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Evony TKR Tips

Overview of Picking Generals

Knowing what generals to keep and what generals to get rid of is an important topic as you start building your keep. It is a complicated question. Most of us will never have as many skill books, rune stones, general fragments, or blood of ares as we would like. Hard decisions need to be made, and the consequences of a poor decision can be intimidating.

If you look my sources1, you will see that there is a 80 to 90 percent overlap in the information they provide in generals, but there is some disagreement between them. Use whichever guide you feel you understand best.

When picking your generals, you need to consider several things.

  1. If you play long enough, you will get premium generals. You may not, however, be able to ever fully ascend these premium generals. This matters a great deal when picking your main general, but assistants are comparatively easy to replace, until you are ready to invest rune stones in an assistant general.
  2. Following up on the above, a general that you can get fragments for may be theoretically weaker than some other general, but if you cannot get fragments for the other general, the one you can is in practice stronger.
  3. Most dragons are really only available to paying players. If you play long enough you will probably, eventually get your wings, and after that, your second level wonder. For a Free to Play player, this may be over a year. However, that means 4 dragons. You are unlikely to ever have any others. If a general requires a dragon, do you have one for him/her? Will you ever? If so, when? Who will you use in the mean time?
  4. Rune Stones are incredibly scarce. You don’t actually need most of your generals to be fully maxed out however. You can get noticeable benefit from a general with 3 purple specialties if you pick the right generals. Pick one general to max out, either your main monster general or your main PVP general. Forget going beyond purple for the rest until that one is done. If some other general needs rune stones to be useful, consider an alternative.

While I have seen generic generals that by random chance have attractive attributes (such as ore exploitation as a specialty), these are the exception. Also note, that the advice below represents lessons learned, things I wish I had understood months ago.

In general, unless you have more slots for generals than you know what to do with, stick to Historic Gold Generals. The attributes on these will be better, the skills more diverse and stronger, the specialties better.

Not all Gold Historic Generals are worth getting. Some of them, compared to others, almost look like Purple Historic Generals. You still need to be discerning.

For many of them, the value depends on your style of game play and your strategy of warfare. You cannot be strong everywhere, so why bother having the theoretical best pair for all four troop types? Odds are you can only actually max out one of these anyway. What your really need are generals that are good enough while you work on your priorities.

As you look at the ordered list below, realize that you may not have the general that you want to work on today. In other words, plan rather than accept compromises based on the generals you randomly happen to get first.

  1. Decide if you care about running rallies yourself, or if you are content to only join them. If you do, you need a good monster general pair. This is different than a mounted PVP pair (the generals you pick for each role are different). If you care about running rallies, this general and his/her assistant needs to be your priority. (2 generals)

  2. Decide on make-up of your main PVP march. This will determine your main PVP general and main PVP assistant. If you run rallies, this will be the second general you look at. If you do not, this will be the first. (2 generals)

  3. Decide one troop type that you will have a TON of. This need not be the same as your main PVP march (particularly if you run rallies). You will someday use this as the bulk of your meat shield and the bulk of your keep’s defenses. Look for Wall Defense generals that complement this troop type. You need a main general and an assistant general. The main general will be the third general you max out. (2 generals)

  4. Look for generals that are specialized as duty generals for your keep and other buildings. If you find one for a building that is too small to get a mayor, either use this general as a mayor for some other building or break him into fragments for later. (the number of generals needed grows with your keep size, assume a minimum of 8)

  5. Look for generals that are specialized as “debuff” generals. These will be your sub city mayors. You have to be careful with these. If you do not plan on investing rune stones on these, they rate very differently than if you do plan on investing rune stones on them. (between 4 and 8 generals needed, depending on how many sub cities you have)

  6. Look for Baibars and Queen Jindock. You will someday want five Theodora/Baibars and five Queen Jindock generals. Take your time finding these, but if you see one and you have slots available, do not pass them up. Use Theodora and Baibars to join rallies; use Jindock to gather. (10 generals)

Footnotes

  1. See the list of pages on the Home page ↩