Starting your first city

1. Starting your first city
There are multiple ways you can start on the server. The path you choose should depend on how much (if any) money you are willing to spend as well as how much experience you have.

Beginner style play

If you have never played Age 2 before, this is probably the way you will want to start the game. I recommend against spending money right away, because you may make mistakes and wish to start over. I also recommend that if you wish to become a serious player, possibly starting on a server for a few days just to grasp how to play, before starting on the server you want to stay on.

The first step will be to go to the server you wish to play on. It will give you a step by step tutorial in game, that will walk you through the first few quests and teach you how to complete them. One thing it does not tell you is to click the "Speed Up" button at the top right of the page. If you do this on buildings that have base (not modified by hero or technology) build times under 5 minutes, you will complete the build instantly without any resource cost (speed ups).

After you complete the Tutorial quests, you should have one of each resource field (Farm/Mill/Quarry/Mine) at level one, a level 1 inn, feasting hall, and a level 2 cottage. This does not leave you very far into the game, but should get you a decent grasp on how the controls work. At this point, you should have ~8k food, 10k lumber, 8k stone, and 7.5k iron remaining, which can be seen on the resource tab on the far right side of the screen.

At this point, you want to start playing with Facebook while you build. The easiest way to do this is to join the largest alliance you can find, advertise your Facebook ID to the members in either alliance chat or a group mail, and then anyone who friends you on Facebook, make sure to add them as Evony Allies. To add a person as an Evony ally, you can click the gift box just to the left of your remaining resources, and then on the top of the new page it brings up, click on "My Allies" to send them an ally request. After they accept this, you will be able to see their Facebook Avatar in game, and you can click on that and click Visit Empire. Once there, click on the bottom of the page "Help Increase Production". Doing this will give you a resource pack you can open and help keep you from running out while starting your first city (it is very easy to run out and have to wait for more to produce). You can also visit your friends Facebook pages individually for Evony wall posts. The one I find most helpful early on is "xxxxxx found Wild Horses". This will give you 100 cavalry for clicking on it. Everyone can click on 20 wall posts a day and this lets you collect 2000 cavalry from other people. If you have the opportunity to post this, when people click on it, you will receive 200 cavalry (up to 10 times I believe), giving you a total of 4000 cavalry for the day. Now unless you are chasing historic heroes (HHs) early, which I do not recommend if this is your first time playing, you can destroy these cavalry in a barracks. Next to their name where you can queue them, is a picture of them with a red circle over it. If you click this red circle, it will ask how many you wish to destroy, and you should choose all to gain a portion of their resources (Cavalry are pigs and will eat more food than you can afford this early in the game, but are worth collecting for their resources.)

Now for city design; You should build your first city as an all-purpose city. This means that it should have Farms, Mills, Quarries, and Mines. I would build 2 Mills and Mines for every Farm and Quarry you build in this town (later on in your next cities, this will not be how you should build them because stone will be useless, and better to focus on one resource per city). Try to maintain this ratio for as many resource field slots as you have. As you increase the level of your Town Hall inside the town, you will gain three more resource field slots. For the first day (once again, if not chasing HHs) or two, you should always have 1 build slots building a resource field, if not both. You will also want to make sure your academy is leveled up high enough to start training Combat Technologies (Iron Working, Military Tradition, Compass, Horseback Riding, Archery, Metal Casting, and Medicine). These should be your focus except for those that are pre-requisites for other things you may wish to build.

As you level up your town, and increase the level of your feasting hall and inn, you will want to watch for a better hero to come along. You will want two types of heroes early one: a Politician, and an Attacker. For your first heroes, I would search for one that fits the following equations (Main Stat - Level ) >= 50. Later in the game, you will change that 50 to a 67 or so for quality, but you can't be too picky early on, otherwise you may not get one for quite a while.

What each hero stat is good for:

Attack : Should be sent with most attacks. Should be set to mayor while queuing troops to reduce queue times.

Politics : Should be your default mayor. Reduces queue times of buildings. Increases resource production rates

Intelligence : Should be set to mayor when starting a new technology research. Should be sent with overwhelming attacks (when your units will take only 1 round of combat to defeat all types of enemy units, regardless of hero Attack bonuses.) This is because INT is a flat life bonus to all of your troops

One last word of advice while building your town, is to not build more than seven cottages in this town. Any more than this and you are wasting space that can be better utilized by barracks.

This may sound too simple, but essentially you will want to follow your quest chains for the most part. There are however a few quests that are not worth doing at all or should at least wait until you are an established player:

Quests you should wait on: The quest row named "Wealthy Society" and the sub-row named "Stone" never needs to be completed. If you complete this, it means you have built many more stone mines than you will ever need. After you have your walls to level 10, you should destroy all quarries and make them into either mines or mills.


Chasing HH at server start

For those more experienced, and willing to spend money at the start of a server, this is a basic overview of how to capture a few HHs in the first day. You start by spending some money; $90 should do it. This will hopefully get you 2 advanced teleports, and will give you enough coins to buy your way to baronet (so you can persuade the HH you capture.) You start by building your Inn to level 5, your Feasting Hall to level 2, and raising your Town Hall to level 5 as fast as you can. Use your speedups that you have. This will get you out of battle protection, allow you to have an empty slot for the HH you capture, and to inquire details about him in the first place. You should have a list of HHs you want to hunt (I avoid the best of the best because many people go for those and will be a race.) As you are building up your town, cycle through the wall posts and make sure you post the Cavalry one so people can start clicking on it. Go onto Facebook at this point and click on 20 different Cavalry posts to build your army. Once all of yours have been clicked, and you have done all your clicking, you should have 4k cavalry, plenty to take out a couple level 1 or 2 NPCs. Make sure you are also watching your inn for the best ATT or INT hero available and recruit him. Don't forget to have a lot of people on this new server visit you as allies to give you all those wonderful, free, resource packs.

After you have your town built to this, go to Folk Hearsay in your inn and search for you hero. If it says he is in a barbarian city, inquire details of the hero you want, if he turns out to be in an NPC that is level 1 or 2, advance teleport right next to it, and attack it and capture him. If it says the hero is in a flat instead of a barbarian city, it means it is already player owned, and you do not want to waste the cents inquiring about him. Directly after, build a second town in the closest low level flat you can find (don't want to waste your cav taking a high level flat.) Build up this town just like you did the first, and transport your HH and any resources you have to it, along with all the troops. Abandon the first town, and start inquiring details again about another hero. When you find another in a level 1 or 2 NPC, advance teleport again, and capture the new HH. Build another town (assuming you have enough cav left to do this a third time) and do it the same as the first to, except this time, build the feasting hall to level 3, for room for a third hero. If you do not have any more Advanced Teleports, you can just regular teleport the existing town into the state of another HH in a level 1 or 2 NPC and send a long range attack with one of your HHs (still must increase Feasting Hall to level 3 first). After you capture the third, you will probably have to wait until the next day to get more free cav and continue this process. If the 3 you have now capture is enough for your liking, or you are out of teleports, build a new town, and this time, do not upgrade the Town Hall to 5, just build the feasting hall high enough to have room for your heroes, move them, your remaining army, and your resources there and abandon the original city. This will return you into battle protection and allow you to be safe, but now with your new HHs.