What can Evony teach you about how money works?
We’re fond of games, and personally we learnt a lot about property & money from playing things like Cashflow, Hybrid Property Game & of course Monopoly.
So to continue our series in things to learn about money from unlikely games you just wouldn’t expect, we are proud to introduce; Nine things Evony can teach you about Economic theory, tax & the art of war.
For anyone who doesn’t know what Evony is, it’s an online real time game, similar to Civilisation. You build up a city with infrastructure, have to defend it from other (real) players, go and invade valleys for resources, or other cities for plunder. The game keeps going in real time even when you’re alseep. So you need to hope you have enough defense to see off any attacks while you sleep.
It’s very addictive. (And while it may well have the tag line “Free Forever” it can be bloody expensive if you want to buy Game Coins.)
In the game you get gold: from taxation, plunder or selling resources to other players that you ‘harvest’ from the land.
Resources you can harvest are;
- food, needed to feed your army, and workers;
- lumber, needed for building & weapons;
- stone, more building;
- iron, yet more building and some other weapons.
You can buy & sell these resources from other players through a marketplace if you wish.
So, what can Evony teach you about money?
1. Gambling & The Wheel of fortune.
Each day you get a free spin on the wheel of fortune, where you stand a chance of winning a random item which is useful to you in the game. Annoyingly the main screen keeps popping up all the really useful things you just wish you could get your hands on, that ‘other’ players have won on the wheel. Only they are the exception, not the norm. Unless you are a guy called DeMontfort, in which case you are an exceedingly lucky git!
So just like with the real lottery, you keep hearing about all the great thing other people have won. Except when you play, you only win crap. Having used my daily spin for a couple of weeks now, I’ve yet to win anything really useful. Mostly I’ve won resources, which I was building anyhow.
A bit like a free ticket for next weeks lottery.
2. Taxation
You need Tax revenue to pay for Academic research, buy resources in the marketplace, and pay the salary of your hero’s. Two things define how much tax revenue you get, your total population and your taxation percentage. The higher your taxation level, the less popular you are, and the lower your overall population, hence a reduced tax take.
Low tax(naturally) gives you low tax income. High tax (also) gives you low tax income.
Why governments need to spend millions on “working groups” to tell them this I have no idea. They should play Evony and save the money for really important stuff. Like expenses claims.
There is a balance between population and taxation levels, which is around 50% tax. Not that we’d like the Tax Working Group to suggest this to NZ govt., and just look at the starting exodus of people from the UK because of impending 50% tax rates. Tweaking your tax rate for optimum income isn’t necessarily the best policy if you want to grow your city.
Unfortunately in the game, a 50% tax rate means that you have to invest a huge amount of time & resources building housing for people, and only 50% of it is occupied. Lower your tax and more of your housing stock is occupied, and you have more people available to work in the fields or join the army.
So just like real life, low personal income tax attracts people to your city, who then work in productive functions. As a Govt. you then have to balance your spending so you don’t run out of money before you’ve built that shiny new Town Hall.
3. Plundering – a great historical tradition going back millenia. Today we call it war.
If you can’t, or don’t want to, harvest the resources you need from your own lands and build a sustainable economic base for your city then you can always steal it off of someone else.
Only you need an army to do that.
So you need some ‘basis’ things like; resources, buildings, academic research, idle population and a hero before you can do that.
Plus you’ll need defenses once you nick the stuff, so the other player can’t nick it back.
If you’re lazy with either attack or defense, you’ll lose the fight, your soldiers all die, and you have to replace them. Back to needing to harvest resources again.
4.It’s all about budgeting!
The game is all a big balancing act, which we more commonly call budgeting. If you have low taxation, then you need to plunder for gold. If you don’t invest in your own infrastructure (resources), then you need to plunder for the resources you need to build. And of course the bigger you want to build things, the more plundering you need to do. The more plundering you do, the further away you have to travel to do it, until in the end you invade a city because it’s building a catapult which could reach your city within 45 minutes.
All of which can be minimised by budgeting well, spreading the investment of your resources back into making more resources, building more housing, or increasing infrastructure. All the time keeping people happy.
5. Hero’s – today we call them leaders, less politely we’d call them politicians.
In a very odd parallel here, you recruit your hero from an inn.
Where they hang out until someone gives them a job.
Only then, they demand a feasting hall be built in their honour, and they hang out there while you pay them a salary for, well, feasting.
The more hero’s you have, the bigger your feasting hall needs to be. Which takes time, gold, resources etc.
I don’t need to say much more on that do I? 
6. Hero’s – part 2.
- In order to enhance the speed at which your people build things, you need a good mayor with high political acumen.
- In order to enhance the speed at which your academics under take research, you need a highly intelligent hero.
- In order to train your armies quicker and win more battles you need a hero with high military skill. Ideally you should have two of these, one to head off and fight a battle, while the other stays at home training more armies.
Typically these three attributes are not found in one person, and ideally you actually need four hero’s to make your city run well. For example if you demote your mayor, so you can send him off to battle, then the population slows down their working speed – i.e. while you leader is off fighting a war in another country productivity goes down.
Amazing how well this matches real life through the centuries eh? Of course if you want to fight lots, either for plunder or conquest, you’ll need more military leaders. Which require a bigger feasting hall, larger inn’s and higher salaries. And if you want to ‘entertain’ a foreign ‘dignitary’, we call them leaders who have been taken hostage in a fight, you need a bigger feasting hall! (yet again)
Basically, provide your politicians heroes with lots of perks, particularly alcohol, and they will love you and do what you want them to.
7. The Marketplace: commodity trading is a great way to make money.
The marketplace allows you to buy and sell the four basic resources with other players. Prices fluctuate a lot, even during a day. However, just like a real economy & stock market you can place an order for a quantity of food at the price you’re willing to pay, and wait for a seller to come along and accept that offer. Just like real stocks, you can see the highest prices people want to buy stuff at, and the lowest prices people are willing to sell at. A very active market has a small, or non-existent difference. A slow market for resources not in demand will have a big difference.
So just like the real economy, you have a price at which sellers are willing to accept for their item (let’s call it a house), and a price buyers are willing to pay for that same item, and eventually there has to be a compromise in price by one party for the sale to happen. And just like the real economy, you have lots of people selling food, so the price is low, and as a buyer you can ‘shop around’, i.e. wait, until a seller comes along who is willing to meet your (low) price.
8. Academic research.
Part of the game requires you to research scientific advances to help you progress in the game. i.e. build things quicker, get a better defense, attack or movement speed to your armies. So just like the real world, where academics need research grants from Govt., here you have to pay gold & food for those academics to figure out how to make a faster wheel. And just like the real world, with a highly intelligent academic honoured in your feasting hall, academic research progresses faster. Academic research is one of those thing to invest in early, so when you’re trying to build a really big something, it only takes a day or two instead of weeks (real time!)
9. Alliances
Alliances are very important. A good alliance will come to your aid when you are being attacked by sending troops to help defend your city, or other troops to attack the city of the person attacking you. A really good alliance will also make donations of resources when you need them, to help you build your city or army. They’re also there to give sage advice. So whether it’s friends, neighbours, work colleagues, fellow countrymen, other countries you know well, or countries you can’t even spell – joining an alliance and working together means you all benefit.
Bake a bigger pie.
Failing that, your alliance may plunder the pie’s of other alliances, but teamwork always gets you more pies in the long run than playing fighting alone.
Related posts:
- How Evony isn’t “free forever” – not by a long shot.
- What can Mafia Wars teach you about money?
- What can Farmville tell you about the way money works?
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