Evony: The King's Return (1 of ??)

It's been a week since I installed Evony on my Android 10.1" tablet.

It's been a bit of fun, namely these first seven days. But the free ride seems to be slowing down while variety has been increasing. I have hit a period where stamina has become scarce. Without stamina, nothing outside the castle fort seems to matter much.

During these seven days, I have gradually discovered how to take reasonable control of the game.

One of the early mysteries concerned how to increase the level. The king's castle has its own buildings, which produce or provide various goods or services. I had been under the impression that there was a level that entailed advancement -- a fact that proved to be true. However, the mystery of this level was that the monarch has a level within the level achieved in the game, and each building has a level that represents its technological advancement. The word "level" therefore has its own ubiquity. And since there is no obvious game manual to read, a while of study brought the realization that the level of a particular building were contingent on the level of another particular building. Certain buildings cannot be improved until certain other buildings or structures have been improved.

The process of improving buildings seems to be neverending and can take even days, while at first creating buildings, constructions, and improvements can be instantaneous.

In seven days' time I have basically figured out the GUI of the system, which was more or less pure fun. Some structures and features won't be available until reaching yet higher levels, which all comes down to upgrading the keep.

Other buildings can't produce certain items until the buildings get upgraded.

So at about this point, a whole bunch of witches appeared amid the monster and celebratory musical goblin types. Celebrating bands of goblins are not monsters, but certain other types of goblins pack considerable adversarial punch.

Visiting the "mysterious witch" NPC promised to be like visiting goblins. Goblins offer certain gifts. In considering a visit to a witch, the order of the day would be to ply her with pie. As the action explains when selected to contemplate a visit to a witch, you have to get a pie from a dwarf. After looking high and low for a dwarf, none were to be found. That was when I went online to figure out what to do about getting these "delicious pies."

Evony always has some of their own brand of excitement going on, from incentives to support the game more by buying needful items with requisite tokens of your gratitude or special events that number at least an handful. I found sales, deals, events, and celebrations represented in the rightmost column of the game screen, assuring players that the game can be tweaked more than by play-time alone. And that was where the dwarf was found, through the unlabeled Harvest Festival Celebration icon in a row titled, "Dwarf's Lucky Apple."

A touchscreen tap on the row in question brought up available options for propositioning the dwarf directly through an adjacent tab. I would have to collect Wishing Coins by exploiting resources found on the map. Ordinarily these resources consist of more opportunities to mine ore, harvest lumber, grow food or collect stone for use in building and feeding workers for any given project or effort.

This showed that in addition to regular gameplay, there would probably be interesting game-play variations from time to time to keep gamers interested in Evony and coming back for more.

Evony can be played fairly casually, which I like. You do not spend all your time fighting monsters directly. Instead, your army takes as much time as required to march across the map to wherever the monster may happen to be. You can exit the app totally and go do anything you like, but once the action has been set and sent to the server it will transpire over the allotted amount of time without needing to interact. These excursions can take seconds, but across the map it can take twenty minutes or more to reach a reach a monster. For me, that means time to play a few Mistplay games, work on dinner and get caught up with dishes.

While at first I was put off by this unconventional strategy, it really makes some kind of sense. I can battle monsters near the castle usually when I want steady action and make my fights count when I have important real-world things to do.

Now, back to the stamina problem.

The usual way to obtain stamina would be to get some at the tavern or buy rationed quantities with gems. It can also be won as a supply, which entails battle or free gifts. What I learned today was that stamina also builds automatically over time with rest, increasing by one unit roughly every ten minutes. It's not much of a problem unless running out of gems and wanting some action now. However, stamina can also be stockpiled by collecting it from treasure & free gifts of some abundance.

Free gifts can be found through some of the events & incentives offered in the game on the right column mentioned above. For example, I was a new player the first week so I was given an option to get a free gift each day just by logging in and choosing the obvious option in the "event center." Some number of free gifts can also be collected every so often inside the castle gates. A server gift found at the castle entrance through the city walls proper renews often. In addition to the tavern offering of free stamina, some treasure chests can be opened inside the tavern itself by checking on "Activity," which adds a point to the activity counter every time something gets done and awards an activity chest at regular intervals.

And another way to get treasure would be by interacting with Evony puzzles, which should be familiar fare with anyone whom has seen the ads. These puzzles can be re-attempted again and again. Although some sort of restriction system seems to be in play, I haven't yet tripped it off. I've got through an entire two courses and have only found one puzzle that I couldn't solve.