Evony: In-depth Guide to Surviving Outside Beginner's Prot

BUILDING YOUR DEFENSE

One key aspect to making yourself an unattractive target for enemies is setting up a solid defence. If others will have a hard time breaking into your city, they often won't bother. With the way defence mechanics work currently, there are specific units and fortifications that work much better than others for defending your city, and you should concentrate on these. Here are defence building pointers:

-Traps, Abatis, Rolling logs, and Defensive Trebuchets, are all disposable fortifications; they each target specific unit types, deal a certain amount of damage during attacks, but always 'suicide' (get destroyed) in their use. They are expensive to continually rebuild, and very easy for an enemy to clear out before sending in a real attack, just by suiciding cheap units into your defences to waste them. This makes them all essentially useless at the moment. They're a minor annoyance, but can be overcome by sheer numbers very easily. Don't build more than the few quests ask you to.

- The ONLY one of the above that can be remotely useful, in my opinion, is Abatis. This is because they only target Cavalry and Cataphracts, two very fast units that enemy players most often use to quickly spam attack your city to reduce your loyalty. Having a few hundred abatis (500 is usually plenty) will make people who want to cavalry spam you think twice, and therefore forces them to use much slower units to spam your loyalty down, which makes taking your city many times slower, and often will cause people to decide it's not worth the trouble.

-Just for technical reasons let me list what units can get hit (and thus clear out) which fortifications:
-Traps: Any foot soldier or mounted unit, basically everything excluding the siege units (transporters to catapults)
-Abatis: only cavalry or cataphracts
-Rolling Log: Same as traps except they seem to be unable to hit cavalry and cataphracts if I remember correctly; almost no one uses these
-Trebuchets: Anything

-If you can deduce from the above, there is only one truly useful fortification unit, and indeed they are the grand-daddy of all defences. When I size up someone's defence in a scout report, there are two main factors I look at: Number of archer towers, and number of archers. Archer Towers (henceforth known as ATs) don't die when they fire, have huge range (even further extended by both archery technology AND the size of your walls), do huge damage, and have great defence. When someone wants to attack you, the general rule is that for every archer tower the target has, they need to attack with five archers to barely win, or ten archers to guarantee minimal losses. Having archers behind towers just makes this harder to do. Build as many as you can, as fast as you can.

-As mentioned above, the other defensive unit that works most effectively are Archers. This is due to their long range, which, when on defence, gets bolstered both by archer technology AND the level of the walls in the city they are defending. This means they can hit almost all units (in combination with archer towers) long before the other units, even ballista’s and catapults, can get in range of them

-Again, as mentioned above, the level of your walls and your archery technology will both boost the power of your main defences significantly. Concentrate on upgrading them as high as you can

-Get an attack hero. You should use all your hero hunting(s) to try and get heroes for each stat who start with around 65-70 base stats at level 1. Having an attack hero sitting in a city will cause the game to automatically use that hero to lead defences. Instead of just using your mayor, the game picks the highest attack hero available and uses them. Get an attack hero, this boosts the power of your defences by a lot

-Only get a second city if you are confident that your first city will have very potent defences by the time you leave beginners protection. Also make sure you are confident you can make the second city very well defended in time as well. The moment you build a second city, it allows enemies to choose to steal either of your cities, because you cannot steal someone's only city. They would almost surely choose to attack your main city, so don't waste effort starting another one if you aren't sure that both will be safe.

-Try and join an alliance that has a 'home state' or 'home area'. Move into this state or area so they can reinforce and protect you if you need it. Being in a strong alliance is of zero use to you if everyone is a state away or more.

-This hint is something I call the 'scout defence'. If you aren't aware, people who try to scout your city to see what your defences are will only get a report if they have more scouts on that scout mission than you have in your city (enough to win the scout battle; this scout battle only happens if your gates are open though, so keep your gates open). Therefore, building large numbers of scouts can keep people from finding out exactly how much defences you have in a city. It's rare to see people under 100k prestige with more than 10k scouts in any single city, so try and get as many as you can; if people can't see exactly what you have they are far less likely to attack you.

-Don't waste time researching the 'increased resources' techs if you only have one of that type of resource node. It's an absolute waste of time to get 10% more food production if you only have one level 5 farm. Focus on the ones that directly affect battle; military tradition, archery, ironworking, military science, etc.

Finally, I want to put in a section that sums up factors that will make you not seem like a juicy target to attack:

-Archer Towers, and archers on defence. Get lots of both.

-High archery level and walls.

-Your prestige. This is an arguable one, as I know I personally see players who come out of beginners prot with large amounts of prestige as potential dangers in the future, so I try and clear them out asap, but if you're only around 50k~ prestige people, you can easily be close to parity with them by the time you get out. Most people are cowards and won't try to attack someone with close or higher prestige than them... even though prestige has virtually no actual meaning for how strong your army and defences are.

-Your alliance. If you're in an alliance that is very strong in a given area, you are significantly less likely to be the victim of random people looting you for fun. You also will have allies near you to reinforce your city if you get attacked.

-Your honor. It's very difficult to get honor inside beginner’s protection; the only way is to attack valleys that other people have stationed troops at, which almost never happens. But, once you’re out, if you get decent amounts of honor by taking out nearby players' armies and defences, you look to others like a pvper, and a scary target. Keep in mind attacking random people can also **** them off (obviously) and get their alliances after you

-How many resources you have. If someone is attacking you just for resources, you become a much less juicy target if you spend all your resources as often as you can. Try and blow all your money on whatever resources you need, and then keep your barracks queued as long as you can to keep your resources from piling up too much. If I see someone behind 8k archer towers and 2k archers, even though I know I could easily wreck that, if they only have a total of 500k resources, I see that and think it is not worth the losses I'll take killing the towers.

QUICK SUMMARY REFERENCE:

- 10-12 barracks in first city. Zero warehouses always, rest cottages. In next cities you can survive with even fewer cottages and more barracks.

- Use the five minute free speedup on any building you can. Get politics mayor and increase construction as they speed up build times.

- Make one of each resource node, and then the rest should be whatever resource is most expensive. Sell your excesses to buy the other materials.

- Stay at your keyboard as much as you can in first few weeks, keep stuff constantly building, save very long builds for when you go to sleep

- Get your free gift Newbie's package and Lord's Package, don't be afraid to use the items if you need to

- Traps, Abatis, Rolling logs, Defensive Trebuchets = useless. Maybe make 500 abatis to make cavalry rushing you unattractive, but nothing else

- Build as many archer towers and archers as you can; they're the best defence

- Upgrade Battle Technologies: Archery, Military Tradition, iron working, medicine, etc. Also get high level walls. Also get an atk hero

- Don't waste time on a second city until your first city is adequately defended

- Get in an alliance in your area, teleport away from nearby high level players who aren't allied with you.

- Build scouts to keep people from seeing what you have.

- Burn your resources as often as you can so people don't see you as a profitable target