Evony community info

Yeterday evening, Aug 22nd, 2009, at about 8pm EST, the Evony server network had an outage.  Players couldn’t login for about three and a half hours.  Every website that had anything to do with Evony got bombarded by complaints by players who were afraid of being attacked or hacked and demanded financial compensation, and some of them couldn’t find the official Evony contact form.   For the record, this is the official Evony contact address: http://www.evony.com/index.do?PageModule=Static&type=ContactUs.   There are other ways to contact Evony, like through their bbs, or its admins, if they happen to be related to Evony, but however it happened, you did manage to get through to them!  Thank you and Congrats!!!

Evony did something uncharacteristic of them in my opinion, but also probably their first truly intelligent and decent promotion (masked as damage control), and their best promotion so far in my opinion, as well.  I’ll let you read it in their words.  Snipped:

Evony Community,

Today we experienced a critical downtime of over 3.5 hours with all servers and the main website being unavailable and then some issues with the forums.  We understand that this has made many of our great players frustrated and disappointed.  We’re disappointed too.

… Today’s downtime was caused by an error from our hosting partner, The Planet.  … as we’re a small company, when problems like this arise, it affects us very deeply.  We’d like to take this opportunity though to try and make something good out of it by offering a token of goodwill to all players.  We are releasing to all players a Compensation Pack consisting of 10 Amulets and 100 cents, FREE.  While we cannot make up for the issue that The Planet has caused, we do hope you accept our apologies and gift and still continue enjoying the game.

Please allow us 3 business days to send out this pack to all accounts.  Accounts must have been created before today in order to obtain the pack.  You will be able to claim the Compensation Pack in the left hand corner in the game.

Evony had pretty much killed the competitive advantage of players who don’t pay them when their servers cut down the drop rates of medals astronomically.  In particular, it’s nearly impossible to get enough rose medals to be promoted even to a baronet - which is just your second promotion.  Which means most players who don’t pay Evony are stuck with two cities, and if they are not careful they have to destroy the second city to build NPCs level 5 around them to farm.

Don’t get me wrong.  You can still be the best player in the game and on the server without giving Evony a dime.  SoCCo did it on W19 quite dominantly.  You can be really good in terms of prestige if you have the right strategy.  What I am saying is that ultimately without those promotions you are at a major disadvantage, mainly militarily.   With 6 cities you can build your army 3 times faster than with 2 cities.  You can do your research 3x faster.  You might need to spend more time to maintain the cities, that is true, but you clearly have a huge advantage. 

Now that you have 100 free cents you have the ability to equalize the odds just a tiny bit.   You could buy a junior medal box which contains 6-12 random low level medals for 80c, or you can buy 16 Amulets for the same price.  Which is better?   Evony claim the wheel of fortune pays out 24c each spin (5c) and that they increased the average daily reward 4x to like 100c.  I wonder if the median reward was increased at all…  Anyway, you might get lucky with 16 spins, or you might get 16 speakers.   I’m going for the junior box.

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Evony has a concept called city gates.  You can read about it in a little more detail at our Evonypedia site.   OR I can save you some time and tell you right now that in the rally spot dialogue box there is a check box asking you if you want your gates open.  If you open them then your troops get to fight when an army invades them.  Otherwise, well, take a guess.  Nope, if you said they are protected, you’re wrong.  They are just sitting ducks for attacking archers.  I haven’t seen proof of it myself, nor read anything authoritative about it, yet I have it from a good source, sort of our guild leader in BOOM on server 14.  So, there seems to be almost no point in keeping your gates closed.  Ever.  Well unless you know you are attacked by an army of sword carrying dwarfs (they need the elves to shoot arrows). 

Another concept in evony is alliances.  If you’re not a member then join one, there’s no membership fee, and you will get some reward from the quests button.  I know, I know, what about the quitting fee… None either!  Free.  You can talk to your allies for free which makes the game more interesting and they can help you with resources or questions you have, after, of course, you’ve checked our evonypedia.  Oh, a little tip, if you don’t find the article you want on evonypedia, but do find it on another wiki, like theevonywiki, or were told about it, do me a favour and copy it, and paste it into an email, and fire it off to contribute@evonypedia.com.  It will appear on the site in like 5 minutes, because as I keep telling you our editor never sleeps.  If it’s not there in 5 minutes, post a comment here and I’ll reply with his phone number. Don’t worry, you won’t wake him up.

The main benefit of an alliance, as in the real world, is your military power. You would therefore think that you can coordinate an attack in your alliance against a target and completely annihilate it with 100x the troops it has.  Well, you can coordinate all you like, but you can’t attack all together.  So an attack has to come in waves.  The first attacker will be the strongest force to weaken the defences as much as possible for the next guy, and similarly for subsequent attackers. 

The problem is that if you’ve got a much larger force than your enemy the evony battle simulation gives you a decided edge.  You overwhelm the other side and almost take no losses at all.  If you are in an alliance and know your city is about to be attacked you can ask them to reinforce your city with their army.  Open your gates and make sure you can host many armies (your diplomacy centre has to have a high level).  As the defensive side, you have an overwhelming edge over the attacking alliance.  If you assemble a truly large enough army in your city that it takes no losses even against the best army of your enemy (which will be fought first) then no matter how large the attack force or alliance is, you’re safe, and you will take almost no losses. 

If that really is the case, then the only way you can get attacked successfully is if your own alliance turns on you.  So you better be very nice to them. 

Hey, I ended up a blog post without any self-serving statements, yay!  (I believe I’ve already made those statements at the beginning of the post)

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I promised to notify you guys about new videos from the guys at Evony Tutorials, and here it is.  They told me it will be released today, so look for that one titled "The Economy".  I don’t want to ruin the movie by telling you how it ends, but suffice it to say that it spells doom for certain very high level players.   You see, players were foolishly following our quick-start guide and didn’t build enough farms.  They used this strategy to get to astronomical prestige levels which makes their population crave food, and there simply wouldn’t be enough.

The worst part is as more people read our start-up guide, the worse it’s going to get.  So stop reading it people!  Stop advancing in ranks already.  Do it for the economy, if not for me being able to conquer something still.

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I do play Evony, not just blog about it.  I don’t have much time to play it however, a good thing at my level, since it takes a day to build most things now.

I therefore have a strategy that I use in other similar games as well:

• Build up your city in a balanced  way at the beginning.  Follow our quick-start guide.
• Build your second city as soon as you can.  That city needs only an academy to help you with research, and resources (and workers) to ship them to your first city (or their cash equivalent).  Don’t worry about defending it, but if you have the extra time, put in a tower so you can ship the resources to your main city whenever you’re attacked.
• Do whatever it takes to build ballistas (and archers first).  They will let you conquer a lot more with fewer troops.  See our theory crafting page.
• Build as many cities as you can - probably only one more at this stage.
• Now you have lots of cash, resources and friends in your alliance.  Send me some, please.  Hey, without me you’d still be stuck trying to upgrade your walls as if anyone is going to attack you, and loosing thousands of warriors a day in a futile battle against one forest level 11.

My method will take you longer to build a weak army, but it will make it much quicker to build a strong one.  It might be harder to raid resources at first, if you’re in to that sort of things, but hang in there,  soon you’ll be as good as the guys who play twice as much.

As of the new patch today, don’t bother abandoning your second city to  create a low level barbarian city with more resources - it will revert  to a flat.  Evony, apparently, are running out of real-estate space, so warrantless extra-judicial demolitions are common.  See how smart my strategy is by not relying on abandoned cities?! (<– Rhetorical question.)

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You saw that You-tube Evony tutorial video I linked below, right?  Well, we were so happy to be there that we contacted the team.  I can tell you they are really talented, but I can’t force you to believe me.  Still, that shouldn’t stop you from looking at their new video about archers or subscribing to them.  They told me they would tell me ahead of time on their next video scheduled release, so tune to this channel (blog) to be the first to see it.   You can subscribe to my blog as well.  Did you notice the little RSS icon on the right pane?  Click on it and copy the URL if it doesn’t display nicely in your browser.  Paste the link in your favourite RSS reader and subscribe.  Thank you very much.

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Here are some very compelling reasons that you should use the Evony quick-start to start a new city in Evony:

1. Our guide looks better.   You will be looking at it, won’t you?
2. Our editor knows his stuff!  He’s very analytical.  He will tell you to build an academy early on so that you can parallelize your construction and training soldiers with researching and save time!   Other guides don’t seem to care about saving you time… sad sad sad.
3. We were here first!  Thousands of users already read it, and liked it, maybe, I don’t know really, I just know many come back.  Either way, I liked it, except for the parts about how much resources cost at the market and not having more insight into the game.  Yes, I am trying to promote that guide.  He promised he’ll fix it.
4. Did I mention out editor doesn’t sleep nights?  That means if you get stuck somewhere and the guide doesn’t help you then you can just post a message here and complain, and he’ll fix it right away.
5. Actually, if you offer him good advice, corrections, etc.. and click on some of his awfully ugly and irrelevant google ads (or just tell him you did - although he probably counts them between Evony constructions) he’ll pay you with money!
6. Actually, he won’t give you real money, but he’ll give you real game money, even though I didn’t talk to him about it at all!  Because I know him, and he loves it when others try to help him out, and he goes out of his way to help others.         We are just friends.
7. Did I say leave a comment here for improvements?  Certainly do that, but for other stuff, like bugging our editor, why don’t you do it yourself.  His character name is nynaeve on all Evony servers, and he’d usually be one of the first few players on a new server thanks to our notifier.   He actually was the 3rd new player on world server 10 and now has the largest alliance by far (Aiel).   He also has a blog, so feel free to file all complaints directly to him there.

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Evonynet is prominently featured in a new evony video guide. We did not solicite this video reference but we are grateful for it! It is very exciting to see people finding our work useful and more so, credit us. Well, I credit you back youtube group EvonyTutorials.

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