#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.

What they should implement is a vassal system where weaker players can exchange resources for protection.