Widely advertised as a game about pulling the pins from puzzles, most of the gameplay in Evony: The King’s Return is about building a city, generating armies, fighting monsters, and battling players.

Evony: The King’s Return is a fantasy city builder that’s all about building up a powerful city and raising strong armies. If you’re familiar with games where you send out armies to do battles with monsters and win wars for your social group, Evony is going to be right up your alley. It’s a complex game with lots of players, so if you know what you’re doing, you can set up lots of sub-accounts to help your alliance make it big.

Unfortunately, that’s not what Evony: The King’s Return is advertised as. Over the past couple of years, Evony has been one of the most consistently advertised games on many popular online platforms. You’ve probably seen dozens of ads for Evony – if not more. 

In these ads, players are presented with an archaeologist separated from treasure by various golden pins. Pulling out the pins lets lava, water, coins, traps, or monsters into various chambers. By pulling the pins in the right order, it looks like you can get the archaeologist to the treasure. In the ad, however, the player always gets it wrong, leaving a frustrated character to certain doom.

Evony is not about these kinds of puzzles. It has a few puzzles involving an archaeologist and rooms of treasure, technically, but these puzzles are few and far between. More importantly, they look nothing like the ones in the advertisements. In the ads, the puzzles are vibrant and bright, with well-animated elements and lively characters. In-game, you get dismal dungeons and animations that seem to only update two or three times a second. Again, you only get to play these puzzles a few times throughout your Evony experience, so it’s not like they’re lowering the production quality to make more of them.

Despite this misleading advertising, Evony is at the forefront of conversations about mobile gaming. The ads draw an influx of new players, keeping servers fresh and ensuring that battles feel lively. No matter where you are in your Evony journey, there will be plenty of other players at your level, ensuring that the game’s PVP and social modes feel fun, fair, and relevant.

Evony is a freemium game. While you can technically play for free, Evony has a lot of very pricey in-game characters and items that are very difficult to get as a free player. If you’re not looking to spend a decent chunk of change every month you’re going to need to carefully plan out your account and ensure that you get generals and items that are accessible without spending to keep your armies up to snuff.

While Evony might look like a single-player game, you shouldn’t treat it like one. Instead, if you want to get the most out of your experience, you should immediately look for a group of players to work with. Not only will you get to hang out and make friends, but you’ll also get updated tips about the best ways to progress through the game. Your alliance will turn Evony into a memorable gaming experience.

Beyond that, make sure that you pay attention to where the resources in your account are going. For example, many players put super-powerful gear on generals to raise their power level and allow them to get promotions and take on good roles. Once they’ve been promoted, however, you can take the gear off and put it somewhere else. Make sure that your active generals have the good gear on while they’re out doing battle. Similarly, make sure that your main and sub-cities are set up to boost the right stats and that you’re putting ascended generals in charge of your armies instead of generals you haven’t managed to max out yet.

If you really want to master Evony, consider making (or buying) sub-accounts to funnel resources to your main account. This might seem like a lot of work at first, but logging on a couple of times a day to do basic activities doesn’t take too much time. A few of these accounts can really propel your alliance from being a contender to being one of the top dogs.

Are you an Evony: The King’s Return expert? How many pin-pulling puzzles have you seen? Do you enjoy the ads? Who are the best generals for low spenders? Let us know in the comments below!