Recently I've noticed a few things
1 Evony is becomming less fun
2 Evony is becomming less balanced
3 Evony's "top players" (at least on my server) patting each other on the back and passing judgment on others who do the same thing they do but on a dif scale.
Lets start with 1 and 2
Evony is a war game. In order for it to have a give and take flow it needs a balance. However when the balance is broken the flow becomes 1 sided and that leads to fewer players and less dynamics. We break down the players as follows
1 casual players who obey the rules and play a bit here and there and basically treat Evony as some sort of sim city building game. They seldom even bother to learn how to min/max what little they do have.
2 players who play a moderate to extreme amounts of time but obey the rules, no botting and no second/third/forth etc accounts.
3players who have 1+ extra accounts that they use to supply wood/iron/food to their main account
4 players who have upped their heros far enough to farm lv10 npc's like most farm lvl 5's players
5 botters. People who use google or whatever to have another site log in and farm lvl 5's 20 hours a day giving them resources in the billions and troop numbers in the tens of millions
6 combinations of the above set up to a certain min/max they like
This means the 1st type has no way to combat the 2nd tier and above and the 2nd tier has no chance to combat the 3rd tier and above and the third tier has no chance to combat the 4th tier and above. The 4-6 are actually more or less on an even playing field because many of them have billions of resources in reserve and troop numbering in the 10's of millions.
Once you start to break Evony rules or use exploits, you become "uber". imho once you begin to cheat and everyone on any establishd server who is a major player, is cheating, you've ruined the game and imho have the play ability of a 9yo who steals money/realestate in the monopoly game or uses cheat codes on video games. While you can wreck anyone who isn't as big a cheater as you, your tactics usually suck and the main reason you've learned combo's of what to send is because you have so many troops it doesn't matter what you make and waste. Something you'd never have been able to learn by playing evony by it's rules. Do I hold the players accountable for cheating? No, they wanna play the game and "win" and if the only way to win is to cheat more then the next guy then you do what you gotta do.
However I do hold Evony responsible and will here by explain how evony can fix their game.
First to the botters. Have a screen pop up over the "quest screen" that pops up everytime you log in. Have it be one of those squigily letter/number deals where you have to type them in before you can do anything with the game. Second have 1 of the "buttons" randomly light up as orange (the way mail lights up as blue) Make it so it must be clicked on before any other button is clicked on to start the game. Have it change with every log in attempt and close the account after three failed attempts in a row for 24 hours.
High Heroes. Either make all heroes max out to 200 in each ability or the following
Buy a hero for $10 per 100 levels up to 300, plus an additional 100 levels per 6mos age of server. Have the hero be marked special so you may only have 1such hero per account. Have level 10 NPC cities have a random small chance of having such a hero too. Make a new item that lets you change a hero's primary attribute from int/politics/attack to a different one. have this to be a rare drop off lvl 10 npc's and player vs player attacks. All these 300+ heroes need a special code so no one can have more then 1 of each type on an account not even from captureing another players. Only other way to get another 300+ hero should be to raise them normally from scratch
This allows a casual player to now learn how to farm lv10's too and gives him/her the chance to at least defend decently
Secondary accounts, not sure how to handle these since some people actually do have a family member or two who play from the same computer and I've logged onto my account when visity a friend who plays too just to ensure my troops didn't starve or back in the day to start another science. The easiest way is to give a production bonus of resources like 5%-10% per city you have. This then makes any secondary accounts played required to get more cities which then means they need to be played more which in the end if someone wants to play 2+ accounts a lot, no way to stop but would lessen bonus of having 1+ etra accounts to just use 1 city for resources. Increaseing the production of resources for cities and vallies would give everyone more troops but % wise the biggest benifit goes to the smaller guy.
Lastly we return to number 3. Can you really call yourself uber if you use cheats and/or exploits? There isn't a single person on an establish server who can say they are in the top % of their server's players who doesn't cheat/exploit some how. Not a critisism so much as blunt honesty. Evony can run the numbers. Manually the only person who could maybe be so uber is a professional typist (not data entry but actuel 160+ words a minute typist).
I don't wanna see a single person claim to be a professional typist, just sit down and don't say a word, a professional typist is either working too much to play this game or has retired and doesn't want anything to do with a keyboard and comp game.

