Evony September 12th, 2009
Over the past week I have been playing an online game called Evony, the format of the game is familiar to anyone who has ever played Empire Earth, Civilisation or Age of Empires. I guess it’s kind of like riding a bike, once you learn you’ll never forget!
Evony has a couple of aces up it’s sleeve however and rewrites the way strategy games are played ‘en mass’. Firstly, it’s free (and we all like free things) so has widespread appeal to anyone with an internet connection who wants to have a go and secondly, the game runs in real time 24/7
Of course, this does also have a downside, one that I have yet to experience myself (although am sure I will before too long…). As the game is running in real time whether you are logged in or not, you run the risk of some American deciding to invade you overnight and overthrowing your city. The downfalls of international time zones I guess but after the amount of work I have put into building my cities over the last week, I know I’ll be gutted when I wake up one morning and find the inevitable has happened, still it’s all in the spirit of the game I guess. When I have a little more battle experience (my first few attempts failed miserably) I’ll return the favour and attack them when they are safely tucked up in their beds. I’m nice like that ;- )
The format of the game is a familiar one, you build your cities and go on to conquer others, building your empire and battling it out against other like minded folk to try and get to the #1 spot in the land. You must balance the need for gathering resources such as lumber, iron, stone and of course food with the need to develop your cities by building housing, military buildings, scientific buildings and city defences. If that wasn’t enough to keep you busy, you also have to train an army not only to defend your cities but to go out and scout the land, looking for other cities to conquer or flat lands to build new cities. It’s addictive stuff. It sounds very complicated but their is a very good guide called the ‘quest’ which will help you start things off and give you rewards for completing basic tasks, almost like the cheats in other games…
For the first seven days you have what’s known as ‘beginners protection’, this means that you are not open to attack from others and you can spend your time getting to know the game and its features without having to worry about your city being wiped out, it also gives you time to expand and build a second city, maybe even a third. My beginners protection is about to expire now and I think I am ready, I have a couple of cities, one heavily fortified the other not so. I have an army, not perhaps the biggest in the world but they are determined and will fight to the last!
I’m looking forward to the next few days, being able to appreciate the game fully by having the additional strategic task of fore planning for an attack, but at the same time know I’m going to be hit hard by some super power in the middle of the night and probably wish I’d never started playing the game in the first place. Time will tell.
So if you are at a lose end, head over to http://www.evony.com and have a go yourself, for anyone whose interested, I’m on server 46 in Franconia (it’ll make sense during signup) and vice-host an alliance called ‘2WO’, come join up!
The beauty of modern browswers is that you can have Evony running in a tab all day whilst you get on with your normal work, checking back every hour or so to click a few buttons and start your next building project or recruiting some more warriors. You can even change the titlebar of the tab so that your boss will never know if he looks over your shoulder…
