Sunday, June 14, 2009

Blog Contributors

I need contributors for this blog!
You can send in submissions on anything about games -
stories, guides, reviews, recommendations.

Or maybe you can tell me about a game you want added here.

Send me a message at jethro05@gmail.com or you can post a comment here.


Due credits will be given to contributors. You can feature anything you want here.

Also, feedback and recommendations are welcome.

Thanks a lot!

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MyBrute - Game Review

I have yet to create more guides for Evony. But for now, I have to write review myBrute since I made a new interface showing other games I am playing.

To put it simply, myBrute is a brutal game. You and your opponent hammer each other in the Arena. If you have ever played old arcade games, like Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom among many others, you would surely be familiar with the feel of myBrute. Old arcade games, only there is something very different with myBrute that makes it unique.



Like old arcade games, you get to choose your character. But in myBrute, you customize your characters. You get to choose their outfit, skin color, hair, face and others. You also get to name your brute.

Here are two of my characters:

myEyeCandy & jethro08

Then there is the thing that seperated myBrute from your ordinary arcade. You don't get to control anything in my brute, only when you choose which brute to fight. You might be asking, then how can a player enjoy myBrute?

Simple. You get to watch smackdown action. You get to sit back and enjoy your victories without lifting even a single finger.

What is more, there are 28 bonuses and dozens (hundreds from what I've heard) of weapons your myBrute can randomly gain each time he levels up. All is done automatically, all you have to do is select which brute will be the victim of your brute every day.

MyBrute is a good game to pass the time by. All you do is watch and your brutes entertain you. Also, there is a limit of fights you can go in every day, so you have to wait another 24 hours before you can fight again. This means, myBrute will not take a lot of your time.

I play my brute while waiting for the 15 minute daily maintenance of evony.

If you ever want to play myBrute, you can go here.
You can also read the guide I made on myBrute here.


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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Evony - My First Conquer

18 pages of attack reports (more or less 180 attacks), 2 trips to the bathroom, a capsule of stomach ache medicine, 24 hours without sleep, 2 mugs of coffee, and 2 niece asking me questions is what took me to take over a single city. Not to mention the hundreds of cavalry I lost on my spam attack experiment.

I, one of the good and kindly lords, is slowly(or quickly, depending on your opinion. :p), becoming a warlord. I've trained thousands of elite soldiers the past few days and now training more than 20,000 elite soldiers and 2,000 ballista.

And now, I am becoming more and more evil. >:)

I have conquered my first city from a Prinzessin (he is not a princess, I am not that evil yet). And the city I conquered have a level 10 town hall to boot. Well, that level 10 town hall was the one that tempted me and my alliance leader to take it for our own hands.

Unfortunately, I have 4 cities, the maximum I can have for my current title of a Baron. So I had to give up one of my newer cities. When I gave up my youngest city, it turned into a level 7 barbarian. That is what happens when you abandon your townsfolk, they become barbarian and eat each other. Or was that the cannibals? I don't know and I don't care that much about them anymore. :p

Me and my alliance leader, the Mighty Essex, started pounding 2 of the 9 cities of Tantak, with conquer in our motives. Then, the loyalty of Tantak's cities are slowly going down, giving us more and more opportunity to win over the hearts of his people. Well, we didn't win their hearts because of kindness, we threatened them with thousands of soldiers going back and forth his and my city.

After more than an hour of siege (yes, you only need more than an hour to take over a city, the other 23 hours are used on rebuilding and playing around), I finally get to see inside the city! Unfortunately, the city looks worse than what my scout told me. I have to find that scout immediately and have him hanged!

Here is what inside the city looks like:


The resource fields are built uneven. There are very small number of farms than what I need to feed my soldiers. The cottages for the people of the city are uneven (I am guessing he took consideration for a caste system and nobles). The city layout is a random mess. It could have been better if there is a level 10 barracks.

Well, I only conquered it for the town hall after all. What I am telling is that a level 10 town hall is hard to get, unless you have paid for treasure hunters at the black market to get for you some scrolls of Michael Angelo. I only have a single scroll in my treasury, and I plan to use it only when I need to.

After the conquer, I began reformatting the city. I attracted more civilians into the city by very low taxes and no work to do. I ask for the priest to pray for the people. After a flock of stupid civilians entered the forsaken city, I began building up the farms to feed my starved soldiers. Then I started enslaving the people into the fields!

Rebuilding a sieged city is hard work. You need to rebuild all fortifications to protect your city from raids. So, I decided to go into truce for 12 hours to give me time to rest and rebuild.

And on the end of two days for me, me and my alliance leader have a new city to command. Then, I did finally have a good sleep.


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Evony Alliance - MAFIA & MAFIA2

Everyone needs an alliance to survive in evony. After all, no man is an Island.

Well, when I join an alliance, I stick with it. Unless probably the alliance will betray me or get destroyed, which is fortunately, hard to happen on my current alliance.

MAFIA and MAFIA2 are the alliances I am affiliated with in Evony Server 1. We have warlords and good lords, but I have yet to see an active merchant in MAFIA2.

Anyway, MAFIA2 can help players in resources, and defend their cities. Provided that the member needing help in is within reasonable distances. We also provide help to guide new players into the right track.

We are mainly based in Thuringia and Bavaria.

To join MAFIA2, there are several requirements:
1. You play in Evony Server 1.
2. You are an active player.

If you meet these requirements, send a message to anyone on the following list.


Essex
Alliance Host



Ala & Shaed
Vice-Hosts


Kirtis, Phoenix778, Jethro08
deadfred98 & Connani
Presbyters


Sssurri, Hermann, Rupdude
Prunty, Piper, Marley121x & Fonrar
Officers

Note: I will be changing the portraits to handmade drawings soon. If you want a special image picture, please tell me. Either comment here or send me an in-game mail.


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Friday, June 12, 2009

Evony Concepts

There are some concepts that a player must understand before he/she can play Evony successfully. I've listed some of them here.

1. Population
This is the civilian population of your city. They are there in the background doing things that you don't even knew existed in the beginning. If you don't know where to see your population information, see the the interface guide.

First, they are responsible for the gold income of your city. The tax rate set on them determines their loyalty to you as their lord, the gold income of your city, and indirectly your population.

Second, your civilian population is your labor force. Without them, your mines, farms and other resource fields are as good as useless.

Third, they are who you recruit and train to become elite soldiers. The number of idle population is what is available for you to exploit as your army source.

2. Gold
The world of evony revolves around the root of all evil, money. And by money, I mean Evony gold. You gain from several sources.

Taxes - If you are a plain and helpful lord, your city subjects give you a small portion of their income as an exchange for their protection. Or maybe you can get all the gold they are earning, but be warned that they may not like it and leave your city for good.

Market - Or maybe you are a businessman, then you can work your slaves on the mines and sell whatever you get in the black market. Of course, there are downsides in all schemes as the world market's prices can become very erratic, changing at a whim.

Raiding - Being an angry warlord can payoff too. You can raid all the cities around your army camp and get all the gold you want. Unless your neighbors are also warlords who won't give you single cent, or they are peasants who don't even have enough to buy food.

3. Resources
Being a lord of a city entitles you the power to enslave all of the populace. You can force them to work on 4 different resource fields you built. For more information on where the resource fields are, check the interface guide.

Food - They can be earned from the farm. They are easy to produce but also easy to be used up when feeding a big army. You also need food to feed your builders.

Stone - Mainly used for construction, but they are also needed as catapult projectile. Walls, for one, need a lot of stone.

Iron - When you are planning to have a huge army, you would need a lot of Iron. They are needed to make all the weapons and armor your army needs.

Wood - Perhaps the most important of all resources. Wood is needed in all aspects of Evony rule. They are needed for shields, spears, bow and arrows, catapults, balistas, building houses, upgrading your town hall, literally everything. That is why

4. Research
Of course, all things are not in the best shape when they first came out, look at Windows Vista for example. That is why even in the world of Evony, research is needed to improve the quality of things.

Research unlocks some things to be built, and improves it on further researches. Researches have a maximum of 10 levels, which means you need to research 10 times to get the full potential of anything.

Research times are extremely horrible. Even with the minds of Einstein, Newton and others are not enough to finish all the calculations and plans in a single sitting.

Perhaps, the worst research time I ever encountered are from researching a level 1o archery. You would need the science of trajectory, physics, meteorology and other sciences to finish it. Fortunately, you have all your scientists to do all the thinking for you.

5. Building
What is a city without tall buildings? Of course, the only things noticeably tall inside the town of Evony are the Town Hall, Beacon Tower and the walls, but you still need to build a lot of things in order to get the most out of a city.

To build, first select a building spot. Then choose the building you want to build. Simple as that. Your slaves do all the work for you, all you need to do is command them.

When building, there are certain requirements needed to be met. Sometimes, they require that a certain technology is available or a certain other building is available. Of course they also require a lot of resources, especially wood.

Then there is building time. The higher the level of the building, the longer it will take to finish.

Also, there is a limit on the level of the building. It would be unfair to have the world trade center in one of your cities, right? All buildings are limited to level 10, and you would need a special building plan to reach level 10 - a Michael Angelo's Scroll, which is very rare.

5. Training
Training soldiers is not a strange concept to this world. A certain amount of time is needed before a soldier can be trained. Certain soldiers take longer time to train than others. Some, needs only a few moments, like the pitchfork wielding warriors who are only needed to be instructed how to walk and stick their pitchforks into enemy warriors.

You can also train a lot of soldier in batches, but the more they are in a batch, the longer the training time needed. But a single batch graduates at the same time, so if you have a 1000 soldier batch, you would need to wait for all of them to finish before they can be used.

Also, training soldiers requires resources. The resources will be used on their equipent and others. Some soldiers needs a lot more resources than others. Some even need more to build mechanical monsters like balistas, rams and catapults.

6. Alliances
One of the most important concepts of Evony! In an alliance, all kinds of lords gather together to plan the most cunning plans, or sometimes stupid, to take over the world of Evony. Of course, some of this sworn loyalty are sometimes betrayed by the most evil.

An alliance have its pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, which must be balanced to get the best alliance. The strength of an alliance can be measured by many ways.

First, you can measure an alliance's strength using the number of their members. The more members in an alliance, the more players to help each other. But sometimes, numbers are not enough.

Second, you can measure it through quality. The stronger the players in an alliance, the stronger the overall force of the alliance. Who would want to go against an alliance where the top 100 players are in?

Lastly, you can measure it by alliance/area density. The more players concentrated area means that they can reinforce and help each other more effectively and much more faster.

Mixing all of this strengths are hard to do. It needs great efforts to lead warlords, merchants, good lords and emperors in a single alliance. So choose your alliance wisely.


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Evony Beginner - Quests

I admit, I was also a noob when I first started playing Evony more than a month ago. I was clueless on what I am doing and all I know is I should follow the quests. After a few sessions of groping around, following the quests' instructions, I am finally starting to learn playing evony.

So, in order to learn how to play Evony, you should also follow the quests. The best way to learn after all, is experience. However, there will be somethings here that I learned on my own which are not included in the quests.

Quests
Evony provides quests to help guide you in playing. There are quests that help you hands-on to learn how to build buildings, resource fields, train soldiers, attack valleys, scout cities, how to be promoted, among many others.
The [Quest] button which have a scroll icon is found on the lower left corner of the window, the one encircled in the picture. This opens the quests window.

The quests window consits of a pane where the quest lits are found and a main window that explains the quest. You can choose from the various quests found in the pane, although when you are still starting, only a single quest is available.

More quests will be unlocked when you finish some quests as a requirement. Also note that there are some quests that have subquests, which is shown on the lower half of the pane.

On the main quest page, the quest description is shown. It just tells some boring comments on the quests, although sometimes it explains what it will do.
The quest guide shows you what you should do. Follow the quest guide and you will be finishing the quest in no time.

Quest targets are your goals to successfully finish the quest. It will have a red exclamation mark when it is not yet finished and a green check mark if a target is finished.

Your reward is also shown. After finishing a quest, be sure to claim reward to remove the quest from the list and to get the reward. Sometimes, this also unlocks more quests.

When you finish a quest completely, a green check mark will be beside the quest title in the list.


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Thursday, June 11, 2009

Evony Basics - Interface Guide

The Evony Interface













(1) Announcements and view changer
(2) Main Window
(3) Lord Information
(4) Menus
(5) Chat
(6) City chooser
(7) City Tax/Population information
(8) Other city information

1. Announcements and Views
(from left to right)
  • LV button. Can toggle whether to show the level information of buildings in the main Window.
  • Internet Explorer Icon. Changes the title of the web browser of the game. Useful when hiding the game window.
  • Gift Box. Shows the packages that can be claimed and available. These packages contain in-game items.
  • Announcements. Some server information and announcements are shown here.
  • Town/City/Map Buttons. Changes the main window to different game views.
2. Main Window
Shows the city in three different views, [City],[Town] and [Map].
[Town] View
In this view you can build all the civilian and military buildings available in the building spots. You can also upgrade the town hall and the walls from this view.

There are only 32 building slots available so a good mix of military and civilian buildings are needed.

The list of buildings will be on my next posts.

[City] View
This is where resource fields go. The slots available depends on the level of the town hall. This image shows 13 fields from a level 1 town hall. On each additional level, 3 slots are added. On a fully extended town hall, there will be a maximum of 40 slots.

You can build four types of resources, farm for food, sawmill for wood, quarry for stone and ironmines for iron. More in depth discussion will be on the next posts.

[Map] View
Map view shows valleys and cities around your city. You can move the map around to see other locations. Also, you can enter a coordinate in the form on the top-right area of the main window.

The flags identify who the cities belong to. Other than the 4 character flag, the color of the flag also identifies your relationship to the city's lord. Gold means they are your cities, green your allies' cities, blue for other friendly alliances. Red are for enemies of your alliance, white for no relationships, and black for NPCs.

Other Main Window elements:

Top-left - shows the bonuses and other things that affect your status.
Bottom-left - opens the wheel-of-fortune, where you can use the amulet awarded to you every day.
3. Lord Information
Shows the following elements:
  • Server Time
  • The server you are playing on
  • Lord portrait
  • Lord name
  • Alliance Name
  • Prestige
  • Honor
  • Rank
  • Title
  • Overview - opens the town hall
  • My Items - opens your item window
  • Friend List - list of other players you added as a friend
4. Menus
  • Shop - window to open buy in game items using cents
  • Alliance - view current alliance or alliance invitation and offers
  • Quest - guides you on how to play the game
  • Reports - every transaction and army movement are reported here
  • Forums - opens another window to open the official Evony forum
  • Contact Us - opens another window as a way to contact evony staff
  • Statistics - shows the rankings on the server
  • Mail - Send and receive in-game mail with other players
5. Chat
You can chat with the whole evony world in the chat box. You can choose to listen to beginners chat, world chat or alliance chat. You can also whisper with other players online. There are also other channels but are inaccessible right now.

6. City Chooser
Switches between your cities. You can have up to 10 different cities.

7. City Tax/Population information
Statistics of your city, showing the population of the city, tax rate, gold earned over time, current gold, loyalty and public grievance.

8. Other City Information
It consists of four tabs:
  1. Resources - The resources earned over time and the current resources in the city.
  2. Hero Information - Lists the heroes and their current designations in the city.
  3. Army Information - Shows the total number of soldiers and army composition inside the city.
  4. Fortifications - The fortifications currently installed in your city walls. May include traps, towers and others.

PS. got tired editing screenshots. If anyone wants more screenshots, I can post if you ask.



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