Evony Hands-On Review (Formerly Civony)
July 16, 2009 by Ruibo
The last 2 months I’ve been seeing ads of Evony the game all over the web and after seeing it for the thousandth time I couldn’t help but give it a try — hey, who could resist ads with pretty faces all over it? Well, don’t be surprised because it has nothing to do with pretty faces.
Evony is a free to play browser based MMORTS (Massive Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy) game where you can build up your city and army in order to expand your territory and conquer other enemy players or NPCs. You can sign up to Evony here if that has already intrigued you.
The Interface
Evony resembles many other RTS games such as civilization, ages of empire and many others. The learning curve for Evony is very simple due to their quest system which guides new players through their interface. You can easily grasp the concept and the main functions of the game in as little as 1 to 2 hours playtime.
The three main screens of interface is separated into three parts, the world map, the town and the city. In the world map, you’ll find other NPC & player cities, valleys (resource fields) and empty slots where you can conquer to progress further into the game. The city is where you can build farms, sawmills, quarries and iron mines to increase your resource production. The town is where you’ll construct most of your buildings for advancement. Military training and research is also constructed here.
City Building
The game starts you off in a random (usually the newest) server in an empty town with only a Town Hall and your job is to build up the stranded city, army and slowly conquer your way through. Building new facilities, researching, and training troops requires an X amount of time to complete. The lower level the facility, the quicker it will take. The first building you’ll develop is the cottage which takes 1 min and 15 secs, but the second level will require twice as much time and as more levels are acquired, the longer it will take. Some buildings can even take over 12 hours.
Each city in Evony is limited to constructing 1 building at a time. You cannot set a queue to build a second or third building when one is finished. This requires a player to come back and check on the progression very often. Its not about how much time you spend on the game once but how many times you spend on it through out the day. As you acquire more and more cities however, you will have more than enough tasks to spend your whole day playing.
City Management
Other than gathering resources, consistently upgrading buildings you’ll also need to manage your taxes, population and the loyalty of your citizens. You’ll also need to appoint a mayor which we’ll get to shortly. Unlike most RTS games you’ve played, the ideal tax rate for Evony depends on two major factors, idle or actively playing. The population will effect the amount of gold you’ll receive from taxes, production, and how many units you can recruit into your army.
Always having enough resources to continuously construct new buildings may get difficult, thus you’ll need to put good use of the market place. In the market place, you can buy & sell food, lumber, stone and iron. You can even create offers or bids and wait until your price is met. However, there is a small auction fee.
Heroes
Once you’ve created an inn and a feasting hall you can hire a Hero to lead your army or become a Mayor. Each Hero has 3 stats, politics, attack and intelligence. Politics will decreases your cities construction time and resource production. Higher attack increases your combat and how fast your units will be trained. Intelligence shortens the time required for research and scouting ability.
Your heroes will acquire experience points through combat, mayor duties or through items. There is an hourly fee for maintaining a hero, and the salary will vary depending on their level. You can dismiss and replace heroes at anytime. A hero is also required to lead your troops into combat.
Military & Combat
There are a variety of military units available ranging from infantry, archers, cavalries, mechanical units and transporters. All units has a maintenance cost of X amount of food. Their movement, health, attack and defense can be upgraded with research. Training new units will require taking away civilians from your overall population.
Once you’ve developed your army and have a hero in place, you’ll need to go to the World Map screen to conquer new lands and terroritories. There are 3 basic types of land that can be conquered, valleys, empty lots and cities. Valleys provide additional resources, empty lots are used to build new cities and cities can be plundered and if attacked enough times you can even take it over. However, if you are attacking a player city, and if that is their only city, you will not be able to take it over.
The combat in Evony is calculated through their algorithm, no actual fighting is visible. Its either a win or loss and the results are reported in writing. You lose x amount, they lose x amount and etc. Attack, defense, health and even movement is factored into the calculation.
For example, you’re attacking with warriors, cavalries and archers, the archers will start off in combat because of their range followed by cavalries and then warriors last. In result, if your archers do enough damage, you may win without even going into melee range. Or your cavalries will take more damage than your warriors because they arrived in melee combat first.
The rally point has an exercise option which servers a skirmish for battles and will calculate the results. Your research and hero attributes are not factored but it does give you an idea of what to attack with.
Titles & Ranks
As your city grows, you will gain Prestige points which is basically a rating of how well you are doing. There is an overall ranking that is compared among all other players in your city as well. As you progress, you will be able to acquire new titles and ranks. Some ranks are extremely difficult to acquire, it requires gold and medals (which are very rare to find). The medal drop rates on new servers are about .1% or less. The easiest way is to spend a few dollars and purchase the medals you’ll need. The higher the rank, the more cities you can control, up to a total of 9.
Items
There are many different types of items available in Evony which can help speed your production, moving your city location, experience points and much much more. When you first start, you’re given a TON of items to try out and help enhance your gameplay. Items can also be acquired by quest rewards and using real money.
Alliance
Alliances are what most MMO players know as guild or clans. By joining with other alliances, you can have friends who can offer assistance through knowledge, resources, raids and much more. Possibly even scaring another player from attacking you if they know you’re in a well rounded alliance. Each alliance can only have a maximum of 100 players and have a ranking of their own.
Final Thoughts
One flaw I currently see in the game is when you first start, there is not much interaction with other players you intend to play with. Your city is picked in a random location, you are given a city teleporter but that is also random. Further on the game you’ll receive an advance city teleporter which then you can move your city near friends if empty lots permit. Last but not least, the medals are TOO difficult to acquire in which you’ll be more or less forced to spend money in order to play aggressively and compete with others.
After a few days of play time, I can say the game is very enjoyable and the fact that I do not need to spend a whole lot of hours on it is very ideal to me. I spend most of my day in front of the computer and alt tabbing to hit build or attack once in a while is a relief from work. If you’re the type that really enjoys civilization type of games but wish it could’ve been with 100 other players then this might work just for you.
Final Conclusion – If you don’t mind forking out some money then this game is definitely worth playing but otherwise, there are many other games that are really free and good. Again, here is the sign up link and enjoy!
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And whats that got to do with pretty babes?
Absolutely nothing.
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Take care with Evony, a lot more about this game can be found here: http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/07/15/more-about-evony/
Been playing evony for about about 9 months on and off and in alliance with some good crew from all over the world and like a lot of people playing the game the credit card has been hit a few times to get the extra goodies and this is where my question begins…i spend money/dollars to buy stuff and if another player who has spent more dollars to level up attacks my city/cities he/she effectively “steals” what i have paid for…bit like me going down the street to the neighbors on a lower income and stealing their car out of their driveway..this is where the game is no longer “FREE”..IT COSTS !!! End of the day it is a war game and i have plundered heaps as well but i have been careful not to smash the target into oblivion unless they have persisted in causing me grief..if it was really “FREE” I wouldn’t have a problem but I don’t like the idea of people losing their hard earned over a game…i know of people who have spent thousands,you only have to watch the reports to see the dollars ticking over and it’s the same names…online gambling ? maybe a game of chess or halo might be good..Bones
Evony SUCKS.
The battles suck.
The building sucks.
The farming sucks.
The only you should play is if you like farming, which I do not.
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ggeqg sucks..he loves games that suck..because his life sucks…and his nonsense logic sucks…
Because they want to make money? Duh. I think this article is an add for evony.
Here’s our take on their spam abuse and their new drastic action against their members (after we complained that day) : http://www.mmogrindhouse.com/game-news/bizarre/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-be-the-next-spam-queen
Evony sucks. The ads make it look like a cyber sex game but its not. You have to pay for game coins (that explains the ads.) There is an Evony ad that is a picture of a clevage and nothing else. It says play secretly now but the game has nothing to do with clevages (which seems to be their method of advertising: big clevage!)
I agree with your review.
I’d say that you need a lot of free time in order to grow up quickly instead of spending money. Unfortunetely, it’s true , you need to pay to get level 10 farms……….or be lucky. I have 50,000 prestige and I can’t promote to major or knight, because I don’t get medals, but I can do everything else knowing that I hardly get level 10.
Until i need that level,(now I have a lot of 0 , and severals 8, 9,3…) I have a lot of time to reach those limits. Probably I’ll get bored before I need to pay any money.
Evony is great u just need spare time. im at 29k prestige rite now and u dont need to pay. one thing left out of this guide is the amulet and daily amulet quest. the amulet allows u too win prizes like resources cents and items so if ur lucky u can gain all the items u need to continue playing amulets cost five game cents. the dailly amulet quest gives u a free amulet evry day at 12:00 pm ( or when the computor clock says 00:00.
EVONY SUCKS!!!
evony does not suck it just u guys all suck because u never take the dam time to play it i got 900k pres and look i dont get farmed and i havent spent a cent on this game it just u guys start out on already developed ser vers or u realy do just suck at teh game
This is the worst game ever!
This game is so bad that I am listing a number of reasons why:
1. Very time consuming.
2. Very boring.
3. You have to kiss everyone’s ass in the game and not post Fuck, Shit, or anything else that may be offensive to these conservative nerds that are offended by swear words but are not offended by the half naked chicks on the evony ads.
4. They ask you to spend 30$ USD to buy stuff for the game, but for 30$ you can buy a real game that is actually fun to play.
5. The game is full of technical glitches, and when you complain about bugs, etc… in the game you get no response.
All in all this game sucks balls!!!!
I played this game for a month, found it boring and slow! As well, you end up finding that you have to spend money to bring up everything. It is not a great game, and the over-saturation of their ads is annoying.
USD for the one with the swing out table. ,
This is not a game it is mental torture. You have been warned
this
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I am a student studying computer games design at uni and decided to investigate Evony.com.
Just to see what some of these games are like etc. etc.
The game is actually kind of cool (found myself addicted and even spent a little money on it).
But I started to notice HUGE bandwidth use by the site as I played.
I am not the only one either, there are comments on the evony forums about this.
This is odd because all of the client info, the animations etc. are all downloaded in one big download at the start.
There is no streaming media so I began to wonder what was going on.
To cut a long story short I decided to break the law and reverse engineer Evony’s client.
Not to cheat. Not to rip them off or even to use even a scrap of the code.
But just to poke about a bit and find out what was going on, maybe even offer them some ways to improve things.
Aside from the fact that the whole thing is very poorly constructed (it is really very beginner coder level stuff. Reminds me of a lot of
what the first year students produce for assignments) it contained some very interesting information.
Included with the client are 2 peices of tracking software that monitor your web use and which applications you have open while the client is running.
These do not install independently on the machine though due to the limitations of flash and do not actually damage anything.
But they harvest massive volumes of information. My firewall was blocking a lot of outgoing transmissions and it turns out that these
were the data trying to be sent out. So they know nothing about me. lol.
However there is a LOT of data coming IN over the ports the client uses. In otherwords it is downloading something into my cache for use later.
I have bandiwdth restriction which slows these types of tricks down and I completely clear my cache every couple of hours if I am heavily using the net.
I also noticed that all the varanbles etc. are named Civony still and that there are multiple references to UMGE.
Even a couple of folders are simply called UMGE, one of these folders contains one of the spyware programs.
So I can only guess at where the data would end up if I didnt have a good firewall.
There are also commented out sections in the code which contain references to UMGE and Lam himself, though low on details.
Thank you for reading this.
Lee
As I read your titillating comments, and as I type my own, there is an ad for Evony just below this comments box… and there are NO cleavages!! That’s what makes this whole godforsaken piece of crap so hard to live with… sometimes it’s cleavage, sometimes it’s an ugly blond chick with cleavage, sometimes it’s 2 blondes that are sort of hot, then this particular add that shows a godforsaken cheap-looking fort and no cleavage. People, there is a thing called REALITY and in this place, there are REAL chicks you can do stuff with instead of fantasizing… and WTF is up with farming?? Are you serious? Instead of being with a real chick, you’re paying to farm in a goddamned video game? Jeezus…
…I’m not done… I feel like I should be on a radio talk show or something… it’s lame you guys, it’s sooo soo sooooo lame… get out of your houses and basements, put on some clean clothes and take a shower… and get out there and I don’t know… go to a bar if you’re old enough… by a chick a drink… stop with the pay-to-farm bullshit… ”Be a lord! Conquer your world!”, that means ”Don’t be fooled by this shit, get a life and stop paying for this crap!” I’m serious!
All that being said while… (huhem)sitting at your OWN computer, probably in your underwear, covered in cheetoh dust, with youporn in the other tab (muted so your mom doesn’t hear).
That always gets me how people want to act all self-righteous about those that they think “don’t have a life”, and all they are doing is wasting their own pissin and moaning about what other people do, when essentially… you’re doin the SAME DAMN THING! lmao
…wait… how did you know I’m in my underwear, eating cheetoh’s? And what does my mom have to do with this, again? I know… you’re… a… lame-ass… nerd… who’s got nothing else to do but try to look smarter than the smartest nerd in the herd!! Oh… ok Shawn D., you caught me… I was sitting here, drinking Tang when I thought to myself ”Why don’t you go and write something intelligent about how stupid it is to spend money on a fucking game where you FARM simply because some moron put ads on the web depicting titties to tantalize the sexless freaks out there…” I don’t know why I did it, I just did it because I have a better grasp of shit than the rest of you. Self-righteous? Maybe. The fact is, I’m right and you all prove it by replying your cry-baby bullshit.
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WOW! That was something else!
You’re telling other people to get a life? Maybe you should get an EDUCATION and learn how to: type, spell, speak properly, etc. (that means etcetera- “and so on”: just in case you were confused…)
I’m crackin’ myself up today! lmfao
hahaha, i am a teacher and your writing level is worse than that of a second grader!
chuckwood u should sut the fuck up bitch u r a loser who thinks evrey1 else is a loser but really u r a loser bitch and i had fun with ur mom u bitch and u tell ur mom i said how she s doin after i banged her hahahahahhah ps u suck fuking balls bitch and all the nerds out there
my oh my Mr giovannies… you’re lack of respect for my mother shows that you were not brought up right. I’m curious, did she do crack for 8 of the 9 months she had to carry the sack of shit that you are, or did she drop you in a dumpster thereafter?
ps: my mom says hi, and hopes you’ll take her advice and get your tiny cock fixed before you go to the prom. It’ll be too embarrassing for you when you try to sleep with Mrs White, your 60 year-old dance teacher. She also wants her anal-plug back, you know, whenever you next take a shit, shitcock.
pps: anyone else reading this, I apologize for the blatant R rated comments here… I hope I didn’t offend anyone else than giovannies… but you know, when you disrespect someone’s mother…
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bitch chuck? Nerd ass puto? Eat some bananas?!? You have the eloquence of second-grade dumbass, the apparent education of a preschooler, and verbal skill of a dried-up turd. Let’s just stop this, you’re obviously unable to keep up a good fight, you bitch-talk like a moron.
Over and out.
Evony SUCKS to the ass!!!
Look at the ADs, WHAT SHIT! Half-naked chicks EVERYWHERE to CONTAMINATE minds to advertise their game! “PLAY SECERETLY”, “MY LORD” – As if what you ARE TO DO is to play the DAMN EVONY in work and school, just encouraging you to RUIN your life, which is a GREAT ANTI-CIVILISATION thing!
Look at the game, it places you randomly with strong and weak players with the strong one pressing you down
Look at the price, “EVONY, FREE FROEVER”. BULLSHIT! The game coins are SOSOSOSO expensive and they make it into CENTS to SOUND BETTER which CANNOT DO MUCH! SCAMMERS!
EVONY SUCK! THE DEVELOPERS SUCK! ITS CONSTANT PLAYERS SUCK!
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EVONY SUCKS! I HAVE AN IDEA! LET’S SIGN A PETITION THAT WILL SHUT DOWN EVONY FOREVER!!!!!!!!
ANYONE WHO DISAGREES WILL BE MASSACRED!
Months ago my best friend first got me to sign up for Evony so that me and him could play the game together. I told him for the longest time I resist clicking on the ads, I was afraid of getting spyware, but he managed to talk to me into signing up. After signing up and downloading the client for the first time, I looked over the interfaces. At first, it did not seem bad as building went by pretty quickly. It also reminded me of OGame in a way, making me like it more. However, when I started to really get more into the game, getting past the newbie guide missions and getting out of protection I started to see the bigger picture, so to say. At that point, it was nothing like OGame, which was enjoyable for me, and became a frustration.
I think one of my biggest concern for the game is how unbalanced it is and remains in that state.
Players with high mines can produce an astronomical amount of resources in a short period of time. Something that I never even noticed the fast universe of OGame. The combat system is severely botched. It has to be when I create a large amount of all sorts of soldiers and defenses and they get wiped out instantly by an army of archers. That is when the game became un-enjoyable, especially for a player like me who only got on for 15 to 20 minutes a day.
The players who got a big boost at the beginning seem to never let up. They only get stronger as they drain the newbies of their resources. Perhaps it would have been wise if they implemented a system where you cannot attack someone so many levels below you? I even suggested that in the Evony forums and got shot down for it by the very same people who are on the first page of the ranks.
Like someone mentioned, the only way you could survive in that game is by kissing ass rather than making friends. No one actually seemed helpful towards me or sympathetic. The staff did not concern themselves with the players as well, unless they told the truth about the horrible game. Then they made sure to silent you. There was no respect from the staff or Evony community.
Worst online game I have ever played.
this sucks sshit the ads and women. it is a take off from age of empires.
this is a fucked shit
This is NOT a free game. if you plan on going into this as though it is a free game, you’re just another sucker taking a hook. They tout the game as free, but many players pay real world cash to basically over power the free players right off the bat. If your looking for a good “Free Game”, don’t spend your time here.
And if you have a gambling problem, don’t spend your time here. It’s got some similar hooks to gambling in ways to get you to buy “Coin’s” so that you can get cooler get powerful faster. Let me put it this way, to be competative, after a month of playing, expect to spend roughly $200.00. That is if you start on a brand new server.
Had been playing for about 3 months with about 500 US. tied up into the game. Had no problems with it until one day the game locked up on me. I couldn’t get back in. Gave up until the next day and tried signing in. Sure enough after going through my mail I found my password was changed. Kinda funny seeing nobody had my login info. Proceeded to sign in and found everything gone. Both my cities were degraded to nothing. Had almost one completely upgraded city. Nevermind that, all my items were erased. Items I had purchased. Included in that, I don’t receive my autocents either. Totally unimpressed after sending many bug-mails, mails and whatnot to them, haven’t gotten one response from them at all. Nothing. Well they got my money, now they don’t give a damn. Great business…
im a game fag. i think it is important to let you know that this game does not suck. i have 2000000000 prestige. i like farming, and my soldiers spoon themselves
…jeezus… I can’t believe my eyes… you know what, there’s gotta be some way to get you all to some therapy especially you game fag. That’s some really awesome shit you wrote there. Go to Chapters or whatever bookstore, go to the self help section, and shoot yourself with a high caliber pistol.