Intermediate Guide

The Crystal Ball: Knowing What to Expect
In real life, if you had a crystal ball that could predict the future, you would not be playing Evony. You would be drowning in money. But of course there's no crystal ball for the world we live in. Well guess what? There's a crystal ball in Evony. No one will tell you about it, especially not the game designers, but if you can master this trick you will know what to expect, be it what everyone's doing, or what resources are trading at. The former you'll probably already know if you have an Evony account played up through the first two weeks. The latter you probably haven't, in which case you'll want to find out. Basically what you'll learn through this method is what a good player will know after playing Evony for a few weeks, but you can get this information up front rather than later, and, like choosing all the right stocks in the stock market, you'll reap massive rewards.

Here's how to go about it: Enter the 5 to 10 most recent servers and start up your city, but the only thing you need to build is a Marketplace, which can be built right away (use a Beginner's Guidelines now since this is the only building you need to build on that server). Once it's built, go in and take a look at the prices. Write down the average trading range. Do this for as many servers as you want, keeping track of which server you found this information in. Now, as of this writing Evony launches a new server every 2 days, so backtrack: if you're on server X which has just recently launched and you see prices for server X-1, then those are the prices you will encounter on server X in another 2 days, and so on. You can then know what prices you'll be running into in the future, and trade your resources accordingly.

If you want to take this further you can develop your cities on the most recent servers, pump out 5k Scouts and get lv-5 Informatics by day 7 (which is very possible if you don't produce troops at all), then send out your scout army to determine what general level of troops everyone has by a certain day. You should succeed because few players, even with a head start, will have as many Scouts as a player focusing exclusively on getting Scouts. So if you go into server X-1, wait 7 days then find that the average opponent has 1k Archers, then you know that on server X, the average opponent will have 1k Archers in 2 days (day 9 of server X, just as you found this information on day 9 of server X-1).

Investment 101
Evony is a strategy game and like most strategy games involves building things that produce - essentially spending a lump sum of money for an income. However, there's a lot to be said about determining how valuable the opportunity to get such an income stream really is. In life you can buy stocks for a lot of money, and these stocks (often) pay dividends periodically. The ratio between these is called the price to earnings ratio, or P/E, because to calculate this value you have P/E = price / earnings. P/E is a measure of how many units of time (days or years) it takes for the income stream to repay your initial investment. The lower the P/E ratio, the better. So for example:


 * In real life, when choosing any investment, you first find its P/E, after choosing a certain time interval. For example, if you buy a house for $100,000 on Jan 1, 2010, and sell it for $200,000 on Jan 1, 2012, you've earned $100,000 over the course of the two years you've held the investment, and your P/E based on the year is $100,000/$50,000 = 2 (pretty darn good in real life).
 * If you get a stock for $100 that pays you $1 quarterly, you get $4 per year and so the P/E based on the year is $100/$4 = 25.
 * In Evony, if a resourcing building costs you the equivalent of 1200 Gold and generates revenues equivalent to 50 Gold an hour, your P/E based on the day is 1200/(50*24) = 1 which means that the investment will repay itself in exactly 1 day.

Never forget to calculate P/E ratios before constructing a new resourcing building in Evony, and do this often, since relative resource prices fluctuate. A related concept is the return on investment or ROI. If you buy something and then sell it later for a profit (or expend it later while obtaining a profit in the process), then you have a positive ROI. ROI = profit / initial investment. The higher the ROI, the better, and don't forget about time considerations here. So for example:


 * If you buy a house for $100,000 on Jan 1, 2010, and sell it for $200,000 on Jan 1, 2012, you've earned $100,000 over the course of the two years you've held the investment, and your ROI is $100,000/$100,000 = 100% (pretty darn good in real life).
 * In Evony, if you sell 1k Lumber for 0.25 apiece you get 250 Gold. If you then buy 1.5k Lumber for 0.166 apiece you have a ROI of (1.5k-1k)/1k = 50%, which means that if you do this twice (sell 1k Lumber and end up with 1.5k Lumber and do this again), you will end up with double your initial investment. If you can do this quickly, you'll get a lot of essentially free resources.

Early Resourcing
In order to play well, you need to know what everyone else is doing and will be doing. At the beginning of the game, you can quickly see that lv-1 Sawmill costs (100 Food + 100 Lumber + 250 Stone + 300 Iron) and gives you 100 Lumber an hour, and supposing that these four resources are equivalent (which is NOT true but assume this anyway), the P/E ratio (based on the hour) is 7.5, meaning you'll recoup your investment in 7.5 hrs. Other lv-1 resourcing can be almost as good (the Quarry and Ironmine are more expensive) so you'll want to get these early on and you know others will to. Besides, the Routine Quest repays you the first time you build anything, making early construction of resourcing buildings an incredibly good investment. Resourcing building upgrades in Evony work like this: price doubles (exponential growth) and production increases according to the pattern 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... So lv-2 Sawmill costs (200 Food + 200 Lumber + 500 Stone + 600 Iron) - which is twice as much as lvl-1 - and the upgrade itself adds 200 an hour to Lumber production - twice as much as before. The ratio of price to earnings, thus, is the same as for lvl-1. Hence, as long as you have the resources, if you find it a good deal to get lv-1 Sawmill, you should find it just as good of a deal to get lv-2 Sawmill. Thereafter, you will encounter diminishing returns, and so most players stop building resourcing buildings after reaching lv-4 or so on all 13 (+3, or +6) resourcing tiles by the end of day 1. During all this time the price to earnings (P/E) ratio is falling greatly.

Opening Week Trends
By the end of day one most players have cooled off on their production-building-construction rush, and don't need so much resources. Meanwhile, new players are constantly entering the server for the first two days, and they will need to build up, using all those resources now made available. Resourcing buildings beyond lv-4 can take over half a week to pay off the initial investment, in which case you're better off saving those resources for military units. By day 4 practically everyone has already obtained most of the resourcing buildings they will be doing that week and beyond, and now the demand for resources will have fallen.

Meanwhile, players will have 1-2 Academies to lv-3 or lv-4 by days 3-4 and will start doing research. Research costs almost entirely Gold, and a lot of it, and some important technologies (mid-level Military Science, mid-level Informatics and mid-level Archery) are essential to doing well upon coming out of protection so practically every worthy player gets them in week one. Meanwhile, it is hard to push Gold output in a city beyond 3k an hour because of the Town Hall (and hence indirectly Wall) level requirements, while cities regularly have over 20k total non-gold resource output an hour per city, and during days 3-5 there's not that much that needs building. The net effect of all this scientific work is that Gold appreciates and everything else (except food) depreciates, which is why if you keep track of average Marketplace prices you'll notice the following (average) trend:


 * Day 1: 0.07 Gold/Food, 2.4-3.6 Gold/Lumber, 3.2-4.8 Gold/Stone, 2-3 Gold/Iron
 * Day 2: 0.07 Gold/Food, 1.6-2.9 Gold/Lumber, 2.4-3.2 Gold/Stone, 1.6-2.9 Gold/Iron
 * Day 3: 0.07 Gold/Food, 1-1.8 Gold/Lumber, 1-2 Gold/Stone, 1.4-2 Gold/Iron
 * Day 4: 0.07 Gold/Food, 0.5-1.3 Gold/Lumber, 0.4-0.8 Gold/Stone, 0.7-1.5 Gold/Iron
 * Day 5: 0.07 Gold/Food, 0.3-0.5 Gold/Lumber, 0.3-0.45 Gold/Stone, 0.3-0.5 Gold/Iron
 * Day 6: 0.08 Gold/Food, 0.2-0.3 Gold/Lumber, 0.2-0.35 Gold/Stone, 0.2-0.3 Gold/Iron
 * Day 7: 0.09 Gold/Food, 0.1-0.22 Gold/Lumber, 0.14-0.2 Gold/Stone, 0.1-0.2 Gold/Iron

The Strange Resources: Food and Stone
You'll need to produce at least one lv-1 Farm to unlock a major chunk of the Routine Quest. Thereafter, you don't need to get Farms, and you should concentrate on either Sawmills or Quarries. Why is food so worthless? There's a trick to making all the food you'll need up through day 5, and much of it through day 7: Comforting: Blessing, which can be used once every 15 minutes and converts Gold into Food at the rate of 0.1 Gold/Food. Using this method, a city with population limit 10,000 can convert up to 4000 Gold into 40,000 Food an hour. Even by day 7 you'll most likely not have enough soldiers to use up nearly as much from upkeep, though this process does require that you be available every 15 minutes. Food rises toward the end because everyone needs it for their armies starting on day 5.

Stone ultimately becomes nearly useless (many, many days into the game) so many players choose to go for the other resources instead (especially Lumber), which is why the supply for Stone is much lower than the demand for it and hence why Stone prices are elevated early on. If you're going for Stone, be ready to convert excess Quarries to Sawmills in the middle of the week (you might run out of time thereafter).

Hold Gold
Based on the previous discussion, it should be apparent to you that the way to go is to hold either Gold or Food since they appreciate and other resources don't. However, the problem with holding Food is that quantities on the Marketplace aren't in sizes much bigger than that of any other resource, while they are considerably cheaper. In order to hold Food you'll need perhaps 20 Food to 1 of any other resource, and in trading that much Food you will quickly find yourself either flooding or sapping the market and moving Food prices in the direction you DON'T want it to go, and Food prices seem quite sensitive early on. Additionally, in order to buy resources you need to first convert Food to Gold which will potentially rip you off if you have to get Gold at a time when Food prices are low - it's another layer of risk you can avoid by holding Gold.

Don't Build Like Crazy Early On
Time-wise, there's actually not that much to build in the first few days of the game. Yes, you'll want to get lv-3 resourcing buildings and lv-2 Cottages thereafter, but those don't take time to build and you shouldn't be going for lv-5 resourcing just yet. Why? Because each additional upgrade to resourcing buildings entails a much higher P/E ratio (a bad thing) and earning back the investment on a lv-5 resourcing building might take 4 days. If you know about the general price trends in the first week, you're better off selling your excess resources ASAP - the earlier the better, provided you still have enough to do what you need to do. If you can sell 40k Stone (a regular Amulet reward or the product of 2 hours worth of a Quarry-focused city's output) on day one for 4 Gold/Stone, you'll earn 160k Gold. Wait 4-5 days and by day 5 you can buy 400k Stone with that gold. That's a P/E ratio of 40k/360k = 0.11 or a ROI of 900%! That is extremely good, about as good as a lv-1 Sawmill. And it scales: the more resources you sell early this way, the greater your reward. And remember, you don't actually benefit much from spending so much Stone on lv-1 Walls and lv-3 Town Hall and beyond.

Because Gold is so valuable on days 4-7, you should do everything you can to conserve it. This means avoiding extraneous research and getting the minimum research possible.

Cottages are Better Than Resourcing
Because Gold is so valuable on days 4-7, come day 3-4, you should use resources (which are already quite cheap) to build lv-3 Cottages. A lv-3 Cottage costs (700 Food + 3500 Lumber + 700 Stone + 350 Iron) and gives you 600 population limit and if you have 50% taxation (the optimum) means 300 more people each paying 0.5 Gold per hour, or a boost of 300 Gold per hour. According to day 6 prices, that's equivalent to producing an additional 1200 Lumber per hour. A lv-4 Sawmill costs (1500 Food + 1500 Lumber + 3750 Stone + 4500 Iron) and produces 1000 Lumber per hour, so you're paying more than twice as much, for less income! Hence a lv-3 Cottage, and even a lv-4 Cottage, is superior to a lv-4 Sawmill at that time. This is not to mention that you'll want higher population in order to place the orders for units you'll need to produce overnight on days 5-7.

Max-Resources Early Build Order
Using a modified version of this build order, I managed to get, before leaving beginners' protection, 3000 Workers + 3500 Archers + 2500 Scouts + 700 Archer Towers. This could probably get you even more. The main downside is you gain very little prestige early on - you'll have roughly 5,000 prestige through day 3, even though you'll come out of protection with 20,000+ prestige. Hence you can't use this build if you want to host a strong alliance.

The overall strategy is to maximize resource production on day 1, since this is when they sell for the most gold, then keep selling the resources for the next 3 days. On day 4, resource prices have fallen, so you turn to Cottages to supplement your income, and you expo to a new city. The objective in expo-ing so late is so that you can use resources where they'll make you lots of money instead of putting them into a resource sink like lv-1 Walls and lv-3 Town Hall. After day 4 you should have at least 1,000,000 Gold and if you've been oscillation trading effectively during this time (aided by your having lots of Gold) and had gotten into the server very early, you could have 2,000,000 Gold. Starting from day 5 you use 1 mil Gold to buy, say, 2.5 mil Lumber + 1 mil Stone + 1.5 mil Iron, and continue to use your gold income to buy more resources, focusing primarily on Lumber for all the Archers and Archer Towers. If you've written down the server opening time, you can start the military training orders right at the time when all your units finish as you come out of protection, and presto! You're ready to go. This build has a tremendous upkeep cost (easily 40k+ food an hour) so make sure you have at least half a million food before you go to sleep, or else you'll have a massive Refuge program on your hands. If you time it right and use large training orders (1k+) the only upkeep you'll have before coming out of protection will be those for your 250 Workers and 200 Warriors.

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5 Day 6 Day 7
 * 12 lv-1 Cottages >> Upgrade 1 Cottage to lv-2 >> Set to 0% tax rate
 * 1 lv-1 Farm >> 1 lv-3 Sawmill >> 1 lv-3 Quarry >> 1 lv-1 Ironmine >> 5 lv-3 Sawmills >> 4 lv-3 Quarry >> Set to 100% production rate
 * 1 lv-1 Inn >> 1 lv-1 Feasting Hall >> 1 lv-1 Marketplace >> Cycle through until you get a good-Politics hero
 * Upgrade Town Hall to lv-2
 * 4 lv-3 Sawmill >> Upgrade the other 6 Sawmills to lv-4
 * Sell resources as you get them throughout the remainder of the day.
 * Sell resources as you get them throughout the entire day.
 * Sell resources as you get them throughout the entire day.
 * Upgrade all 12 Cottages to lv-3 >> 3 lv-3 Cottages
 * Upgrade Ironmine to lv-3 >> 1 lv-2 Forge >> 1 lv-1 Workshop >> 1 lv-1 Walls
 * Upgrade Town Hall to lv-3 >> Get Package for Lords and get promoted to Knight
 * 1 lv-2 Rally Point >> 1 lv-1 Barracks >> Upgrade Feasting Hall to lv-2
 * Train 200 Warriors
 * Upgrade all 15 Cottages to lv-4
 * After population rises to max, set to 100% tax rate >> At 50% population, set to 50% tax rate
 * 3 lv-4 Sawmill >> Demolish 4 Quarries and replace with 4 lv-4 Sawmills
 * 1 lv-2 Academy >> lv-2 Lumbering >> lv-1 Agriculture >> lv-1 Masonry >> lv-1 Mining
 * Capture nearby lv-1 Flat >> Build city and recall army
 * Transport all necessary resources to City 2
 * City 2: 21 lv-2 Cottages >> 1 lv-1 Farm >> 10 lv-3 Sawmills >> 1 lv-2 Quarry
 * City 2: 1 lv-1 Rally Point >> 1 lv-1 Inn >> 1 lv-1 Feasting Hall >> Get second good-Politics hero
 * City 2: 1 lv-3 Ironmine >> 1 lv-2 Forge >> 1 lv-1 Workshop >> 1 lv-1 Walls
 * City 2: Upgrade Town Hall to lv-3
 * City 2: 3 lv-3 Sawmills
 * City 2: Upgrade all 21 Cottages to lv-4
 * City 2: lv-2 Academy
 * Buy a tremendous amount of resources with all your saved-up Gold from city 1; transport all excess resources from city 2 to city 1.
 * Upgrade Academies in both cities to lv-4 >> lv-4 Military Science >> lv-1 Military Tradition >> lv-1 Iron Working >> lv-1 Logistics >> lv-1 Compass >> lv-1 Informatics >> lv-1 Archery (get these in almost any order)
 * 6 lv-4 Barracks
 * Get a good-Attack hero in city 1
 * Train 2.5k Scouts
 * Train 3k Workers
 * Train 1k Archers
 * Buy as much resources as you can
 * Upgrade Informatics to lv-5
 * 1 lv-5 Beacon Tower in each city
 * Train 2.5k Archers
 * Buy as much resources as you can
 * Capture 3-4 Forest tiles for each city
 * Upgrade Archery to lv-3 or lv-4
 * 700 Archer Towers

The Most Important Thing
The single most important element in the game in terms of determining whether you succeed is the number of Archers and Workers when you (and many others) come out of protection on day 7. Don't worry if your prestige is lower than your neighbors', and don't go prestige-chasing. Archer Towers are good only as they protect your main city from enemies and thus don't tie down your Archers. Once protection ends you'll want to attack and pillage a LOT, because pillaging is the best way to get the resources you need in the game, and as long as your military outnumbers everyone else's, which you need in order to survive in this game, you might as well be pillaging. Once your pillaging gets up and running, you can continue producing more military units.