UCool is apparently putting almost all their effort in The King's Return. Evony age 1 has not had a new server since May 2016.

Bots are not really a problem, but when a player has entire 100 member alliances to feed their main account(s), that's a major problem.

So, yes, when players have multitudes of accounts all busily scanning for whatever 24/7, that's lag.

Last time I played I was amazed how whenever I catch and released valleys to farm for medals, within seconds several bots were march armies to grab the valley.

Bots would seize flats and then just hang on to them, preventing them from going to level 5 or 10 so they could be turned into farmable NPCs.