There are some concepts that a player must understand before he/she can play Evony successfully. I've listed some of them here.

1. Population
This is the civilian population of your city. They are there in the background doing things that you don't even knew existed in the beginning. If you don't know where to see your population information, see the the interface guide.

First, they are responsible for the gold income of your city. The tax rate set on them determines their loyalty to you as their lord, the gold income of your city, and indirectly your population.

Second, your civilian population is your labor force. Without them, your mines, farms and other Resource fields are as good as useless.

Third, they are who you recruit and train to become elite soldiers. The number of idle population is what is available for you to exploit as your army source.

2. Gold
The world of evony revolves around the root of all evil, money. And by money, I mean Evony gold. You gain from several sources.

Taxes - If you are a plain and helpful lord, your city subjects give you a small portion of their income as an exchange for their protection. Or maybe you can get all the gold they are earning, but be warned that they may not like it and leave your city for good.

Market - Or maybe you are a businessman, then you can work your slaves on the mines and sell whatever you get in the black market. Of course, there are downsides in all schemes as the world market's prices can become very erratic, changing at a whim.

Raiding - Being an angry warlord can payoff too. You can raid all the cities around your army camp and get all the gold you want. Unless your neighbors are also warlords who won't give you single cent, or they are peasants who don't even have enough to buy food.

3. Resources
Being a lord of a city entitles you the power to enslave all of the populace. You can force them to work on 4 different resource fields you built. For more information on where the resource fields are, check the interface guide.

Food - They can be earned from the farm. They are easy to produce but also easy to be used up when feeding a big army. You also need food to feed your builders.

Stone - Mainly used for construction, but they are also needed as catapult projectile. Walls, for one, need a lot of stone.

Iron - When you are planning to have a huge army, you would need a lot of Iron. They are needed to make all the weapons and armor your army needs.

Wood - Perhaps the most important of all resources. Wood is needed in all aspects of Evony rule. They are needed for shields, spears, bow and arrows, catapults, balistas, building houses, upgrading your town hall, literally everything. That is why

4. Research
Of course, all things are not in the best shape when they first came out, look at Windows Vista for example. That is why even in the world of Evony, research is needed to improve the quality of things.

Research unlocks some things to be built, and improves it on further researches. Researches have a maximum of 10 levels, which means you need to research 10 times to get the full potential of anything.

Research times are extremely horrible. Even with the minds of Einstein, Newton and others are not enough to finish all the calculations and plans in a single sitting.

Perhaps, the worst research time I ever encountered are from researching a level 1o archery. You would need the science of trajectory, physics, meteorology and other sciences to finish it. Fortunately, you have all your scientists to do all the thinking for you.

5. Building
What is a city without tall buildings? Of course, the only things noticeably tall inside the town of Evony are the Town Hall, Beacon Tower and the walls, but you still need to build a lot of things in order to get the most out of a city.

To build, first select a building spot. Then choose the building you want to build. Simple as that. Your slaves do all the work for you, all you need to do is command them.

When building, there are certain requirements needed to be met. Sometimes, they require that a certain technology is available or a certain other building is available. Of course they also require a lot of resources, especially wood.

Then there is building time. The higher the level of the building, the longer it will take to finish.

Also, there is a limit on the level of the building. It would be unfair to have the world trade center in one of your cities, right? All buildings are limited to level 10, and you would need a special building plan to reach level 10 - a Michael Angelo's Scroll, which is very rare.

5. Training
Training soldiers is not a strange concept to this world. A certain amount of time is needed before a soldier can be trained. Certain soldiers take longer time to train than others. Some, needs only a few moments, like the pitchfork wielding warriors who are only needed to be instructed how to walk and stick their pitchforks into enemy warriors.

You can also train a lot of soldier in batches, but the more they are in a batch, the longer the training time needed. But a single batch graduates at the same time, so if you have a 1000 soldier batch, you would need to wait for all of them to finish before they can be used.

Also, training soldiers requires resources. The resources will be used on their equipent and others. Some soldiers needs a lot more resources than others. Some even need more to build mechanical monsters like balistas, rams and catapults.

6. Alliances
One of the most important concepts of Evony! In an alliance, all kinds of lords gather together to plan the most cunning plans, or sometimes stupid, to take over the world of Evony. Of course, some of this sworn loyalty are sometimes betrayed by the most evil.

An alliance have its pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses, which must be balanced to get the best alliance. The strength of an alliance can be measured by many ways.

First, you can measure an alliance's strength using the number of their members. The more members in an alliance, the more players to help each other. But sometimes, numbers are not enough.

Second, you can measure it through quality. The stronger the players in an alliance, the stronger the overall force of the alliance. Who would want to go against an alliance where the top 100 players are in?

Lastly, you can measure it by alliance/area density. The more players concentrated area means that they can reinforce and help each other more effectively and much more faster.

Mixing all of this strengths are hard to do. It needs great efforts to lead warlords, merchants, good lords and emperors in a single alliance. So choose your alliance wisely.