Strategies for Devana. Devana is a web-based civilization like game of strategy and conquest (should you choose to go that route) When you start on devana, you're basically starting with nothing. You need to build a town, build it up, and defend it from enemy attackers (or become an enemy attacker) if you so choose. First things first. To start building your town, click on towns, it will bring up a page allowing you to create a town. Name it anything you like, and click create. That'll get you started. The game allows you to select your position on a map, but other than terrain positioning, there's very little need to worry about where you are physically located on the map for the most part, so don't worry about that piece.
After you have your town created, you'll need to do several things. First, you'll want to click on your city hall (each faction calls it something different, but it's the only building you start out with when you begin, so it's easy to find) Select the town hall, and you will then be able to set taxes, and build additional buildings to enlarge your town. Now, the FAQ and guide indicate that you should build your granery, sawmill, quarries and iron foundries first. This is certainly an option, but I recomend another approach. First, upgrade your city hall to level 2. This does several things for you. First, it increases your gold maximum value, allowing you to have as much as 1000 gold on hand for building, and it also decreases the amount of time it takes to build other structures, as well as giving you a head start on some of the requirements for other structures you'll need/want to build later. Once you have your town hall at level 2, you can then begin building other things such as your grain fields, saw mill, stone quarries and iron foundries. With the town hall at level 2, these structures will build slightly faster than they otherwise would, giving you a slight advantage over other players who didn't go this route. However, since this is a realtime strategy game (for the most part) it won't afford as big an advantage as you might think, since you need to wait for the structures to finish being built before you can upgrade any of them to begin producing additional resources. However, every little bit helps, so that's why I mention it here. Now, the single most sought after resource in your early days of devana is gold. I highly recomend after you upgrade your town hall, and before building your other structures, or perhaps after you've built a couple and gotten additional resource production going, is to max out your gold collecting abilities so that you'll have plenty of gold for building structures to get you started. You do this by clicking on the town hall, and setting your tax rate. It's shown as a percentage, which is slightly misleading, since it's not really a percent, but more a flat rate, but you'll understand why it's called a percentage later on. To max out your gold capacity in your town, change your tax rate to 210 percent. (that's right, raise it to 210 which is the max it can be set to). This will max out your gold in less than 5 hours realtime. When you reenter the game, you should find that your gold is now at 1000/1000 (assuming you upgraded your town hall to level 2, otherwise you'll only have a capacity of 400 gold, in which case, setting your tax rate to 20 percent will max it out in the same amount of time, since you begin with 300 gold. Now, after you've gotten your 1000 gold, it's time to reduce the tax rate to something uusable that will not only allow you to regain used gold from building your initial structures, but will replenish your resources as well (since no resources are created when taxes are more than 100 percent). Set your tax rate to something around 20 percent or so (you are of course free to choose any number you like, but I've found that 10 to 20 percent seems to work best) Then, make sure you have all four basic resource types created, grain fields, saw mills, stone quarries, and foundries. You'll also want to upgrade at least 1 of each of these items to level 1 to generate additional resources. You are of course free to upgrade more than one resource in each category to further increase your resource generation, since the more upgrades, the faster things get created. After all that's done, you'll want to upgrade your town hall further, and build housing for your citizens. You only have a limited number of things you can build when you begin. By default, you can have a maximum of 20 people in your town before you're required to upgrade housing for your citizens. as each structure you build gets completed, it will require additional people to maintain these structures. As a result, once you've built your basic structures and upgraded your town hall, you'll need to build some housing, so that you can allow additional population to maintain additional structures as they're built.. The next thing you'll likely want to do is to raise the level of your town hall so that you can build a cathedral. The town hall needs to be level 7 before you can build a cathedral, and you definitely want to do this, because for each level you have your cathedral upgraded, you get a 10 percent bonus in your moral of the town folk. This means you can raise your taxes an additional 10 percent with no affect on resource production. I.E. a cathedral of level 5 will allow you to set your taxes to 50 percent and you'll still get 100 percent of your production from all your resources. If you were to raise taxes to 60 percent, then your production would be reduced by 10 percent, netting you 90% of your total possible output. But, to get to that point, there's lots more to do, including building walls for defense, forges for creating weapons, barracks for housing your soldiers, and much much more. Devana is quite an interesting game, and one you can't win in a couple hours, it will take weeks (of only a few minutes a day) to build a fully maxed out town, and weeks more to begin your world domination, since each soldier you with to train needs to be built from components such as spears, chainmail, swords, bows, and the like. Each soldier has it's own particular task, and each one can't be trained until proper equipment has been created. So, as you can see, Devana is quite the complicated game, but it's this very complexity that makes it enjoyable and useful, and I'm glad tohave been able to make this game accessible for all vi players to enjoy right alongside your sighted friends and family. Devana is free to play, and is open source, so you too can download and begin your own online version if you so choose. You can find the version I've modified at http://www.thesiegelsnest.us/devana/ and the source for the original version of devana is located on sourceforge at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/devana/ And you can get the version located on thesiegelsnest.us at: http://www.thesiegelsnest.us/games/devana.zip This copy has the changes I've made to make devana accessible to all, so that the game will be more enjoyable to vi players. The original version is playable as is, but it's somewhat difficult in places, and has few concessions to vi players, especially for things like determining what's currently under construction when looking at the whole town view. I hope folks will enjoy this version of devana, and please do let me know if you find broken things, and if you have suggestions for improvement, as there's certainly nothing that says this version has to be identical to the original, so feel free to wish away, and we'll see about making this game even more fun to play. If there are any questions, problems, complaints, suggestions, or something I missed, post them in the forums from the forum link on the top menu. There are some issues with the forum code at the moment relating to special characters (forgot to check/strip dangerous chars) so if your message doesn't post, try again after removing extraneous punctuation such as single quotes (apostrophes) html tags and the like. Will get that fixed asap though. --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
