Ainarand’s Game Guide – Playing Evony for Beginners

This Evony guide is for people just starting out in playing the game, or thinking about joining. In the past Evony has had a reputation for being dominated by bullys and being hard to get to understand, but both of these perceptions are incorrect.  In order to set a few things right this article aims to give beginners some basic hints and tips to get them started in this hugely popular real time strategy war game.

Beginners Get 7 days of Protection

When you start playing Evony for the first time a new player cannot be attacked by anyone for a period of seven days.  Of course if you attack someone during this time then beginners protection will be removed, but most players use their first week to build up a reasonable city and army before they go off adventuring. Apart from attacking another player, the only other thing you need to be aware of is that if you build your town hall to level 5 this automatically removes beginner’s protection. Use your first week wisely by building up your army, city buildings and production ability as far as you can.

Follow the Evony Routine Quests Early On

Evony routine quests, or beginner’s quests, are there to help you.  Many of the buildings in the game and early research require what might be seen as a lot of resources to complete.  If you follow the routines quests then often the reward for completing the quests is in excess of the resources needed to complete the building or research required.  This means that you effectively get many advances in the early game for free just by following the quest lines. Routine quests can be seen as a beginners guide or Evony walkthrough of sorts – follow them and you will do much better when beginners protection wears off.

Build Up Your Defences Early

You can never lose your last city – or if you are a beginner you cannot have your first city taken away from you. The worst that can happen is that you can be beaten in battle and put under suzerainty.  This means that a small proportion of your production is taken away and given to the player that beat you. A good way to stop this happening is to build up your walls early on and make sure that you build more than one barracks so that you can generate troops quickly. Many players make their first city have 5-10 barracks depending on how aggressively they like to play.

Maximise Game Resource Production

As the level of your town hall increases this enables you to utilise more of the fields outside your town.  Make sure that all available building plots are being used and remember to upgrade them as much as you can.  Build at least one of each of the four types of resource gathering squares – wood, stone, food and iron and make more as soon as possible. Resources are very important in many strategy games and Evony is no exception – you can never have too much.

Of the four resources wood is probably the most important in the very early game as you use it to build building and also many of the unit types.  Later on this balance between needed resources will change, so watch your reserves carefully. So long as you are making more food than you use this should never be a problem, but remember that troops require food and having reserves is always a good thing.

Once you are far enough along to build a feasting hall and inn you can recruit heroes.  A hero with a good politics score will enhance city production and will also gather experience from doing so.  At least one hero per city with a good politics score should be appointed to mayor on a permanent basis.  You can also swap heroes around if you need to level up a low level one by making him mayor for a while and then swapping the regular hero back in.  This stops you going into battle with a low level character leading your army.

Getting a Second City

To take a second area and build a city is probably the easiest path to go down here.  If you scout a FLAT in the vicinity of your home city you should be able to find a low level one, (e.g. level 3) that will be quite easy to beat. If you have researched your informatics and want to be certain then send a small scouting party to see what is there before sending in your army.  The scouts will tell you how many enemies are there.  Ideally you want to outnumber your enemies by at least 3 to 1.  For low level areas this is easy to achieve and you should win this battle with no difficulty.  Once you hold the square you need to send 250 workers and 10,000 of every resource to be able to build a new city on the square.

Congratulations!  You now have two cities!

Don’t forget to leave defenders at your first city as now you have two you can be attacked and you don’t want to lose your home city while expanding.

This ends our Evony Guide for Beginners. We hope that it has helped you see that Evony is a simple game to get to understand and is fun to play. See you on the battlefield, my lord.