Playing Evony (2 of ???)

While getting started with Evony, I decided to create an Alliance early on. It was quickly filled to its capacity of 50 members. It seems that additional members would be possible by building on alliance research, and many options to improve the alliance exist. The basic idea involves setting up a banner and then forming an alliance city.

My own focus has been on eliminating monsters. Now I'm up to choosing fights against monsters with only a medium chance of winning and have reached level 16, which reflects the level of the Keep.

The Keep were central to advancing in Evony. All other improvements follow from upgrading that building, which also provides the mechanism for levying taxes throughout the empire. Often the Keep cannot be upgraded until upgrading certain other constructions within the realm to a minimal or certain maximum level.

Until reaching level 16, there seemed to be a big lull in progress, and the game got dull. Monsters couldn't be killed past level 15, which left my army tackling Crafty Rangers and lower fare. But don't overlook lesser fare, because some of the treasure offered can be useful. It was at level 15 that I found that my army could hit the lowest of the Hypocritical Knight NPC armies successfully. By level 16, I was sacking Greedy Goblins. And when my army surpassed 40,000, the Golden Goblins became a convenient source of gold. These goblin troupes have 100,000 or more gold to offer, and gold makes enhancement of your Generals accessible by adding stars to their credentials.

Actually I downloaded Evony to try to get an incentive of a whopping 24,000,000 tokens from another site I frequently use. The objective was to upgrade any one general to four stars.

To beat the dullness of the lull period, I focused on building my castle infrastructure and eradicating monsters. In the meantime, I also helped the alliance in any way that I could, including a little improving of my empire's own research. I also resorted to reading some of the online Evony game-play manual to discover how to go about building the alliance city. Members must contribute troops to the banner in order to build the city. 

There appears to be a discrepancy between what the manual says about building your alliance city and what the game provides for. The game appears to allow 72 hours (3 days) to build the city, but the manual says 24 hours. And the amount of troops that alliance members must send isn't especially clear, so long as at least 20 alliance send their "best troops."

The lull period did offer some time to think and get to know the game and contemplate any available option that has not yet been explored. In that time, I got my Subordinate City up and running and began to upgrade my generals to higher levels, enhance their performance stats, apply skills from books, and even bring a couple back to life in the temple becaue some were killed while gathering resources, and one was killed by an attack on the Subordinate City.

My first attacks on fellow players were actually planned from the original location of my realm. There were quite a number of level 2 cities in the vicinity, and I drew the conclusion that these cities were left by players who quickly tired with the game and disappeared offline, never to be seen again. They left behind paltry armies and were readily beaten. I moved my armies to torch about ten or so of these cities in an impressive board display that must had terrified some other players and looked good on my resume. I expected that the cities would disappear after that, but that wasn't the case. When torching a city, technically the Archer Tower burns ... or maybe the city walls. Each city has its own protective archer tower and city walls. Once winning the battle, the city shows as burning on the game board proper, but symbolically, indicating that the city has been sacked.

After setting fire to a dozen cities and having been attacked much later by some zealous and successful monarchs, I decided to move my city to find if I'd be an easy target elsewhere. I found that I couldn't move my city off the specific server, although I could navigate and see what the realms of other servers look like. They all have more or less the same layout, although resources and monsters aren't guaranteed to be in identical places. Indeed, after touching down directly next to a couple of farms, these resources moved within a few hours away from my realm.

Eventually I settled upon a very challenging area to teleport my monarch's city to. It was surrounded by monsters mostly of level 19 and up, with only a few lesser ones and low-level bosses, including the goblins and bosses I couldn't begin to defeat without alliance assistance. Almost every monster nearby was beyond my ability to defeat, which meant that I'd be focusing on infrastructure and monsters at least 200 km away, mostly. There weren't a lot of cities around, and the area was fairly remote. I took a closer look at the map and found temples, then later hazarded past an unoccupied structure in a forest while collecting treasure left behind by a vanquished fenir or Royal Thief. This structure could be occupied and then used for lobbing only a certain place. I checked the log and it had never been used. The temples can also be occupied, apparently.

At this point, I'm a lone fish weaving in and out of other schools of fish. I've only joined an handful of alliance fights, picking on Weak Fenir, and have yet to participate in a major battle. As a player, I've barely gotten my feet wet. Weak Fenir leave an abundance of treasure chests and can be tackled with as few as 10,000 troops. This makes for a convenience to supply a certain number of useful items that can be called upon by collecting fangs of a certain variety.

Tips:

* Save your gems. They may be useful for when you want to improve your buildings without waiting a day to finish them. I also spent more than a few on Stamina when there was a drough of it; 200 gems buys 50 Stamina.

* Don't waste timers. Use the all-purpose timers for construction of priority buildings rather than training, research, or development and you'll get further faster. Advancement means getting your Keep to the next level.

* Start on lengthy timer-type actions before going to bed so it may be finished after waking up. This can go great for research.

* Checking standing progress takes only a short time. And in that time, new actions can be started. One of my favorite things about Evony were that it is not demanding in terms of having to be present for anything that has been started.

* Be sure to check out the Events Center and the unlabeled icons found on every screen. These are not always a funding-spending proposition. Players can do quests, get rewards by showing up, get opportunities to interact with the game in novel ways, get incentives to explore the game more deeply, and so forth. For example, slaying monsters may give a wishing coin. Some of those can be traded with Dwarf, who gives pies. Then pies can be traded with the Mysterious Witch for some things of value.

Now you've heard from me on how I've been enjoying Evony plus an idea of what I have learned by playing to level 16.