Units~
Now onto the fun bit; a bit of discussion on individual
units. As much as input from other sources would be, screenied battle
reports will be a tremendous help for here (I'm lookin' at you,
Jerbo!). I say screenies because system battle reports expire after 3
days and become useless clutter afterwards, whereas screenies will
remain and be a valuable source of demonstration and information.
Foot Troops~
Standard,
basic soldiers who march on foot. Most of any army will comprise of
these merry men. Their strength lies mainly in their ability to train
fast, cheap and vastly outnumber.
Worker~
Life: 100
Population: 1
Attack: 5
Defence: 10
Load: 200
Upkeep: 2
Speed: 180
Range: 10
Borin',
useless, slow, weak individuals. All they achieve in this game is
constructin' cities and bein' an early, cheap version of the
Transporters. They serve little use other than bein' another troop in a
rainbow (but will actually slow down the wave, because of their speed)
and are little use as Cleaners becasue they do less damage, have less
life and actually take longer to train than warriors. Worst troop
available. I discourage ever trainin' any of them beyond what you need
to build cities.
Warrior~
Life: 200
Population: 1
Attack: 50
Defence: 50
Load: 20
Upkeep: 3
Speed: 200
Range: 20
Everyone's
favourite fodder. The suicide troop. The manshield of Evony. Their
incredibly fast trainin' time and otherwise cheap costs set them up to
be an ideal candidate for a horde troop. They don't have good stats,
but considerably better than worker and enough to damage an enemy given
half the chance. Even so, their primary mission in life tends to be to
run headlong into traps, groups of enemies and cause as much damage as
they can before they get killed, cleanin' the way for the real soldiers
behind. Sounds harsh, but thas life. Use them as such and you'll use
them to their full potential.
Warriors should be used as a
rainbow troop or cleaner waves almost exclusively unless you're
deliberately suicidin' them to shave off your honour.
Large Scale Warrior Attack-Fail
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/80K19Karvs282Kar.jpgOpen Scale Warrior Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs1Kbli.jpgScout~
Life: 100
Population: 1
Attack: 20
Defence: 20
Load: 5
Upkeep: 5
Speed: 3000
Range: 20
Scouts...amongst
the weakest of the damage/defence bases and left to do their scout
missions rather than real combat. Sayin' that, scout missions can often
enough lead to scout wars. Defendin' cities scouts (with open gates,
ofc) will take the initiative and attack enemy scouts invadin' them, in
an attempt to prevent them returnin' a report. Luckily for the
attackers, no other units are involved in this so it includes only the
two armies of scouts and acts as a Valley fight (no walls or defences
included). This is probably the most basic kind of battle as it only
involves one unit and at a time when techs are all maxed comes pretty
much down to numbers. Maxin' out the attack wave might be enough, but
in a city where there's say...200k scouts, expect to have to send more
than one wave. If there's over a million scouts you might not even get
the report back based on the 10% rule and have to send several more
waves before you can even find out how many they have. Only hope that
they don't start sendin' them to you in an attempt to wittle your
numbers, too.
Note that if you are scouted and the enemy kills 10%
or more of your scouts but still loses the battle, that they will only
get the report of the scout battle and not anythn' else from your city.
The only way for them to get a report is to kill all your scouts or if
you have no defendin' scouts when they arrive or if your gates are
closed.
Outside scout battles, they would once have been used to
spam attacks against walls to lower loyalty, but considerin' how
sheerly fast they could do this it was considered unfair and as such,
their ability to damage walls has been removed.
However, this
doesnae mean that they're not a valuable combat component. Due to their
relatively fast trainin' times and comparitavely cheap upkeeps, they
can also be horded to a great degree and used as cleaner waves similar
to the warriors, but w/ a different role. Where warriorbombs are
designed to waste traps and overwhelm nearby foot troops, scoutbombs
are aimed more at usin' their insane speed to rush at archers and
overwhelm them to crush their numbers before any spearhead assault. A
typical tactic is to send constant, full waves of 100k scouts to trash
the archer defence so that the main assaults can walk in w/ less or no
danger.
There's a lot to be said about scouts and scoutin'
tactics. arislan1999 has compiled an advanced guide on endgame scoutin'
and scoutbomb tactics in this thread. This will go into more advanced
and thorough detail than I intend to cover in this guide, as it covers
endgame tactics and massive scale warfare.
[edit]
There is a
discussion on scout layerin' mechanics and how it works. There is some
evidence that shows that scouts don't move until all other units are
dead and therefore don't act as a layer, but other evidence that shows
that they do move and act as a layer like all other units. Since both
obviously cannae be true we can only conclude that there's a variable
that changes their mechanics; we do not know what this variable is,
though. Currently, it looks like scouts don't work as effective layers
on Valleys or NPCs, but they do work on player cities. To view the
discussion (that was originally about somethin' else completely and we
threw it waaay off-topic ) go here.
[/edit]
Scoutbombs are
pretty guaranteed to end in a defeat, but it's all about how many of
the enemy you kill. Since scoutbombs are pretty specific to 100k scouts
there's not much you can do to increase your success or damage; it
really is all about numbers and attrition, although read the above
guide buy arlisan1999 for the deeper details.
Ofc, never scoutbomb
against someone who has heavy layers of swords or you're gunna find
yourself w/ a lot of dead scouts for no real gain.
Large Scale Scout Bomb
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/sctbmbvs282Kar.jpgOpen Scale Scout Bomb
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/sctbmbvs44Kbli.jpgOpen Scale Scout Bomb
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs25Kar.jpgOpen Scale Scout Bomb
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs12Kbli35Kar.jpgPikeman~
Life: 300
Population: 1
Attack: 150
Defence: 150
Load: 40
Upkeep: 6
Speed: 300
Range: 50
The
foot troop geared towards offense. Fast, light troops that rush their
enemy and hit hard. Their main target in a battle are ponies. Since
ponies tend to be pretty far in front of the rest of the army, the
pikes can get to them in nigh full force w/o enemy rainbows gettin' in
the way. However, don't expect this to mean that they automatically
kill ponies. They were designed to drastically increase losses on them,
seein' as ponies will typically pass by the pikes and look for other
units on Valleys, or charge straight to them in Cityfights, givin' the
pikes all the chance they need to kill some off....before they die.
For pikes to kill ponies, the required ratio is roughly 3:2 at pikes to ponies.
Swordsman~
Life: 350
Population: 1
Attack: 100
Defence: 250
Load: 30
Upkeep: 7
Speed: 275
Range: 30
The
foot troop geared towards defence. Slower, clunkier but act as a solid
sheild. Well...sorta. Sadly, numbers play more of a part in the
mechanics than quality, so swordsmen don't quite live up to their role.
Tagged as effective against archers, they tend to die pretty fast,
gettin' shot down by archers long before they can actually reach them
to fight back. Bein' slower and weaker than pikes they're also less
useful to send as loyalty spammers against cities than pikes or ponies
and the fact that archers play a heavy defence role makes them an
almost completely redundant unit.
Their primary use is to counter
the trend of scoutbombs; bein' big, metallic, fat guys they do a good
job of stoppin' scoutbombers dead in their tracks and killin' them off
before the scouts weak attack rates can match up to them. This is
indirectly essential as it protects your archers from otherwise certain
deathrates.
Swordsman screenies; their primary function in life
is to prevent scoutbombs. They do it seriously well, but note that the
cost of this is that you require more swordsmen than archers otherwise
the scoutbomb will skip your swords and fly into your fragile elf-ears.
Sayin' that, don't forget that these lumps of cast iron are capable of
doin' pretty great things, when given the chance
Open Scale Defence against Scoutbomb-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/45Kvs90Ksct.jpgOpen Scale Defence against Scoutbomb-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/27Kvs52Ksct.jpgOpen Scale Defence against Scoutbomb-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/27Kvs90Ksct2.jpgOpen Scale Swordsman Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs43Kcav.jpgArcher~
Life: 250
Population: 2
Attack: 120
Defence: 50
Load: 25
Upkeep: 9
Speed: 250
Range: 1200
The
unit of the current Evony battle mechanics. They can outdo pretty much
all opposition, even enemy archers or ponies, and w/ a solid rainbow
defence they can do as such w/ little to no losses. Layered up and next
to ATs at a wall make them absolutely lethal defenders, capable of
downin' most attacks before they even get close. On the offense, they
can protect themselves w/ rainbows and shoot from afar, killin' off
enemy rainbows and movin' towards to shoot down the main enemy force.
Archers
alone are capable of wipin' out the defendin' barbarians at an NPC10,
and as equally as capable of shatterin' enemy assaults; they're the
most solid all-rounder unit that move at a good speed and are cheap and
quick to train. Typically battle reports detaillin' defeats sent in by
players askin' why they failed so hard were against a large number of
enemy Archers + ATs. Often enough the solution is a simple rainbow;
archers fallin' foul to their own tricks in this respect. The best way
to deal w/ archers is often the way they like to protect themselves,
too.
The things to note about archers are that when they enter a
combat zone, they'll move forward until they're in the range of enemies
and then stop to shoot. They'll stay in place where they are until
they're either killed or have no more enemies in range, wherein they
advance farther forward to put themselves in range of more enemies.
The
other thing to note is that when given the choice between multiple
enemies, they'll attack ranged units first and foremost; this makes
them susceptible to both rainbows and ponies. It also means they're a
sharp sight at killin' off other archers. The downside to this is that
ATs act the same as archers, and since they outrange everythin',
they'll typically start shootin' down your archer army long before they
get to play their full role in a battle. This is why outnumberin' ATs
is so important. This is also why rainbowed archers act as the best
defence unit one can have.
As far as screenies of archer reports
go, I'll probably wind up w/ more of them than any other so allow for a
pretty wid variation. Also take note of the various effects of rainbows
and how drastically they affect each situation.
Large Scale Archer Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100k25kphrVS380Kar.jpgLarge Scale Archer Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/10K75KarVS380Kar.jpgLarge Scale Archer Defence-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/90K20Kraamvs282Kar.jpgHB Units~
HB
units are fast, strong units that are especially talented at killin'
off their non-HB counterparts. They are notably more expensive and slow
to train, but are often enough worth it if one can afford the increase
in costs.
Pony~
Life: 500
Population: 3
Attack: 250
Defence: 180
Load: 100
Upkeep: 18
Speed: 1000
Range: 100
Ponies
are the most effective counter-unit to archers, as well as bein' the
best loyalty spammers now that scouts got their wall damage nerfed.
They train at a decent speed and don't require too much, but are solid
units that move quickly and are an easy cure to all your
archer-flavoured problems.
However! They act as a potential bomb
unit. Misuse of them winds up w/ them bein' very expensive bombs and
denyin' them livin' up to their full potential. Despite their life and
defence, they're somewhat fragile because of their speed; they move
forward fast each round, well ahead of the rest of your army and charge
headlong into all enemy rainbows; they also become the first viable
target or enemy archers, so find themselves gettin' off'd pretty fast.
Also
because of their speed, rainbowin' them is hard to do; only scouts can
be their rainbow; but thas not always bad. Scouts move so much faster
that they take all the threat the ponies would have before their more
expensive horsebacked counterparts come in range. This works well as a
protection method and mid-battle bomb tactic.
So by now, you've got
glass cannon ponies that will potentially fly straight into all dangers
at no thought for themselves and get themselves maimed before their
task is complete. But on the other hand you have a ragin' mule that
kills rainbows w/ haste and charges at enemy archers and chews through
them at a ratio of 1:5. By the time the rainbows are out of the way,
ponies can waltz right up to archers and ATs and flatten them; expect
100k ponies to be able to maul 500k archers. When numbers start rollin'
out like that, you can start believin' in them as a solid counter unit.
Also,
note that ponies are a great assault unit, but when it comes to
defendin' it's a different story. Havin' your range set to 5k will wind
up sendin' your ponies on an unneccesary trek to attack the offender,
and have to go through rainbows and get shot down by arrows (bein' the
first unit the offendin' archers will be in range of) so will actually
backfire and lead to your ponies deaths.
Ponies can defend, but it
requires archer backup, heavy scout numbers and the removal of traps
that set the range to 5k; that way you can get in on the game easrly,
hard and fast w/o goin' out of range of your own archers. Ofc, this
will also give the offender the advantage of no traps/abati to worry
about.
Ideally, keep ponies for your attacks and less of a defensive unit.
Open Scale Pony Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs141Kar.jpg'Phract~
Life: 1000
Population: 6
Attack: 350
Defence: 350
Load: 80
Upkeep: 35
Speed: 750
Range: 80
What
can I say? Almost exactly the same as regular ponies, but slower and
scarier. They can be rainbowed by scouts and ponies, addin' extra
protection while still movin' at a decent pace towards the enemy; they
have far fewer losses than regular ponies and even reduce their losses.
Their extra attack chews through enemy rainbows like nothin' and
defence and life increases protect them solidly. By the time they get
to archers you're lookin' at a terrifyin' ratio of around 1:8. 100k
'phracts will solve nigh all archer problems when marched correctly.
Since
they're easier to protect, harder to kill and far more capable of
slaughter than any other non-seige unit it seems like a sweet deal, but
consider the costs and time to train. They become ridiculously
expensive in small numbers; when you send 100k 'phracts to murder a
million archers, jus' consider that they can have those archers
replaced fast and reinforced w/ more archers quicker than you'll be
able to retrain any lost 'phracts. It's a monster task, but often worth
the punishment on your time.
Pay attention to how important it
is to pre-clear layers away and how many unneeded casualties are taken
due to remainin' defencive layers. These big boys may be powerful, but
it's essential that they have the enemy layers cleaned as much as
possible before they go marchin' in, although you shold also be able to
see the sheer, relentless power these beasts have behind them.
Large Scale 'Phractsmack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/80Kvs340Kar.jpgLarge Scale 'Phractsmack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/19Kvs100kar.jpgLarge Scale 'Phractsmack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/10Kvs100Kar.jpgLarge Scale 'Phractsmack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/17Kvs144Kar.jpgLarge Scale 'Phractsmack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/74Kvs302Kar.jpgLarge Scale 'Phractsmack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/89Kvs178Kwar.jpgTransporter~
Life: 700
Population: 4
Attack: 10
Defence: 60
Load: 5000
Upkeep: 10
Speed: 150
Range: 10
A
safe transportation device. Relatively cheap and quick to train they
act as your courier for goods; however have no effect on battle.
Whereas every other unit moves forward each round, ever more into enemy
arrow range, transporters stay behind in safety till the end and only
get killed when your army loses.
Sayin' that, transporters can be killed in a victorious battle. Have a looky at this:
50k Raams attack ATs
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/50Kvs14Kat.jpgThe
rainbow got wiped out, doin' the job in protectin' the raams while they
slowly inch forward, but the interestin' thing is that the transporters
started takin' hits w/o any raams bein' killed.
Transporters do
indeed move slowly, and will even pass the attackin' force. Where seige
units will stop as soon as they're in range of walls/defences, the
transporters will continue forward, actin' as a painfully expensive
rainbow for the raams to continue their attack untouched for longer.
This
is a rare situation, becasue typically the defendin' units will be busy
attackin' other units and otherwise keepin' their focus on the seige
before the transporters.
I honestly don't have a solid explanation for this; if anyone does, feel free to let me know and I'll include it.
Seige Engines~
Seige
mechanics are devices and machines built and constructed to be a
powerful tool used in city invasions. The have high costs and train
times, but tend to be far more powerful than any foot troop can
possibly match. They're pulled by horses and as such their speed is
affected by HBR rather than Compass. An issue w/ seige is that (with
the exception of b'listers) they tend to require large numbers of them
to be worth the time; when involved in small scale battles, foot troops
or HB troops can often enough match, if not better any job seige can.
This means that Seige mechanics are almost exclusive to large and
massive scale warfare.
B'lister~
Life: 320
Population: 5
Attack: 450
Defence: 160
Load: 35
Upkeep: 50
Speed: 100
Range: 1400
B'listers
are standard projectile seige mechanics. They follow a lot of the same
rules as archers, but most importantly will move forward each round as
well as attackin', until they are in range of walls/defences. This key
mechanic is what makes HBR/Archery combos so vital for them, as they
will literally creep into enemy AT range before they're finished
destroyin' them, or have to move too close to get in range in time.
Sayin' that, this is mainly for NPC5s. B'listers have little, if any
use in the game outside regular casualty free NPC5 farmin'. They've
been proven to drastically increase losses on NPC10 raids and get torn
up too quickly on player raids, as well as movin' too slowly.
I
have...virtually nothing good to say about b'listers in a pvp
environment. They move too slowly and don't hit hard enough while
havin' a tendency to die easily. The fact that they're expensive and
slow to train next to the few archers it requires to kill them off jus'
goes to make them further redundant. If you really, really want to use
b'listers, then I suggest you use them as a defencive unit and hope
that your attacker doesn't know how to layer properly.
Large Scale B'lister Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/98Kvs282Kar.jpgLarge
Scale B'lister/Raam Attack-Defeat
https://s203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/?action=view¤t=44K32Kraamvs575Kar.jpgOpen Scale B'lister Defence-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/24Kvs96Kar.jpgOpen Scale B'lister Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/83Kvs313Kar.jpgLarge Scale B'lister Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/100Kvs276Kar.jpgRaam~
Life: 5000
Population: 10
Attack: 250
Defence: 160
Load: 45
Upkeep: 100
Speed: 120
Range: 600
Gears of War!Raam's
are the swordsmen of seige mechanics meets a solid brick wall on
wheels. Crazy life and defence stats means they can pretty much walk
through attacks onto their person until they're in range and slowly
cram their proverbial boots where the sun don't shine. Like all the
seige mechanics, they will creep forward slowly each turn (very
slowly...) and punch their way through anythin' they see until they are
in range of the walls wherein they will begin to chomp up anythin' they
find. Bein' incredibly hard to kill, they have plenty of time to do
this.
They have massive potential, meetin' that of 'phracts and
bein' able to successfuly seige hugely defended cities w/o requirin'
several waves of them.
However, they move slowly. So slowly that
pre-battle, the target has plenty of time to prepare a defence and get
heavily reinforced, rendern' the attack a waste of time or an outright
failure.
In battle they have similar problems; bein' held back by
their speed, they give massive numbers of enemy archers and ATs plenty
of time to start rippin' on their life while they stop and slowly punch
down heavy rainbows; sadly, their attack isnae to up to scratch, only
matchin' that of ponies. So they don't kill any faster, but take a lot
longer to reach their targets; in situations w/ extremely large
defendin' armies and lots of rainbows, all their might turns
to...well...death; leadin' to the agonisin' loss of extremely expensive
and slow to build seige mechanics.
This isnae to say that they
cannae be used well, however; they jus' tend to be too easy to counter
against for all their expense to be worth the effort. In the end,
'phracts will typically do the same job about as well, but w/ less
chance of bein' countered and the extra losses they take can be
retrained quicker.
A typically important thing to say about
raams is that most of the defendin' units against them will actually be
reinforcements sent durin' the long time it takes for the raams to
actually reach their target. These extra numbers can potentially still
be fought off, but they defender will usually have all the time they
need to prepare a full rainbowcake for you. Several pre-cleaner waves
will have to be camped to hit a second before the raams or you're
lookin' at serious failure.
Large Scale Raam Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/93Kvs240Kar.jpgMassive Scale Raam Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/125Kvs13Mar.jpgMassive Scale Raam Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/110Kvs330Kar100Kphrct.jpgCata~
Life: 480
Population: 8
Attack: 600
Defence: 200
Load: 75
Upkeep: 250
Speed: 80
Range: 1500
A
unit of some controversy. The almighty attack rate combined w/ range
makes them a frightenin' prospect to imagine, but their otherwise
mediocre defence and speed pulls them down and makes them relatively
easy to kill. Their speed falls into the same issue as raam's, but
havin' range offsets some of that. In theory, they would be able to rip
up the most massive of defences, but realistically it introduces the
issue of pre-battle speed that raams have and allowin' said massive
defence to get heavily reinforced, and then the unholy costs and
expenses involved w/ maintainin' and makin' them.
From a defensive
standpoint, max Archery and max walls puts these big guys at the
highest range in the game; coupled w/ ATs and archers, they have the
ability to annihilate attackers long before they're in range; they're
ideal for raam-killin' in this situation, although the high upkeep is
arguably not worth it next to Archers who will train much
faster/cheaper and eat considerably less.
Requirin' mich scripts and
lv10 researches is a whole issue on top of that; they're hard to get,
slow to train, expensive to train and when you do get them you probably
don't have enough to make a difference. So you need to spend another
month makin' more and then finally do send them out to war; but you
give your opponent all the time they need to get fully reinforced and
wipe out your army.
This is up to a personal choice, I reckon...some
people think that cata's are the be all and end all of superunits.
Personally, I think they're jus' raams that hit harder, farther, die
easier and cost way, way more.
Sadly, not much more effect than
raams, but far costier to rebuild. Layered up properly they could
potentially be pretty dangerous, but as w/ raams, they give the
defender far too much time to prepare a better layerin' and defence,
renderin' yours inert.
8k Cata's against NPC8-Victoryhttps://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/8KvsNPC8.jpg
7,5k Cata's against NPC9-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/75KvsNPC9.jpgMassive Scale Cata Attack-Defeat
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/95kcata.jpgMassive Scale Cata Attack-Victory
https://2img.net/h/i203.photobucket.com/albums/aa4/Darkbrady/Evony%20Reports/86Kvs244Kar.jpg