Overview: While you would never have been able to guess from the early ad campaigns, Evony is a web-based player-vs.-player strategy game. You govern an empire made up of various cities that produce resources and troops, and you use those troops to fight for territory with other players. It’s a game along the lines of multiplayer Civilization, although everything is gated by real-time timers for actions instead of separate turns.

The tutorial, with its sultry guide, takes you through the basic tasks of building and upgrading parts of your empire. You begin under a 7-day Beginner’s Protection effect, so you have one realtime week to build up your city and marshal your forces before your neighbors can attack you. The Routine Quests provide a large set of possible objectives to reach that guide you through the process of building up your city. However, they may not be the best and most efficient strategies – this is where planning and forethought really start to separate the experts from the greenhorns.

All the game’s tasks, from upgrading a building to marching troops across the countryside, require real time to complete. The early tasks may take seconds or minutes – the later ones take hours. Spending real money on Evony’s “cents” allows you to speed up task completion, which is the first major advantage buying in gives you. Cents can also be used to purchase “strategems” which are items that improve various aspects of your combat forces or simply counter other strategems, and the various medals that can be turned in for Prestige to raise your rank. Speaking in World Chat also costs cents, which is a moderately effective way to deter spammers.

Evony is a web-based game, but it’s connected pretty heavily with Facebook as well. You can use Facebook Connect to log in, which links your Evony account to your Facebook account. This also gives you the ability to send and receive gifts and post updates to Facebook from the game itself. Periodically a little icon will appear in front of your Town Hall – clicking this will bring up a window that will allow you to post a status update to Facebook. When your friends click on it, you will both receive a reward.

All of your building and upgrading is focused on improving your chances in battle with your rivals. And that is where the game gets interesting. Joining alliances, negotiating with other players, and conquering enemy territory is the heart of the game. There are “barbarian”-held territories, where a computer-generated opponent waits for all comers, but the real challenges are always other players.

Evony is a complex and competitive game – it’s really not designed for the casual player, but requires a fairly large time commitment and probably some real money to get ahead. Fortunately, it’s a popular game with lots of resources to learn the strategy – TheGameNet’s Evonypedia is a great one to start off with. If you’re looking for a strategy game you can really dig into, forgive them their ad campaign and give it a shot.