Evony, which is known for its suggestive advertising campaigns, is now turning to the social graph for more growth and engagement. Over the past 16 days, we have watched the Facebook app for Evony grow from nothing at launch to just over 200,000 monthly active users. Well, “app” is a term used loosely as sans gifting or inviting friends as “Allies,” everything takes place on a separate browser window in the Evony site itself. The company is actually using Facebook Connect.
Regardless, for those unfamiliar with the title, Evony has absolutely nothing to do with the ladies advertised. No, it’s basically a browser based version of Civilization – in fact it used to be called “Civony” – but after being out for a few years (Age I, anyway, the current version is called Age II), the freemium title has proven that while it is not quite its predecessor, it’s still good enough to garner millions of worldwide players.
Essentially, the game is broken up into three major sections: Town, City, and Map. Within the town, you have your city-building sort of rules. Cottages are required to grow your population so you have workers and soldiers, taxes increase your gold, users have to keep the people happy, and so on. From here, players move to the outer limits of their City, where they build sawmills, farms, quarries, and mines to produce the raw materials they need to do, well, everything else.
This is where things start to get a bit more complex. Each building has a particular purpose. If you build military facilities, you can start training and upgrading units for an army. If you build an academy, you can start researching means to improve your production efficiency. If you build an inn, you can recruit Heroes (non-player characters that can be used to lead your armies and town for added bonuses). The list goes on. The idea is to construct an efficient and thriving medieval city and then raise an army to defend it.
Yes, defend it. These are feudal times, and there are many enemies and potential enemies about. This is where the Map section comes to play. This is a high, bird’s eye view of the entire land and from it, you can see every plot of land, with every resource and every other player city. Now, different spots of land can grant benefits, such as increased food production or even be used to construct new cities. Of course, with the shear number of players on Evony, there are likely to be at least four or five players adjacent to that same resource.
This is where the social play style sort of comes into play. The game is connected through Facebook, so you can invite friends as allies – or ally with others within the game directly – to aide one another as need be to help in defense, share resources, and so on. Basically, you can play diplomatically. If that sounds boring, then you can simply declare war and try to ransack everyone that looks at you funny.
Another interesting element to Evony is that, periodically, random events will occur that will ask you to post something to your Facebook feed. Occasionally, it is a blatant means to get you to advertise for them with events like “A disease is spreading in your city” and you have to ask your friends for help (there is no penalty for ignoring it), while others are more useful and offer you rewards such as resources, prestige, or population. Unfortunately, these events have a tendency to appear very, very frequently and get very old, very quick.
On a lighter note, Evony does do an excellent job at getting a new player started. This doesn’t refer to the tutorial at all, but rather the fact that it is rather quick to get your kingdom underway. Basically, you can only construct one structure at a time, and the more advanced it becomes, the longer it takes to build. That said, any building with a build-time under five minutes (pretty much all level one buildings) can be sped up and completed instantly. Furthermore, as you get more complex or upgrade parts of your city, the game grants you a generous amount of special items to improve everything from build times to production efficiency.
Normally, such items are reserved for paying customers, where you would utilize Evony’s virtual currency, Cents, to buy them. These can be bought in packages ranging from $5 to $1000, though we have no idea who would spend that much. Regardless, this is the game’s primary monetization method, and without making use of it, once you are beyond the beginning levels, the game becomes a bit of a slow burn. Granted, at upper tiers of play, there are a lot of different things to do (especially if you are picking fights), but they start to take more and more time. As an example, an upper level Town Hall could take over a day to construct.
While the beginner’s experience is not too bad, the game does tend to ramp up rather quickly, so don’t expect to understand everything right away. Evony does make an attempt to help clear this up with a quest system broken up into Routine Quests, Hero Quests, and Commission Quests. While the latter two are for more advanced users — though there is not exactly a clear explanation on them, they seem to be meta quests made up of the routine quests and user-generated quests respectively — Routine Quests are described as more tutorial’esque quests telling users what to do next. All the same, however, this log is bloated, and really only gets clicked on to claim the reward. Likely, most users will just poke around, building structures until they pick everything up themselves.
Of course, clicking on the quests tab, or any other tab for that matter, may be avoided because of latency and loading issues. Granted, Evony is a free-to-play game, but every time you click on something, a timer appears and the user has to wait. Sometimes it only takes an extra second, others, it’s an eternity. Either way, it is extraordinarily annoying.
Overall, for a free-to-play title, Evony is not half bad; especially if you are a fan of Civilization and are still waiting for the Facebook version to come out. Yes, the game has some issues here and there, but once you dabble around within it for a while, it starts to become fairly easy. That said, there are still a myriad of features yet to be mentioned, and the more we play, the more new ones we discover, which really does wonders for longevity. Well, assuming you like such complexity. So, the next time you see a busty maiden, just remember, it’s actually game about complex feudal kingdoms, available to play with your Facebook friends.
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