Aug 24, 2009

The Ubiquity of Evony

1. A New Perspective

I am an old school Age of Empire [the Conquer pack] (AOC) player and I have been playing this game for over 8 years. The one day I found Evony, which has a few nice features that AOC does not have:

1. The number of players is not limited.

2. Free (and technically free forever)

3. Evony is also a real-time strategy (RTS) game (I will explain later)

4. Can be played anywhere with just a browser.

2. Cutting-edge Technologies

The reason why Evony is Operation System independent is that, it uses the latest cutting-edge technology called Flash. This may sound obvious to most of the reader but this is the point that makes Evony unique. Network based games are hard to be developed and Flash makes it easier. Evony has made an excellent work on graphics. Do I need to compare Evony with the most popular among officers game called FarmTown?

The Internet doesn’t mean connectivity to everywhere. I still remember the day of TCP/IP dominated game era: We have to mess up with the router for port forwarding. With Evony, it is easy; all we need is just a browser (zero setup!) – Nothing can be simpler than that!

The “Map View” mode is very well done and I have never seen that kind of work in other text-based RTS games before: We can browse the map in the way we use Google map. Adding visualization to the game is the key factor that makes Evony easy to play and being unique.

3. In-game Booming and Rush

You are given 5000 resources of each kind (food, lumber, stone, iron and gold) and you have 7 days of protection, which means, you have 7 days of free booming without fear of being attacked from stronger users.

Of course, with 7 days, you can never be strong enough if decide going solo. You can buy items that make stronger but it will never be enough. And you have to find a good alliance to join. Otherwise, you won’t survive!

Army training in Evony goes the same way like other RTS games: We make a good economy, getting resources and training armies. The difference from Evony to AOC is that: Evony has only one kind of “army building”: The barrack. However, we can train dozen kinds of armies from it.

Fighting in Evony is not so visually: We choose a target, right-click it and choose “Attack”. A new window will popup letting we choose the armies. This is fine but after the attacked is launched, all we can do is WAITING! We can cancel the attack but we can not redirect (I mean set the targets to another coordinator). When the armies arrive the target, the fight instantly finished in a not-so-intuitive fashion way. AOC players like may ask: How to micro-management in Evony? Well, probably no, there is only macro-management in Evony.

4. Is This a True Real-Time Strategy Game?

Yes it is. However, to be precise, Evony belongs to a sub-genre of RTS game called Real-Time Tactics. Therefore, AOC players, who understand the meaning of the phase “Real-Time Strategy” in a misleading way, will find it strange at the first look. However, macro-management skills in AOC can be similarly applied here easily.

23/08/2009

Written by Nguyen Vu Hung

Email: vuhung16plus@gmail.com

Evony nickname: “VCF ksv9x” on server 30