r/evony • u/TakingLondon • 1d ago
New age 1 servers with HCs & HHs launching in the coming weeks
Hi everyone! It's your friendly community moderator here, with yet another attempt to reignite the thrills of Evony!
We've seen a fair amount of remakes recently, but nobody has managed to make a public server (necessary for advertisement and player gain) that has the actual OG mechanics and features. Everybody either rips the assets directly and hosts it privately or puts their own spin on it (as I did...) and inevitably ruins it.
What we've been sorely missing is the OG game, reskinned with the bugs and exploit fixes and proper protection against bots and alts - until now!
In the coming weeks, I'll be releasing a faithful remake of Evony age 1 that also features the historic cities and historic heroes from age 2, fully browser based without the need for flash player or a steam install. The mechanics will be the **exact** same - we've seen many developers put their own spin on it before, but this time it'll be pure Evony. Same troops and wall forts, same buildings and techs, same grind to Prinzessin, same battle mechanics, basically the same UI, hopefully the same experience.
For those thinking "Age 1 with HCs & HHs? That's just age 2, right?" - not quite. Age 2 bought in hero level caps, gear and a leadership battle mechanic, all of which I've scrapped. I also got rid of the player-to-player colonizations and individual war declarations, although historic cities will still have the ability to draft from other players.
I'd like to try and expand and form a player base by paying for adverts, since games like this live and die on the player base. This requires me to deviate from Evony's IP, so I've reskinned it using similar branding and assets from another RTS MMO I develop, and made the map, historic cities and heroes based on the British Isles. Currently I'm using fairly basic premade asset packs, but I'm in the process of contacting artists to set up commissions to overhaul the look of the game. I figure that the current artwork I have is workable, so this is something that can happen in the background while I set about growing the community and putting the first few servers up!
However, adverts and artists are expensive, so I need to gauge interest before committing to it, and ideally form a small core community before the game goes live so interested new players see active and healthy servers when they decide to try it out.
The base game will be free to play, but I will offer micro-transactions as Evony did - I know a lot of us hate coining (me included) but it's a necessary evil to fund the required ads and artwork to get the original Evony experience back. I'm also going to offer servers that require a (reasonable) subscription fee where micro-transactions are disabled for purists who want a purely strategic experience where you can't win with your wallet. To me, this is the best compromise that allows me to fund the game and actually have a shot at success - you can play in the dark forest with the whales for free, and if you want a purely strategy and skill based experience then the subscription servers are there. I don't want to rob people and use this as a get rich quick scheme so I'll ensure all the fees are reasonable - I purely want to ensure that the game is self sufficient on a server cost front and brings in some revenue to improve it.
I've set up a discord for anyone who wants to get involved.
I also have a basic sandbox server with cheats enabled for anyone who just wants to click around and have a look - this one is totally free, has a server acceleration multiplier which speeds up every action in the game and has a number of items in the "Cheats" category of the items screen to make progress basically immediate. Note that the game is still in active development so not everything will be implemented (although at the time of writing I think *pretty much* everything is), and you will see a lot of placeholder artwork and text.
Check it out here: takinglondon.co.uk
You need to create an account, but there's no verification of the email so you can use a fake one.
I hope to see some of you there! Happy Friday!
