Evony Cities
There are different types of cities that you can build in evony, and each city type has specific purposes that will be of benefit at certain points in the game. This posting is to explain methods of building cities that will give you the best advantage.
Resource city basics
It is always a good idea to build the majority of your cities, especially your first few, with mostly a single resource field type. The reason for this is that you get an increase in bonuses for production due to only needing one type of valley (ie lumber or iron) which then increases the output of every res field. There are two types of resource cities that are commonly built, Lumber cities and Iron cities. Stone and food res fields are fairly useless to you long term. The reasoning behind this is the following: In the beginning of the game, stone is in high demand, but still rarely costs more than lumber does to buy on the market. If you build your city with all Lumber, you can simply sell your excess lumber at the market and buy the stone you need. This is especially helpful since once your walls and buildings are mostly built, you will find that you have very little use for stone, and market prices will drop quite a bit on stone as the game progresses. Not building a bunch of quarries means that you don't have wasted res fields making items you dont need long term, or can buy at a higher quantity than you could produce by simply selling off the more highly valued lumber, and you can avoid having to later tear down quarries when they become mostly useless. Food res fields are not reccommended to be built either, because once you begin to plunder other players and farm NPC's you will get plenty of food from that. Keep in mind that if you have not finished your research, you WILL need one each of the quarry and farm res fields for research purposes. Resource cities will be the backbone of your empire, and will produce most of the troops that you will need. Ideally they should be located in an area where you will be able to place nice NPC fields very nearby, and they will be your permanent locations throughout your game so they should be placed in good strategic spots for defense.
Building a resource city
The following is the recommended build setup for a Lumber resource city:
9 cottages
12 barracks
1 of every other building except a warehouse
1 farm
1 quarry
1 mine
all other res fields sawmills
If you decide to build an iron city from scratch, you may want to drop up to 2 barracks and replace them with cottages. The reasoning behind this is that Iron takes MUCH more labor to produce than lumber does. Due to this, I generally do most of my resource cities in Lumber, and wait until I can use a captured LVL 10 NPC city for an iron city, due to it having all level ten cottages. If I do build an iron city from the ground up, I will rarely do so prior to the fourth or fifth city just due to the production issues being easier with lumber. Some people like to use the town hall to turn production off on their iron cities prior to baking troops. This is an okay method to use if you do not mind the fact that doing this will temporarily cut your production and cause increased usage of gold.
Strike Cities
Strike cities are the cities that you will teleport around with and will be used to menace your enemies. Due to the fact that these cities are meant to be mobile, it is of more use to build them with a mixed res field, because you may not be in a location long enough to bother with capturing a bunch of valleys after every port. We reccommend you not build a strike city until you have at least 4 or 5 resource cities, and you will not need one at all if you intend to be a mostly farming or defensive player, or cannot afford to buy teleports to go anywhere to attack people. The res field mix reccommendations below are assuming that you have already completed any research requiring resource fields, and that your buildings are all completed in this city (these reccommendations are what you will want to end up having once city is finalized); and that if you have not reached that point yet, you will need to still have one quarry and one farm until you do reach that point. A fully built Strike city with level ten Town Hall should ideally have 22 lumber mills and 18 iron mines. If you do not have the mich script to do a lvl ten TH, the suggested mix for a lvl nine is 20 lumber mills and 17 mines. The reasoning behind this suggested mix is based on the percentage of resource consumption for building archers, which uses more lumber than iron. This mix should provide the proper ratio of res for arch production, providing that your research on res production is equal and isnt skewed in favor of one res type over another.
Quicktroops Cities
You will never need a quicktroops city until late in the game, when you have a very high attack hero. Once you have reached the point where your attack hero can build instant warriors and/or instant scouts; it may be time to think of getting yourself a quicktroops city. A quicktroops city is simply a captured level ten NPC city that has a single LVL 10 barracks, and every other building inside that can possibly be replaced has been made into a LVL 10 cottage. These make fabulous iron resource producing cities due to having a very high population, so you can up all of your iron res fields to lvl ten if you get enough mich scripts to do so. When you are ready to bake troops, simply stop the iron production, and use the huge population to make large quantities of troops instantly.
Jump Points and place holders
Jump points are cities that are built to assist in attacking an enemy or alliance that is far away. To make a temporary jump point, simply march to a location near enough to launch an attack against your enemy and build a city. A disposable jump point will need nothing but a rally point and a feasting hall of a respectable level. A relief station can be tossed up also, if preferred. Jump points can be purposefully seeded in enemy territory in advance also. These are created under a new account, and there are two types that can be used. Future jump points placed strategically for hitting enemy alliances in other states should ideally be mostly fully built cities that can be used by you later on by logging into the alt account and building a village, then capturing the jump point near your enemy and using it against them as a functional city. Placeholders may also be created if you are a player that teleports. A placeholder jump point is simply a city built under a new account that has had enough interior built into it to not get scrubbed by the server. We recommend 5k or so pres on the placeholder accounts. Placeholders simply sit there until you are ready to adv, then you log into placeholder account and either port and reset it, and adv your strike city into the place it was holding for you to attack from. Future and placeholder jump points will always be single city accounts so that the enemy cannot capture them, and should have the production turned to zero so that the enemy cannot benefit from farming them. PLEASE keep in mind that you can be banned from Evony for multi-accounting. We do not require you to use Jump points under alternate accounts, and strongly urge you if you choose to use this tactic to make sure you use a secondary computer to access the alt accounts, or make sure you are switching IP's. We are in no way telling you that we require or reccommend that you make jump points under alt accounts; we are simply advising you that it can be done, and is done by some vet players.
About Warehouses
Warehouses have a very limited usefulness. Most of the time, we do not reccommend building warehouses at all. There are really only two reasons to ever have a warehouse from our experience. The first and most obvious, is if you are under heavy and constant attack from a much stronger enemy. In this situation, you may need one single warehouse which you will want to set to store food. Do not bother with other resources. The food will assist with doing disaster relief and getting your city on its way back to recovery. If you need other res, your allies will aid you; you will NOT ever need a fleet of warehouses. The secondary reason you will want to have a warehouse at some point is for research. For every level of stockpile research you complete, the maximum amount of resource that you can store prior to hitting your storage capacity increases. For this reason, we reccommend building a warehouse in ONE of your cities at the point where your res storage starts to become an issue, and most of your more important research is completed. Once you have completed research on stockpile, you can tear down your warehouse, and still retain the research benefits.
Adjusting your cities long term
As you progress through the game, the buildings that you need to have in your cities will change over the course of time. Many buildings that you initially need for research or in order to build other structures will no longer be necessary, and can be torn down and replaced with more useful structures. Buildings that can be torn down after they have served their purpose are: stable, workshop, forge, inn, farms and quarries. If you keep a level one market in one city and later need an inn to replace heroes, simply tear down your market and replace it with an inn short term. What type of building you will want to replace these structures with will depend on how high your attack hero is. If you are fairly early into the game, barracks will probably be the best choice. As your attack hero gets higher and your troops bake faster, you will find that you need fewer barracks, and may want to switch to a higher number of cottages to offset the faster production.
Resource city basics
It is always a good idea to build the majority of your cities, especially your first few, with mostly a single resource field type. The reason for this is that you get an increase in bonuses for production due to only needing one type of valley (ie lumber or iron) which then increases the output of every res field. There are two types of resource cities that are commonly built, Lumber cities and Iron cities. Stone and food res fields are fairly useless to you long term. The reasoning behind this is the following: In the beginning of the game, stone is in high demand, but still rarely costs more than lumber does to buy on the market. If you build your city with all Lumber, you can simply sell your excess lumber at the market and buy the stone you need. This is especially helpful since once your walls and buildings are mostly built, you will find that you have very little use for stone, and market prices will drop quite a bit on stone as the game progresses. Not building a bunch of quarries means that you don't have wasted res fields making items you dont need long term, or can buy at a higher quantity than you could produce by simply selling off the more highly valued lumber, and you can avoid having to later tear down quarries when they become mostly useless. Food res fields are not reccommended to be built either, because once you begin to plunder other players and farm NPC's you will get plenty of food from that. Keep in mind that if you have not finished your research, you WILL need one each of the quarry and farm res fields for research purposes. Resource cities will be the backbone of your empire, and will produce most of the troops that you will need. Ideally they should be located in an area where you will be able to place nice NPC fields very nearby, and they will be your permanent locations throughout your game so they should be placed in good strategic spots for defense.
Building a resource city
The following is the recommended build setup for a Lumber resource city:
9 cottages
12 barracks
1 of every other building except a warehouse
1 farm
1 quarry
1 mine
all other res fields sawmills
If you decide to build an iron city from scratch, you may want to drop up to 2 barracks and replace them with cottages. The reasoning behind this is that Iron takes MUCH more labor to produce than lumber does. Due to this, I generally do most of my resource cities in Lumber, and wait until I can use a captured LVL 10 NPC city for an iron city, due to it having all level ten cottages. If I do build an iron city from the ground up, I will rarely do so prior to the fourth or fifth city just due to the production issues being easier with lumber. Some people like to use the town hall to turn production off on their iron cities prior to baking troops. This is an okay method to use if you do not mind the fact that doing this will temporarily cut your production and cause increased usage of gold.
Strike Cities
Strike cities are the cities that you will teleport around with and will be used to menace your enemies. Due to the fact that these cities are meant to be mobile, it is of more use to build them with a mixed res field, because you may not be in a location long enough to bother with capturing a bunch of valleys after every port. We reccommend you not build a strike city until you have at least 4 or 5 resource cities, and you will not need one at all if you intend to be a mostly farming or defensive player, or cannot afford to buy teleports to go anywhere to attack people. The res field mix reccommendations below are assuming that you have already completed any research requiring resource fields, and that your buildings are all completed in this city (these reccommendations are what you will want to end up having once city is finalized); and that if you have not reached that point yet, you will need to still have one quarry and one farm until you do reach that point. A fully built Strike city with level ten Town Hall should ideally have 22 lumber mills and 18 iron mines. If you do not have the mich script to do a lvl ten TH, the suggested mix for a lvl nine is 20 lumber mills and 17 mines. The reasoning behind this suggested mix is based on the percentage of resource consumption for building archers, which uses more lumber than iron. This mix should provide the proper ratio of res for arch production, providing that your research on res production is equal and isnt skewed in favor of one res type over another.
Quicktroops Cities
You will never need a quicktroops city until late in the game, when you have a very high attack hero. Once you have reached the point where your attack hero can build instant warriors and/or instant scouts; it may be time to think of getting yourself a quicktroops city. A quicktroops city is simply a captured level ten NPC city that has a single LVL 10 barracks, and every other building inside that can possibly be replaced has been made into a LVL 10 cottage. These make fabulous iron resource producing cities due to having a very high population, so you can up all of your iron res fields to lvl ten if you get enough mich scripts to do so. When you are ready to bake troops, simply stop the iron production, and use the huge population to make large quantities of troops instantly.
Jump Points and place holders
Jump points are cities that are built to assist in attacking an enemy or alliance that is far away. To make a temporary jump point, simply march to a location near enough to launch an attack against your enemy and build a city. A disposable jump point will need nothing but a rally point and a feasting hall of a respectable level. A relief station can be tossed up also, if preferred. Jump points can be purposefully seeded in enemy territory in advance also. These are created under a new account, and there are two types that can be used. Future jump points placed strategically for hitting enemy alliances in other states should ideally be mostly fully built cities that can be used by you later on by logging into the alt account and building a village, then capturing the jump point near your enemy and using it against them as a functional city. Placeholders may also be created if you are a player that teleports. A placeholder jump point is simply a city built under a new account that has had enough interior built into it to not get scrubbed by the server. We recommend 5k or so pres on the placeholder accounts. Placeholders simply sit there until you are ready to adv, then you log into placeholder account and either port and reset it, and adv your strike city into the place it was holding for you to attack from. Future and placeholder jump points will always be single city accounts so that the enemy cannot capture them, and should have the production turned to zero so that the enemy cannot benefit from farming them. PLEASE keep in mind that you can be banned from Evony for multi-accounting. We do not require you to use Jump points under alternate accounts, and strongly urge you if you choose to use this tactic to make sure you use a secondary computer to access the alt accounts, or make sure you are switching IP's. We are in no way telling you that we require or reccommend that you make jump points under alt accounts; we are simply advising you that it can be done, and is done by some vet players.
About Warehouses
Warehouses have a very limited usefulness. Most of the time, we do not reccommend building warehouses at all. There are really only two reasons to ever have a warehouse from our experience. The first and most obvious, is if you are under heavy and constant attack from a much stronger enemy. In this situation, you may need one single warehouse which you will want to set to store food. Do not bother with other resources. The food will assist with doing disaster relief and getting your city on its way back to recovery. If you need other res, your allies will aid you; you will NOT ever need a fleet of warehouses. The secondary reason you will want to have a warehouse at some point is for research. For every level of stockpile research you complete, the maximum amount of resource that you can store prior to hitting your storage capacity increases. For this reason, we reccommend building a warehouse in ONE of your cities at the point where your res storage starts to become an issue, and most of your more important research is completed. Once you have completed research on stockpile, you can tear down your warehouse, and still retain the research benefits.
Adjusting your cities long term
As you progress through the game, the buildings that you need to have in your cities will change over the course of time. Many buildings that you initially need for research or in order to build other structures will no longer be necessary, and can be torn down and replaced with more useful structures. Buildings that can be torn down after they have served their purpose are: stable, workshop, forge, inn, farms and quarries. If you keep a level one market in one city and later need an inn to replace heroes, simply tear down your market and replace it with an inn short term. What type of building you will want to replace these structures with will depend on how high your attack hero is. If you are fairly early into the game, barracks will probably be the best choice. As your attack hero gets higher and your troops bake faster, you will find that you need fewer barracks, and may want to switch to a higher number of cottages to offset the faster production.