In Evony building strategy is very important. Here’s a guide to which buildings you may want and what they do for you.

Cottage- Cottages offer shelter to citizens, attracting more people to reside. This will allow your population to grow and tax revenue to increase.

Farm, Quarry, Iron Mine and Sawmill – These buildings are pretty self explanatory. They are your resource generators. The higher their level the more they produce and store.

One advanced strategy is to keep your Farms to a minimum. You can get all the food you need raiding barbarian cities or by buying it. It is typically much cheaper to buy food than any other resources.

Barracks – Soldier training and dismissal are conducted in Barracks; the higher its level the more advanced army branches can be trained.

Feasting Hall – The Feasting Hall is the residence of heroes. You can check the status of heroes, upgrade stats, give rewards, and dismiss them. There must be vacancies in the hall if you want to hire a hero. A higher level Feasting Hall will give you more heroes to choose from. There must also be a vacancy if you capture a hero during combat.  A captured Hero can either be Persuaded to join you (same cost as hiring in the Inn) or Released.

Inn - The Inn is used to recruit Heroes. Increasing the level of Inn allows for more Heroes of higher level to be present at any point in time. The quality of available Heroes varies.

There is a trade-off between initial level and Stats for Politics, Attack and Intelligence. Higher level Heroes hit diminishing returns for improvements – each Stat increase requires more experience. This makes a low level Hero that can be developed a much more attractive recruiting prospect than a higher level one with better Stats. Financially, low level Heroes are cheap to hire and keep.

Marketplace – The marketplace allows you to buy or sell resources. Higher levels allow for more trades at once.

Rally Spot – The Rally Spot is a place for military assembly, where you can give an order to attack or conduct a military exercise, check your army’s status and intelligence, adjust your attacking and defending strategy.

The level of the Rally Spot determines both how many marches you can send out at any given time and the maximum size these marches can be. Per level, you can send one additional march and the march sizes increase by 10k troops, all the way up to level 10 which can send up to 10 marches, each consisting of 100k troops.

Also note that using a War Ensign item can increase the size of a specific march by 25%. The ‘Open Gate to Fight’ option determines whether your army adds its strength to the city defenses, or stays safely in barracks to leave the wall defenses to take on an attack unaided.

Leaving your gates closed is useful when you think your army will die from an oncoming invasion and want to protect them. Note that while having your gates closed will protect your troops it will also keep them from fighting and defending your city. If you think that your defenses are sufficient then protecting your army is a good idea. Sometimes however sending your men out can mean the difference between winning and loosing.

Another feature of opening gates is that your scouts will combat enemy scouts when they come to scout your town and potentially kill them before giving the enemy any information; having your gates closed prevents this and lets enemies scout you freely.

March: Instead of going to your selected target on the map and choosing to send a march, you can send it directly from your Rally Spot if you know the co-ordinates of your destination.

Exercise: Exercise is a troop vs. troop battle simulator that will give a rough idea of what might happen in a battle between specific army combinations. This is handy if you’re unsure what formation to put your army in, or wondering how to reduce your losses, but it has some flaws.

It doesn’t include technology levels, traps and wall durability or Hero attack statistics, all of which can seriously swing the outcome of a battle. Because of this, it’s advised to not use the Exercise unless you know the enemies information and can accurately put it together in accordance with your own to come to a better conclusion about what might happen, but is still gives inaccurate numbers at best.

Medic Camp: In the rally spot you will find a button that says medic camp. This holds all of the troops that have been wounded in your recent battles. For a gold fee you can ‘heal’ these troops and they will rejoin your army. If you don’t heal them they will eventually die.

Relief Station - The Relief Station increases the speed of Army movement between your cities and your allies’ cities.

It is very useful if your cities are far apart and you need to transfer troops. This is also good for reducing time to transport or reinforce your alliance members.

Stable - A stable is a building in which livestock, especially horses, are kept. It most commonly means a building that is divided into separate stalls for individual animals.

A military stable would also have a training grounds, barracks for the troopers, blacksmiths, armories, and the like. A horse must be highly trained to be successfully used in battle. Any civilization that wants to employ a large number of horsemen are highly encouraged to invest and build as many stables as possible.

Horses are raised in the stable, and horsemen develop along with the stable’s level. The Stable allows Horseback Riding to be researched and is also required to build Relief Stations. The in-game description of Stables claims “the higher its level the faster troops are trained.” Perhaps it means that faster horses can be trained with higher level of the stable. It does not increase speed of training however. Building levels do not affect speed of research/training/construction in the game.

Town Hall - The Town Hall is the administrative center the city. Here, players modify Production, Tax Rate, Comfort, and Levy parameters. Each upgrade of a city’s Town Hall increases the number of valleys a player can conquer. Upgrading a Town Hall also increases a city’s resource fields by three. Every city begins with a Level One Town Hall.

According to the quest guide, the Town Hall is the administration centre of a city. While you upgrade it, the efficiency of constructions is enhanced at the same time. Furthermore, the limit of gold reserve will also be increased. Don’t forget when starting out upgrading your Town Hall to level 5 will remove beginners protection.

Also note that the Town hall level affects the view of your city on the map. Levels 1-3 is a “village”, level 4-6 is a “town”, level 7-9 is a “fort”, and level 10 is a “city”.

Walls - Strong and firm city walls built around the city provide significant protection against attacks and invasions. All kinds of fortified units can be built here. The higher your wall level the more spaces are provided for defensive units.

Warehouse - Build one Warehouse for the quest, but don’t rely on it to protect your resources from raid on it’s own, however it’s good to have one Warehouse and set it to save only food so you have some stored for the Comforting “Disaster Relief” if you fall victim to attacks.

As for protecting resources, there are some ways to keep most, if not all of them safe from plunders.

This strategy no longer works: Hide your gold and resources from plunder by putting them up for sale for a lot of money in the marketplace.

Resources in the queue for sale that have not sold yet are taken in an attack (attempt to do this in a massive attack, and all resources up for sale will be gone from the list).

Resources that are bought and not yet arrived before the strike are not touched. One strategy is to sell everything and buy it back (so the gold can’t be taken) less than 30 minutes before the strike hits. They can’t touch it.

Another strategy is to have transporters load up with everything they can, and then march them to a valley, or set them up to march for a long time (maybe an ally far away) while the strike happens, then recall the transporters before they arrive. In theory, you could just set the camp time for the marching orders for several hours and they would be safe, and when you recalled they would come right back.

The main issue about Warehouses is that they simply don’t store enough for them to be worth taking up the construction slot in your town, even with Stockpile 10 researched.

However, several high level Warehouses and Stockpile 9 or 10 can save a significant amount of resources. Ideally you would set aside an unimportant supply city and use that as your Warehouse city, so as to not interrupt the soldier training in other, larger cities. In this case you would keep a supply of resources sitting aside in this town to protect them in case you fall under attack unawares and don’t have time to protect them in other cities, or transport them to safety.

Workshop - The workshop is necessary for offense and defense mechanics. It is required for Metal Casting. It is also a requirement for building higher levels of your Walls.

Academy – The Academy is very important. All of your research is done here. You will see that much of the research requires other structures to be built. All advanced troops require research to be done before they can be trained.

We have actually done several posts dedicated to the Academy:

http://www.evonygameguide.com/academy-basics-part-1/

http://www.evonygameguide.com/academy-basics-part-2-or-why-you-need-an-academy-in-every-city/

I hope this gives you a good idea of what you are dealing with when you start and continue your building process.

- Kris

Thanks to LakersFan1 on server NA10 for much of the information in this post!