Picking Sub-City Mayors

Note

In the Overview, I explain my thinking. This is a fairly long article, but contains a lot of useful background information if you want to understand how I arrived at these conclusions. If you just want to be told what to do, you can skip it and dive right in here.

Philosophy

As you look at the many generals in Evony for mayors, you are looking for what are called “debuff” generals. These are generals that reduce one or more attributes of the attacking general and/or attacking army. While you can “debuff” the enemy’s ability to attack, the enemy’s health (HP), or the enemy’s ability to defend against your counter-attack (defense), these last two amount to the same thing in practice. Both of them reduce the enemy’s ability to survive your counter-attack, while the first one reduces his/her ability to attack you.

So which strategy do you prefer? The best defense is a strong offense? You will want to go all out building ranged and particularly sieged troops. Or do you depend on your own PvP march to do the real damage and you just want to survive while that happens? If so focus on ground and mounted troops.

There are strong arguments each way, and both positions are presented better in other places. Alternately, take a hybrid approach and look for the few names that appear on both lists. These may not be the strongest mayors in one or both categories, but that they show in the list at all means they are still among the top choices available.

At this time, I do not recommend the use of peace time mayors for either free or light spenders. I explain why here.

Reducing the Enemy’s Ability to Attack You

This is for people who depend on their PvP march and are just trying to survive the enemy’s attack in the mean time. While you would not mind hurting the enemy, you are focused on preventing him/her from hurting you.

In the tabs below, see how radically the lists change as you look at different levels of investment in your mayors. I recommend Free Players use the 3 Purple list and everyone else use the 3 Orange list. Further note, generals marked with a ‘Y’ in the ‘Availability’ column are the only ones available without getting lucky in paid events.

Reducing the Enemy’s Ability to Survive Your Attack

This is for people who want to make the enemy regret the decision to attack their keep. They plan on having enough sieged troops to totally destroy any incoming march. To make this possible, they want to make each attack by their own siege count for as much as possible.

In the tabs below, see how radically the lists change as you look at different levels of investment in your mayors. I recommend Free Players use the 3 Purple list and everyone else use the 3 Orange list. Further note, generals marked with a ‘Y’ in the ‘Availability’ column are the only ones available without getting lucky in paid events.

Trying to find balance

Some authors advocate an approach where you look at the overall amount that each general reduces the enemy’s stats, regardless of what specific attribute is being debuffed. There are trade offs with this hybrid approach, as while it is great that you are both reducing attack and reducing toughness, the resulting generals are not the strongest in either category. My instinct is that a free or light spender is probably better off specializing with generals from either the attack debuff set or the toughness debuff set, rather than attempting to do both with one of these lists.

I have included rather more generals in this section than in the other two because another use for this list is as a tie breaker: if you are debating between two generals in one of the other lists, knowing where they fall here can help make the decision.

SPTable csv=“overall_mayors.csv”