you can do per sitting and therefore speeds up the entire process of Rose medal farming.  After that, most medals can be acquired from farming level 4 and 5 NPC cities with no losses with ballista attacks.  This also allows you to slowly level up your heroes, while building up an army.  Later, Justice and Nation medals are found in level 10 NPC cities.  Hits on level 10 NPC cities can be costly with lower level heroes, but you will get to level them up rather quickly given the total amount of troop losses from these takes.

 

The higher your title, the better the daily Gifts you have give on Facebook.  Once you become a Prinzessin, you are able to give away minor fortune packs on Facebook.  This was a huge thing at first, back when fortune packs had more of a potential of providing you with something very valuable and when no one was able to gift them.  But as more and more players became Prinzessins, the awards on the 20 or so spins you got per day diminished in value, both because of Evony programming to devalue the Fortune Spins and because the novelty of getting a fortune packs became so watered down.  It was fun while it lasted.

 

 

Hero Gear

Hero gear can be upgraded at a workshop with "Materials."  These can be won on the Wheel of Fortune, purchased at the Evony Shop and rarely found as treasure.

 

 Materials:

 

Hero Gear:

 

I didn't find very much "Materials" treasure hunting and was unwilling to spend real money to really build up the gear levels.  But I did win Evony Cents on the Wheel of Fortune on several occasions and later won several Material Chests after Minor Fortune Packs became common gifts on Facebook.  It wasn't uncommon to see players leveling up their gear beyond level 10, which would only be useful to Historic Heroes greater than level 100.

 

You can also increase the star level of each gear, which further increases the political, intelligence or attack strengths of your heroes.  This requires gems that are often found when winning an attack on an NPC city.  When you get enough gems, you "gamble" them at a chance at increasing the start level of each individual gear.  If you lose, the start level of that gear drops.  Here is another appeal to the gambler type players out there and makes the game a little more "unpredictable" in some ways.

 

 

The more gems you use (up to 4 at a time), the higher the success rate of raising your star level.  The higher the star level, the lower your odds are of increasing the star level.

 

Since regular heroes in Evony 2 max out at level 100, hero gear and star levels are all that are left to increase the political, intelligence and attack attributes of your heroes long term once they reach level 100.  And this is one of the ways to separate the powerful players from the not so powerful ones.

 

If you are the type of player that spends money on Evony or is very lucky on the Wheel of Fortune, hero gear upgrades would be one area to focus on for long term benefits that will follow through the game.

 

 

Attacking and Battles

Evony is a war game, so the game is centered around battle.  In many of the battle type computer games out there, you get to watch little animated soldiers, cavalry and perhaps even vehicles and other mechanics battling it out.  In Evony, you don't get this.  You wait for the countdown for the arrival of troops to get to 0 seconds and await a battle report.

 

 

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That's it.  All you get is a report that shows how many forces you've lost and how many of the enemy troops were lost (a level 10 NPC city in this example).  This one also shows that I won a Justice medal (which were hard to get early on), a gem (used for upgrading "Star" levels on hero gear), the prestige gained (that's a whole lot - but I attacked with a single city with a town hall level of 2), the number of experience the hero gained (need to scroll down for that), whether a hero was captured, resources plundered (in this example - as much as 86,549 archers could carry), and how many troops were automatically healed at your rally point in your city (seen only on the Evony player screen - not this web report).  The loyalty of the city is important if you are trying to conquer it, as you must get it down to 0 with subsequent attacks to take it.  If you are just "farming" for hero experience, prestige, resources, medals or treasure, it is meaningless. 

 

The report on the Evony screen looks like this:

 

It's hard to believe that so many people would invest so much time and even money to wait for reports like this.  But they do.

 

 

Alliance

There are weak alliances and powerful alliances.  There are also good ones and ones that will drive you to quit early on.  The good ones will band together and keep each other safe from attacks from larger players or alliances.  Bad ones will mock the unfortunate players instead of lending a hand or stay silent as other players lose marginal battles.  The alliance I ended up in was pretty fun.  It had some emotional and quite dysfunctional players who banded together through various wars and did surprisingly well.  The alliance chat was often very entertaining and the topics were generally unrelated to Evony. 

 

It was this alliance that made the game rather fun and got me to stick around for as long as I did.  This same alliance later dissolved as players left for a new server that allowed you to attack instead of just colonizing other players.  I subsequently went to the top alliance on this server.  It was filled with the top "good" players who as a group have taken over a large section of the map and had oppressed many.  They seemed much more organized and goal orientated than the members of my previous alliance, with officer meetings on Skype and plans to dominate the world.  Shortly after I joined, the number two alliance joined our alliance and the leadership declared world victory.  The short time I was with this final "top" alliance, their alliance chat never seemed all that interesting compared to the crazy chat from my old alliance.  Despite them being organized and attaining world domination, I would not have fooled around with Evony very long had I started with their alliance.

 

 

City Setup

There are many ways to set up your cities and much of this depends on how you play.  If you are one of those play at work folks, you can get away with a more high-maintenance setup, and if you are just logging on every few days, you may need a more self sufficient setup.  My approach was to set up as many cities as I could as fast as I could.  This allowed me to research technology in multiple cities early on.  My thinking was that I could always abandon a city if I couldn't defend all of them.  Even a colonized city will still produce troops, resources and technology.  And you can just move troops somewhere else so that they can't be drafted.  That was at least my thought...I was never colonized.  Well, except for a few minutes when I was experimenting with "giving away" a level 8 NPC to another player.

 

I ended up with 8 full cities before I decided to take a level 12 historic city.  Each of these had about:

 

In the level 10 cities I took, I eliminated all but 9 Cottages, all Marketplaces (except for one in my trading city), and all Inns (except for one in my Hero city) and replaced them all with level 9 barracks.  I first got all barracks to level 4 to allow for archers, then later to level 9 to allow for rams and more troops in the queue.

 

After I was able to conquer level 10 NPC cities, I quit building cities from scratch.  Three of my cities were lumber cities.  Each lumber city had only lumber fields (no farms or quarries) and 9-10 level 10 forests.  Two cities were steel cities with 9-10 level 10 mountains.  And the rest were level 10 NPC food cities with 10 level 10 lakes apiece.  Each morning and evening, I would move all my wood out of the lumber cities to resupply  the other cities and stockpile the rest in the Trade City to sell for food.  The steel would be moved around to other cities for building troops.  This setup worked out very well, and I only had to purchase food and sell lumber every once in a while.  If you wanted to maximize production and didn't mind more maintenance, then have more lumber and less steel and food cities would be an option.  In regards to steel cities, they require far more population than lumber cities, so you have to make a compromise in regards to the number of cottages, barracks and iron mines you have.  But if you have plenty of time to play, you can always set production to zero, recruit your troops and then set production back to 100 percent in each of your cities, or at least in the steel ones.  I was too lazy for this technique.

 

In regards to heroes, high base levels is very important since they max out at level 100 in Evony 2.  I kept one level 10 Inn and kept a lookout for potentially high level attack and poli heroes.  I had one high level intel hero that I moved from city to city via 1 scout when it was time to research technology.  My goal for "high base level" was 69.  I had many level 69 base attack heroes, one level 70 and a few specialty heroes (Queen and Mars, but no Historics).  I distributed my highest level attack heroes in all my cities so that they were there to defend and speed up troop training.

 

In regards to farming, each city had a designated level 5 NPC to farm.  I built one city adjacent to a level 5 NPC city early on to allow for leveling up my heroes.  This worked well until I was was able to take a historic and then focused on farming level 10s and 8s.  That helped me quickly level up many heros to level 100 and get the medals needed for Prinzessin.

 

In regards to clustering of cites, I opted to keep them packed in tight.  This made defense easy as I could easily and quickly move troops around and made redistributing resources quick and easy.  After I discovered that you can take a historic city, I built an outlying city next to a nearby level 12 Historic City and subsequently took two level 10 NPC cities that I made by NPCing an empty city on a level 10 flat right next to the Historic City.  These cities were used to attack the level 12 and later were used to help feed and defend it.

 

 

Facebook

The move to connect Facebook with Evony must have been a tremendously successful marketing endeavor for the company managing the Evony games.  Gamewise, players benefiting from the features that come with the Facebook connect have a tremendous advantage over players not on Facebook, so much so that you just can't be a "successful" high powered player in Evony without Facebooking each day.  This allows for huge daily resource bonuses when you "help with production" for your allies, special game buffs such as free troop upkeep with you click on New Feeds and special daily gifts sent by other players.

 

For Evony businesswise, Facebook allows for "viral" marketing.  For example, when I first found out about the Facebook link, I created a fake Facebook account and added 2 friend who were in my alliance.  After I figured out how much you could get from Facebook "farming", I created an alliance group in Facebook, got most of the alliance up on Facebook and started collecting "Evony Friends."  At the end of my Evony career, I had over 700 "Friends," and hundreds of News Feed Evony bonuses I could select from each day.  Now each of those 700 plus "Friends" had "Friends" and many of these accounts were "real" accounts with real friends attached, who could see that their friends were spending a lot of time with that Evony game.  And the more people that see Evony is out there, the more people that will play and out of that group will inevitably be those that end up spending their 30 US dollars to get the extra edge.  Smart thinking Evony!

 

The following is a screen shot of the Evony/Facebook New Feeds.  There are annoying announcements that pop on on the Evony screen throughout play that ask if you would like to share one of these New Feed items with your Facebook Friends.  If you accept, your Facebook Friends will get one of these announcements.  If they click on it and are linked to Evony, they will get some sort of prize.  Prizes include food buffs, free troops, minor prestige boost, war horns and such.  Ten food buffs will bring down troop food consumption to 50% for 24 hours and is a must once you build a large army.

 

 

Here is a screen shot of Evony Gifts.  Other Evony players can send you one gift per day.  Early on in the game, free troops seem nice.  Later on you quickly determine that Speed Ups are better.  These shorten the time of building by 15 minutes, so 20 of these per day can save you 5 hours of build time!  And later on after your empire is almost complete and you have higher ranking friends, fortune packs allow for a spin on the Wheel of Fortune.  Each spin can mean fancy Evony gifts like Penicillin which reduces battle casualties, medals, high stat heroes, resources or even Evony Cents!

 

 

Oh Look!  David Wayne sent a Minor Speedup Pack and isn't wearing a shirt.  How did I end up friending this guy?

 

And below is a screen shot of the daily gift screen.  You can send out gifts to 40 people at a time.  The higher your Evony title, the better the gifts you can give.  Once you reach Prinzessin, you can send out the much coveted Minor Fortune Packs.  Early on when there were few that had won the title of Prinzessin, this was a big deal.  Later on, it was easy to get nothing but Fortune Pack each day, as long as you had enough Facebook Friends playing Evony.

 

 

And here is an example of what you see when you click on the "Visit Empire" button of an ally in Facebook.  You get to peek into your allies' cities, see how much of each resource they are amassing or using, see how they set up their cites and towns, and where all their cities are (at least you used to be able to do this).  There is also a "Help increase production" button on these screen which sends the cities owner and you a nice little resource package with gold, wood, iron, food and stone.  The higher your title, the better the package you receive.  If you are able to max out on resource packages each day, you will not need to build up farms early on and can build to your heart'sza content, limited by time only.  This gives you an enormous advantage over new players that don't know about this feature.

 

 

Wow.  Anesidora is already at 1 Million prestige.  Nice job!

 

 

 

Please feel free to link to this site so that others can find it.  It's easy to link to this site, just copy one of the texts below onto your web page:

 

 

Zen's Evony Page

 

 

 

 

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