Evony

Evony
Evony's logo
Developer(s)	Evony, LLC
Publisher(s)	Evony, LLC
Platform(s)	Adobe Flash
Release	May 6, 2009
Genre(s)	Fantasy Medieval MMORTS
Mode(s)	Multiplayer

Evony

URL	www.evony.com/

Evony (formerly known as Civony) is an Adobe Flash-based multiplayer online game with graphic elements reminiscent of Civilization. The game is set in medieval times, where a player is to establish a city, begin developing various technologies, and build supporting structures and alliances to generate armies and resources for the purpose of attacking other players and in-game opponents.

Gameplay

The gameplay of Evony.

Evony is set in a persistent world during the Medieval time period in which the player assumes the role of a lord or lady of a city. A new player is given "beginner's protection," which prevents other players from attacking their cities for a total of 7 days or until a player upgrades the Town Hall, the center of a city to level 5 or higher. This gives new players the opportunity to accumulate a few resources and troops and get accustomed to the game before the challenges begin to surface.

The player gives instructions on production and construction with the initial resources. The resources in the game are Gold, Food, Lumber, Stone, and Iron, and the city's population. As with many real-time strategy games, one first has to increase the city's population and hourly resource-collection rates through high level construction of certain buildings in the city, and then start developing other aspects of their city and building an army. Your army can include siege machines and foot troops (archers, warriors, swordsmen, etc....) siege machines include (ballistas, catapults, and battering rams)

Evony offers many items, purchased with cents (Evony money) which can be bought with real money, through its Item Shop or won at the wheel or in battle, most of them in some way accelerating the player's progression through the game.

Aspects

The construction of buildings, researching of technologies, and training of units consume time and resources and have various prerequisites.

Construction

• Buildings: The city always holds 34 positions for buildings In-town, where one is permanently occupied by the Town Hall, and up to 40 positions outside the walls (depending on the level of the Town Hall. The latter are resource fields. Each building can be independently upgraded from level 1 (initial construction) to level 10. each time you upgrade your town hall it opens up three more resource fields. Level 10 require a special item - a Michelangelo Script. Initial construction may take from under a minute to several days, during which the player must find other aspects of the city or army to manage. Until the introduction of Bernini's Hammer in Age II, there were not any queue options for buildings. Only one building may be queued. Each upgrade requires double the cost of the previous level in every resource and doubles the time required. Building time may be reduced by researching the Construction technology, and by assigning a Hero with a high Politic attribute as Mayor. There is a Speed up button, that will instantly finish buildings, with the initial building time (w/o technologies or Heroes) being less than 5 minutes. There are also several items that can shorten building time or instantly finish a building.

Technology and military

• Technologies: The 19 Technologies however, start with level 0 and can be researched using an academy. Prerequisites may include specific levels of other Technologies and Buildings. Research time is influenced by the Intel attribute of the Hero assigned as Mayor. Research time may also be shortened by using Items.

• Troops: More advanced army units becomes available as buildings and technologies are upgraded. Army units are built in the Barracks and can be queued. The level of the Barrack determine how many slots that can be used for training. Two factors influence how many units you can ask Evony to train: The number of people in your town not involved in resource gathering and your resource situation. One slot allows for one unit type. Training time is determined by the attack value of the assigned Hero, and on certain technologies. There are also Items that can shorten training time.

• Fortification Units: This also applies to the fortification units that assist in your city defense. They are built in the Wall, where wall level determine queue slots. There are a certain maximum of slots that can be occupied by fortification units in the wall. The value increase with rising Wall level. Training time is determined by the Politic value of the hero assigned as Mayor, and by certain technologies.

Heroes

One important aspect of the game is the concept of Heroes. Heroes can be assigned as the "Mayor" of a city, lead attacks, and various missions. The Hero earns Experience points (XP) from these tasks, which increase his level, and provide one attribute point to the Hero, which you place in either Politic, Attack or Intelligence. The Heroes have certain attributes, which are crucial for succeeding in the game: Politics, Attack and Intelligence.

• A high Politics attribute of the Mayor will shorten the time for building buildings, walls and wall defence.
• A high Intelligence attribute of the Mayor will shorten technology research time.
• A high Attack attribute of the Mayor will shorten troop training time.
• A high Attack attribute of a Hero defending, leading an attack, reinforcement or scout mission, will increase the fighting abilities of your troops.

Interaction

Evony features player versus player (PvP) gameplay, making it possible to attack another player's cities. The level of the building called Rally point in the attacking city determine how many parties and how many troops in each party that can be sent in one attack. Unlike Age of empire, buildings cannot be destroyed, but a city can be lost - even if you are off-line. When member of an alliance, your friends can reinforce your city. (Requires an Embassy). Various army units are available, and all battles are based on a player attacking another players city, a Non-Player City (NPC) or Valleys/Flats. NPCs arise when a city is abandoned. This happens if a player (which has not paid real money) doesn't play for a period of time, but more commonly when a player, after building a new city on a level 5 or 10 flat, and then abandoning it. It is necessary to attack these level 5 or level 10 NPCs for resources (called farming). Therefore there are a lot of level 5 NPCs around mid-level players, and level 10 NPCs around the better players. There are certain troop setups to attack these NPCs favorably, but on some servers the outcome of farming a NPC10 (resources plundered minus cost of troops lost) is negative. Even if not profitable, attacking NPC10s are used for leveling up the Heroes (called training). An NPC can be taken over, and if it's a level 10, all buildings will be at level 10, saving huge amounts of resources and time. However, certain reconfigurations must be undertaken, like dismounting a lot of cottages in favors of Barracks, and - on older servers - dismounting farms in favor of Iron Mills. Taking a NPC level 10 close to an opponent is a well known strategy for staging attacks.

The game allows the player to control up to ten cities through gain of titles. To gain a title, certain rank is necessary. Both Title and Rank require Medals gained by buying in-game coins or by attacking valleys.

Evony has two different monetary systems. The in-game monetary system revolves around gold. Gold can be obtained by completing quests and by taxing the player's population. It is also possible to sell resources for gold on the marketplace to other players, or gain gold by raiding non-player cities. In lieu of this, a player can use real money to buy game cents with which to purchase items and resources from the in-game shop.

Prestige is a measure of a player's rank in the game. Players gain prestige by following quests, building and upgrading structures, training armies and successfully attacking valleys and cities often during the game. Honor is also a ranking system; however, it only changes with a successful or unsuccessful attack of or defense against another player. These are two of the main ways in which player rankings are visible. The overall ranking system that is displayed in the players window is based solely on their prestige compared to the remaining server population.

Critical reception

Reviews for Evony have praised the appearance, but have been mostly critical of its derivative gameplay.

The game was cited as doing "an amazing job at making the game look and feel appealing to all gamers" by New Zealand-based Stuff, although it was criticised for the amount of time and effort needed to excel in the game. Stuff also noted the shortcomings of a system like Evony's where one could essentially buy one's way through the game.

The Guardian pointed out that it was so similar to Sid Meier's Civilization series that it felt like a ripoff, going so far as to essentially steal its name.

Controversy

Advertising campaign

An Evony advertisement on a music streaming service

Evony's 2009 online advertising campaign was criticized for featuring what The Guardian called "a string of increasingly racy images." The images depicted females who, as the ad campaign continued, became increasingly unclothed, none of which had any relevance to the game itself. In 2009 Gavin Mannion commented that Evony's "latest ad is seriously pushing boundaries of what is acceptable to publish on Google". Other ads used stock photographs from pornographic DVD covers.

Evony has also been accused of promoting the game via "millions of spam comments left on blogs". The company denies they are responsible for the spam. Others attribute the spam to players making use of the pyramid scheme-based iEvony affiliate program.

Censorship

On 25 August 2009, Evony's lawyers threatened to sue a critical blogger for defamation over a variety of allegations as to the game's provenance and the practices of the companies behind it. The developers of Evony have denied the allegations from internet blogger Bruce Everiss, and have sent a cease and desist letter for defamation based on Australian law. Everiss responded by linking to a documentary which reportedly shows evidence of Evony's fraudulent history. Shortly before the case was due to begin in Sydney, Evony parted with their legal team and asked for an adjournment of the case. Two days into the most recent hearing in March 2010, Evony withdrew the libel claim against Everiss.

Sequel

On February 12, 2010, Evony, LLC, the company behind Evony, announced the release of Evony: Age II. Currently the second age of Evony has now left the public beta testing stage and is now in its final release. There are now many new Evony Age II servers up. Some new changes from the original include Historic Cities, Cities with counterparts in reality with advantages over user-created cities, as well as Historic heroes and hero gearing.

Bots, alts and botted alts

A bot is third party software used to automate a wide range of ingame functions such as farming (food gathering), troop recruitment and city defence. An alt account is an additional account a player has on a server. The use of bots and alt accounts are forbidden by Evony's terms and conditions, though minimally and selectively enforced. Bots, alts and alliances composed mostly or entirely of alt accounts animated by bots have become a severe problem on many evony servers leading Evony to introduce captchas in order to remove them and also take legal action against software developers who produce bots. This has met with only partial success.

External links

• Official Evony Two website
• Evony corporate website