Introduction:
Advanced Evony Age2 players have heroes statistics over 500. They belong to large powerful alliances that are often at war with equally powerful enemies. These players have very large armies that include every troop type available. They attack with different forces depending on the defenses of their enemy. Wave attacks by cataphracts, ballistas, or scout bombs are used often.
A single city plan that was designed to produce archers will not support these action
s and support optimum use of city resources, city population, and barracks capacity.
Evony Two players with very large armies need large food supplies. The daily food search creates greater time management problems for these players.
City Designs:
When you finish your equipment upgrades and all items have reached level 10. You will begin upgrading your stars. Once you have reached a 12 set your heroes will be over 500 attack or politics rating. At this point I started adding Excalibur to my queen every week. I win enough coins on the wheel to support this setting and still buy other items as needed.
Remember once your hero equipment reaches level 10, you won't need coins won on the wheel to improve that equipment ever again. If you receive the maximum 21 free spins every day, you will win enough coins on the wheel to buy Excalibur and teleport scrolls.
Now my queen is around 690 attack. She can use every citizen in a 55,000 population city to make archers and not even need 24 hours to complete the task. That means I have 10 cottages and only 15 barracks. Unless you are willing to go into the barracks cues more than once a day, you can't fill more barracks.
The game has also changed for me again. I now need a constant supply of scouts, ballistas and cataphracts. These troop types do not always come out of my standard city very well. I have built two scout cities that have 13 level ten cottages and 12 barracks. These cities have 71,000 citizens which I use to make two waves of 44,000 scouts a day in each city. The scouts take a
bout 13 hours so I make about 180 thousand scouts every day. I found it easier to make two waves in these cities than to keep up resource production when I used one wave of 71 thousand.
Cataphracts are easy to produce in a 55,000 citizen city, but need much more iron than archers. I try to keep this production in only two cities where I can also make pikes when necessary.
Mechanics like ballistas and rams are very slow to produce and need more citizens per unit. I created two cities to make these units. Each city has 5 cottages and 20 barracks. One can produce over 4300 ballistas a day with only 27,000 citizens. Fewer cottages would mean that some mines, saw mills or farms would not be used. The city normally only has about 5,000 ci
tizens remaining after a barracks build is scheduled.
Production in these cities is not perfectly balanced. The archer cities normally fill the barracks for under 24 hours, meaning an extra build is required about once a week. The scout and mechanics cities also aren't perfectly balanced. This is actually not a problem. I will continue to add stars to my queen which means production rates will increase. It is almost pointless to perfectly balance any city when your hero is going to keep changing.
Notice this strategy involves moving my queen from one city to the next every day to gain the advantage of her statistics and Excalibur. This could be done with a Historic Hero who would have even higher statistics. The problem is that any Historic Hero needs an open slot in a city before moving, the queen does not. I didn't want to keep an open slot in each city since that reduces NPC farming for gems and supplies. I also didn't want to have to keep one random open slot and be forced to move my Historic Hero in one direction while moving some random hero in another. Shuffling my queen around up to 12 times a day is quite enough trouble.
I have found that moving the queen after completing the barracks cues, gives me time to complete NPC farming in one city. I then open the city she has arrived in, make her mayor, open the town hall to set production to zero, send out a single NPC farming wave to reset the production counter, and then do the next set of barracks. With the barracks completed, I reset the mayor, reset production rates and send the queen with one scout to the next city. This resets the population and production counters. I then send out the NPC farmers from the current city allowing the queen time to move to the next city.
Always double-check your city before you schedule barracks cues and before you finally leave the city. It is frustrating to forget to make the queen mayor. You normal barracks production will take days instead of hours. It is also frustrating to realize you didn't set production to zero before entering the barracks, since now your cues will only last a fraction of the time you expected.
Once you leave a city, it doesn't reset the mayor and the production rate itself. If you forget these items, you won't get the politics mayor's benefits and your citizens will sit around doing nothing for you. Losing hours of necessary production is not a pleasant experience.
Food:
Two or three waves of cataphracts, plus two or three waves of ballistas, plus 5 million archers, plus 5 million warriors, plus 2 million scouts and a lot of other troops eat a lot of food. They eat much more food than any city can produce. They also eat more than you can supply by farming level 5 NPCs alone.
You will need to take advantage of the FaceBook bonus application that calls for Historic Heroes. This application allows ten of your FaceBook friends to join you. They each receive a 5 percent reduction in their entire food bill and you receive 5 percent for every friend who joins you. You may receive up to 50 percent of your daily food bill by any combination of friends you help and friends who help you. It makes sense to hope your friends provide the full ten people since you may then use your FaceBook bonuses for other items. There is no easy way to insure that the FaceBook bonuses you click on plus those of your friends equals exactly 10 and no more. Any total above 10 is wasted.
You should upgrade Historic City farms to their greatest levels. The upgrade step at level 10 requires a Michelangelo script. In a normal city this step is a waste since it gains so little. In a Historic City the script opens all the available levels. A level 14 Historic City with level 14 farms and level 10 lakes still cannot support a large army by itself, but it does produce a surprising amount of food.
You will need to colonize large inactive player cities. These cities pay tribute 10 times an hour to your city. It is possible to receive several million tons of food per hour from your colonies in any city.
Attacking level 9 and level 10 NPCs is the only way to exceed the food demands of a very large army. There will be some troop loses in any attack on these NPCs. The loses will be reduced by better hero equipment but will never be eliminated. You should expect to farm several of these large NPCs every day.
We players have discovered some Evony program bugs that allowed better food yields when attacking high level NPCs. Evony programmers have corrected each bug when they discovered them. The game designers want the players to struggle to find enough food. They designed the game to include a trade-off between available food and army size.
Conclusion
Evony is a constantly changing game. The tactics you chose and the time you can give the game will dictate the types of cities you build. Advanced players will need diverse troops in their armies. The requirements to build these different troops will not fit well into a single type of city. Either the resources or the training cues will not be optimized in every city.
Every player must decide what troops they need. The player should then build distinctly different cities to produce each type of troop.
There are several Evony Age2 guides and manuals available for beginning and advanced players.
