Evony

Readers are encouraged to avoid this game entirely. It is a spyware program in disguise.
"Play now, my lord!"

Evony is a Browser Game MMORPG where you start off in charge of a tiny village and presumably build it up into a mighty kingdom.

Evony is best known as the source of those annoying banner ads with the random, mostly-naked women that you see on Live Journal (and, for that matter, TV Tropes).

The game has a strong social element. You are advised to join an Alliance, who can support you in war, cannot attack you and can communicate with you via chat. Alliances are composed of the Host, who is formally in charge of the alliance and has the power to dissolve it if necessary; the Vice Host, who is second in command and has the power to boot members; the Presbyters, who function as diplomats and can form alliances with other alliances; Officers, who serve as recruitment for the alliance and have only powers of recruitment; and finally, Members, who have no special powers.

This game provides examples of:

 * Allegedly Free Game: Like most games of its type, but taken Up to Eleven.
 * Big Brother Is Watching. A game design student reverse engineered Evony's client, and discovered not only is it very poorly made, but it harvests massive amounts of data, including such things as your browser history, which websites you visit while the game is open, and what applications you run.
 * Blind Idiot Translation: At first, anyway, although as translation errors are reported by the playerbase it's been getting steadily better and better. It was still clearly written by someone for whom English is a twentieth language, though.
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: You can buy in-game coins with real money, which allow you to purchase resources and helpful items. Can be a real Game Breaker if you're willing to pay enough, but it's not cheap.
 * The Cavalry: You will be very glad of your allies when they come to bail you out. Build relief stations to make the most of this, especially if you're a long way away from your allies.
 * Ad Campaigns Always Lie: Evony's entire marketing campaign is false advertising.
 * One ad did show a Civilization-like game. Granted, like nearly all of Evony's ads, this one also had a woman in the foreground.
 * Another ad has the slogan advertising for Evony II: "No more bullies! No need to farm! Free Forever!" Really? So what about Evony I?
 * Not quite a lie, but none too credible at all: One Evony ad boasts that someone (allegedly a critic) claimed that Evony is the greatest MMORPG he'd ever played. The quote is attributed to, in much smaller font, an Evony player. His username was given, but no real name or credentials apart from "Evony player".
 * Another one on Facebook shows a screenshot from Counter Strike: Source, and has the title "Level 2 is impossible!"
 * There's another on Facebook with Gengar saying "Can you beat level 3?".
 * Thankfully, later ads return toward a more traditional route.
 * Easy Communication: A particularly blatant example with how fast mail can reach other players. Consider that you are role-playing lords in a medieval setting. Averted however in how long armies take to reach distant destinations.
 * Fan Disservice: A lot of people don't find their Sex Sells ad campaign at all sexy.
 * Follow the Leader:
 * A game called Caesary, which is Evony IN ANCIENT ROME!
 * It even follows through on the Blatant Misleading Sex Sells Contemptible Ad saying "One Click for a Roman Orgy! Click Now!"
 * There's actually a number of Evony knock-offs lying around, if you know where to look. Caesary is just one of the more popular (having shown up on Kongregate until a possible lawsuit), but they're all more-or-less the same... minus the spyware.
 * Caesary is now advertising on youtube. Prepare lawsuits!
 * World Of Lordcraft is another, even right down to the sexy ad campaign.
 * Another popular knockoff is War2, set in World War 2. There are several variants, The Stratagems, Glory and Dawn of Nations. The Stratagems has the quirk of censoring Evony's name out of its in-game chat for some reason.
 * Several other games, such as Glory of Rome, Galaxy Online, Global Warfare, Napoleonic Wars and Samurai Dynasty use the same basic engine and game concepts though set in different eras ranging from the Roman Empire to the far future.
 * Battledawn is an interesting entry into the category... It also kind of unintentionally mocks the genre, as you can choose from 'fantasy, modern, or futuristic' eras to play in. Virtually nothing changes aside from reskins and resources used to build crap. Each era plays exactly the same despite the fact they should be markedly different, it feels as if one era was made first, then they saw the same-but-different entries mentioned above, and just decided, aw the hell with it, lets cram them all into a single game engine. The eras are completely separate but one can play in all 3 at once if they so wish which just makes it more obvious nothing is changed. Unlike the rest of this page, it 'ends' every month, with the goal being to be the one to research then push the Big Red Button before anyone else.
 * Interestingly Caesary does away with a lot of the less respectable elements of Evony's setup, along with having a pre-calced animated battle after the damage is done, WHICH ACTUALLY REFLECTS HOW THE CALC CAME ABOUT. No more thousands of hours spading invisible troops and theorizing on attack order, you can see how your unit attacks and in what order, then adjust specifically for that. Yeah, you still need to wait ages for things to build, and they still try to enforce payment, especially with the training time required for higher end troops, but they cut down a lot of the more GUI-unfriendly areas and refined/polished the areas that felt like beta holdovers. Also the time required to go anywhere is never more than an hour, and reinforcements can be sent to your allies once you realise they are under attack. It is the marked difference between a Chinese casino and a Vegas casino. Also it added some extra non-PVP things to do like gladiatorial arena battles. You can either grind up the tickets required by sacking the same npc area over and over, or you can take the lazy way and buy them. It is, in short, Evony with playtesting and bonafide community {guild at least} focus.
 * Frivolous Lawsuit: More information here
 * Guilty Pleasures: The game is designed from the ground up with the primary goal of being as addictive as possible (sharing many design similarities with casino gambling machines), so it's very easy to get into even knowing how terrible it is. And once you are into it, it's very hard to stop, even once you've experienced how terrible it is.
 * Lady Not Appearing in This Game: The trope could very well be called "Evony Ad Girl".
 * It is now (except it's just a redirect).
 * Orwellian Retcon: The owners of Evony have become somewhat infamous for their many unsuccessful attempts to Retcon real life. For example: deleting all mention of the company they originally proudly touted as being a product of and now outright claiming that the company in question never even existed, and they've always been owned by the new company.
 * For several years the company claimed they had somewhere between twenty and thirty employees - until they sued Bruce Everiss. Australian law prohibits a company with more than ten employees from filing a libel lawsuit, so they deleted all mention of 'over twenty employees' and claimed - in fact, continue to claim - that they have never employed more than nine people. More info here.
 * Plagiarism: Long suspected, finally confirmed in, of all places, them stealing Legend of the Five Rings card artwork.
 * And Civilopedia entries, as well as building and terrain graphics from Age of Empires (although they did change most of the building graphics when they got caught).
 * Sex Sells: The game's (in)famous ad campaign showing increasingly unclothed pictures of women who don't appear in the game. Usually these ads will try as hard as they possibly can to make it look like a pornographic game. It's actually a clone of Chinese browser game Kingory, a Civilization ripoff where you build and fight ancient cities. These ads progressed from being standard pictures of armoured warriors and the like (you know, things the game actually contains), then showed a woman with a sword pointing into her cleavage with the caption "Save your queen!". After that it just got worse and worse. it got to the point that they didn't even bother putting the name of the game on some ads; Evony had become so infamous for using softcore porn as ads, they could afford to assume that people who see these ads would know it was an ad for Evony. The same notoriety has led to a lot of parodies (Web-based card game Alteil had, "She is actually in our game, m'lord!", for example.) from similar games and from webcomics.
 * And when your ads look like this (NSFW), when your actual game is a Civilization clone, there's something wrong.
 * Slave Collar: For alliances. Shown above.
 * Tactical Rock Paper Scissors: Though its a bit more complicated than just matching up units, other units support each other in odd ways due to the range stat.
 * Zerg Rush: Due to unbalanced countering, and bad AI, this is the preferred method.
 * But never with cavalry, unless that's ALL you're sending. They are the dumbest cavalry ever coded and will set off every single trap in their way. The typical zerg rush with cavs entails sending a legion of footmen with some ballista backup, going to sleep, waking up, then firing off hundreds of thousands of horses.

=== Readers are encouraged to avoid the game entirely. It is a spyware program in disguise. ===