Despite all the hee-hawing over Civony‘s ads and in-game graphics, there’s actually a pretty decent strategy game underneath. The previous ‘hot girl’ marketing strategy appears to have run its course since all the new Civony ads I see on my blog showcase standard non-offensive swords and sorcery artwork. Civony recently released their first patch, aimed at fixing a big chunk of the in-game bugs reported by their users. They also spruced up the interface. So I took the opportunity to give the game a second go.
First of all, some of the in-game graphics that were allegedly cribbed from Age of Kings have been swapped out. Most noticeable are the farm and quarry. The castles appear to have slightly changed as well. I’m glad the developers are making changes because the stolen graphics only cause controversy for an otherwise decent strategy game.
A lot of the Engrish has been replaced as well. In some areas, the text remains confusing (like naming your flag). But for the most part, the game is easy to understand. The landing page still contains jumbled English, but the actual homepage is written in perfect English. Baby steps, I guess.
The patch also adds a beginner mode. When you’re a beginner, chatting is free. You also won’t get attacked by any veteran players. It’s a pretty good way to ease players into the game. Of course, once you graduate from beginner mode, you just might have to pay a few cents to fight off neighboring kingdoms.
There are also plentiful opportunities to ‘pay money’ now. In the end, Civony is still a business. And to be honest, it’s probably better to give the option for some elite folks to finance the game for the masses than to make everyone pay a subscription or watch in-game ads. In addition to the old $0.30 per line world chat, you can spend money to speed up resource gathering, boost stats, and buy in-game artifacts. I’m sure there are other ways to pay money that I haven’t discovered yet. But whenever you see a green plus-sign (+), you know the option exists to pay money for a perk.
Of course, you can build your kingdom just fine without ever paying a cent. The downside is the wait time. Resource gathering happens in real-time and is very slow. It also takes a lot of resources to build and upgrade structures. So if you want to build a big city, you can either watch your lumber and ore increase ever so slowly (Chinese water torture style), you pay a few measly cents.
I noticed in the global announcements, Civony is hiring dedicated artists. So I wouldn’t be surprised at all if a few months from now, the game gets a complete graphical overhaul to avoid comparisons with Civilization or Colony. But all in all, despite some questionable beginnings, Civony is turning out to be a pretty decent browser-based strategy game. You still can’t “save your lover” or “protect your queen” though.
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You did not say much about the beginner mode. The reason I have stopped playing civony is because there is no scaling, once beginner mode ends (auto ends if town center gets to level 5, or 7 days) your wimpy 1 city “empire” is fair game for all the 1337 players who are level 10 and have more of every unit type than you population, starts raiding you for resources.
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The vassal suggestion above is a good idea, but there are still 2 major problems with it:
#1. There are counter-intuitive and illogical dynamics in the combat algorithms and advancement indicators. For example, you LOSE honor when your cities are attacked, even when you utterly defeat the attack; combined attacks of footmen and archers have the EXACT same attack effect in many cases whether you send either a single (as in 1, literally) footman or 1000, with a large number of archers. Much more problematic is
#2, as you improve your technology and infrastructure, the TIME (literal time) needed for each incremental increase doubles so it’s a *geometric* function in terms of time (which is the essential difficulty here) to improve, while other costs (for example, feeding troops) are linear. You may double or triple your food need for troops as you double/triple your troops, but the *ability to actually provide that extra food* becomes geometrically more difficult to meet. It’s not exactly Malthusian since there is no direct correlation between troops and food production, but the impact is about the same.
In the short run you can address this problem by increasing your capacity to hold low level farms and then spending INORDINATE hours painstakingly upgrading those (large numbers of) low level farms since at low levels, incremental improvements take minutes rather than hours. One can defer this problem by pillaging the abundant abandoned and unfortified still-producing cities of players who departed the game, but this is ultimately unsatisfying and still requires huge amounts of time. Ultimately, it will not meet the demands of huge armies as you get truly powerful. In the interests of intellectual integrity, I have to add here that this DOES provide some interesting instability effects on both the market for food and other commodities as well as on player strategy and tactics. (more on this later). In the long run you are forced to BUY special items that speed development, which would be ok, but frankly, the real costs in US $ is prohibitive (gonna get worse when the dollar loses it’s status as global reserve currency, but that is definitely a topic for another blog!)
Technically, I’m still on problem 2 here. Now, the geometric aspect I refer to is bad enough, but in addition to this, getting to the current final level (10) on any number of things (e.g., individual buildings in a single city, level 10 technology) requires an item called Michaelangelo’s Script. You get one by default and may randomly be awarded one here or there by lottery, but you would need *dozens* of them to make the leap from intermediate to high ranking player. Meaning, real advancement means BUYING them in real dollars from the game masters. So, in a meaningful sense, the game is not free. Not free would be irrelevant if the total cost were low, but in fact, we are talking hundreds of dollars ultimately or hundreds of hours in playing time just to advance, or both. I could go on, but those are the main problems.
Before closing I have to acknowledge that ultimately, for me, the game retained as much interest as it did for as long as it did because it was and remains something of a global simulation. Once I worked out the mechanics of survival and could survive indefinitely as either an independent or as a member of an alliance, it was tempting to observe the dynamics of market demand and player actions (e.g., food prices would spike while armies were being built and fielded, but then not so inexorably crash (as armies were liquidated in battle). Also, the dynamics of bluff and communication were interesting since there is a wide level of player real world experience an innate skill represented by the “sample” playing the game.
My final verdict is that Civony/Evony would be improved by addressing the time issue and reducing the price of “items,” and also correcting some of the weird combat algorithms that are in operation.
All in all, I had much more fun with all versions of CIV than with Civony/Evony and am finding my time more profitably spent away from the game than playing it.
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P.S. For the record, it’s already possible to create a vassal system within the existing game since allied players can send resources to each other. A more formal version of it or an accounting mechanism would be helpful. Also, armies sent by players to each other can only perform defense. You can’t aggregate forces from all of your allies and then march them off to attack your arch enemy. Best you can do is aggregate them in your cities to help out on defense (or do so while taunting and baiting your arch enemy into attacking that city).
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As soon as I found this article, there was a digital rendering of a woman on her knees, with a sword pointed at her handsomly displayed clevage. Underneath where the words “Help! Save the Queen”.
It was an add for Civony(now known as Evony)
I cant help but point this out, for fun mostly
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