One of the more effective methods of building your empire up in Gold, Resources and Hero experience is Ballista Spamming. Technically its not spamming due to the travel time to your targets. But, I consider it spamming due to the extreme effectiveness if used correctly and with a little planning.

NOTE:
This is an ongoing post. I will update it as I learn more myself about the method and fine tune it more. Your technoliges can also change these numbers so its better to err on the upside when using the ballistas on any level for the first time.

Whats Required:
Ballistas and Transports. (transports are optional but it would be crazy to not carry back all that loot.)

The Method:
Can’t much easier. Send Ballistas and Transports with a decent attack hero at a NPC city.

Npc Ballista Spam

These Numbers are from my experience using a attack hero with over 100 attack and may be adjusted more to the downside or upside as more of my alliance members report in on smaller sizes being successful. I will fill in lvl 9 and 10 when i get enough Ballistas. Hero Level is very important, if you hero has low attack adjust these number up about 50%

• Lvl 1 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 30 Ballista
• Lvl 2 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 50 Ballista
• Lvl 3 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 150 Ballista
• Lvl 4 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 300 Ballista
• Lvl 5 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 600 Ballista
• Lvl 6 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 900 Ballista
• Lvl 7 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 2500 Ballista
• Lvl 8 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx 3500 Ballista
• Lvl 9 NPC BARB CITY  - Requires approx 9600 Ballista (My attack hero was 156 attack)
• Lvl 10 NPC BARB CITY – Requires approx

Pre planning a long term Ballista siege of multiple NPC citiesIf you plan your strategy out effectively in advance you can have multiple npc very close and easy to spam.

• Plan your capture of and abandon some lvl 7, 8, 9, or lvl 10 Player cities very close to you.

Player cities converted to NPC Barbarian cities

• until you have a large ballista army you can continuously hit lvl 1, 2, 3 NPC for small rewards. those are easy to capture from other players and can be abandoned right away as they have no value to you anyway.
• Seeing you are on a long term siege of these cities, why not use the flow of experience the hits will generate to level up your mayors faster. Once you know your ballistas can beat the NPC no problem (any easy way to tell is by how many rounds it takes to wipe them out. If its under 40 you should be o.k. sending in a low attack mayor.) attach a mayor to them for tonnes of experience and lots of levels you can then apply to intelligence and politics.
• Don’t forget to level up your attack heroes while sieging NPC cities, and when you go after a new level of NPC city, use them not your mayor until your low in rounds reuired to beat that npc with your attack warrior. Myself I like to use my attack hero to hit the higher level NPC, and the level below that I send my mayor while waiting for the higher level to regnerate new resources.

Evony has patched the servers again without warning its players. This classes act has been performed numerous times. First they changed the regeneration rate of npcs so we couldn’t get enough food to feed our armies, now they’ve made it so no matter what you hit a npc with you take loses of super expensive time consuming ballistas. Overwhelmning force means nothing.

It appears lvl 1 – 5 npc are still safe but 6-10 are not worth the effort.

LVL 3 NPC, 1400 BALLS, 30 Rounds, 118 Attack Hero, 0 loses
LVL 6 NPC, 5094 BALLS, 30 Rounds, 102 Attack Hero, 90 BALLS lost
LvL 8 NPC, 26375 BALLS, 26 Rounds, 140 Attack Hero, 1707 BALLS lost

I pity my neighbours as they are now my main source of food. Time to make dozens more quit Evony.

These classless bastards have no clue how to keep the servers up and running, keep opening new servers, changing game mechanincs without notice costing hundreds of players days and sometimes weeks of work. If you have never played Evoy, Don’t start. If you have and have paid to play, file a chargeback with your credit card or paypal as these are not the terms you signed up to and you were never given prior notice of any changes, you weren’t even given notice after the change these cat eatin bastards are so fucking clueless.
 
***OLD INFO NO LONGER ACCURATE FOR LVL 6-10 NPC***
The new patch is in effect on Evony servers. Medals are now attainable at a very regular rate.

From my alliances experiences so far with the new system we have come to these conclusions,

• Lower level medals can be found in all levels of valley, flats, npc city and PVP battles.
• Higher level medals can be obtained in high level valleys, flats, and npc cities and large PVP battles.
• The drop seems to be very random. Its hard to target one medal type specifcally.
• So far the rate seems to be 1 in 5 hits on avg produce a medal which is inline with the developers claim of a 20% drop rate.
• Loses (both defender and attacker), hero level, army size, and all those other silly variables peole are coming up with in the Evony forums doesnt matter when attacking valleys and npc cities(its a random drop per level of target), but it may matter when attacking PVP.

CONFIRMED MEDAL LOCATIONS:

NPC Barbarian Cities produce the following,

• npc lvl 1 – Courage, Lion, and Honor Medals.
• npc lvl 2 - Courage, Lion, and Honor Medals.
• npc lvl 3 – Courage, Lion, and Honor Medals.
• npc lvl 4 – Courage, Lion, and Honor Medals.
• npc lvl 5 – Courage, Honor, Freedom Medals.
• npc lvl 6 – Courage, Honor, Freedom Medals.
• npc lvl 7 – Courage, Wisdom, Freedom Medals.
• npc lvl 8 – Courage, Wisdom, Freedom Medals.
• npc lvl 9 – Courage, Wisdom, Freedom Medals.
• npc lvl 10 -

Flats and Valleys produce the following,

• Lvl 1-3 flat and valley – Lion, Cross and Rose Medals
• Lvl 4-6 flat and valley – Lion, Cross and Rose Medals
• Lvl 7-9 flat and valley – Lion, Honor,
• Lvl 10 flat and valley – Courage, Lion, Honor

As we continue to build our medal stash I will add any knowledge we gain to this post. For now, get out there and get your medals before they screw it up again which i have faith at some point they will.

We have some new developments in store for the Civony community that we are excited to share!
The Civony Beta will soon be drawing to a close. We would like to thank everyone who has helped us in beta testing and we hope you have enjoyed the experience. Your feedback has been invaluable in making Civony a fantastic game. Of course, this is not the end. We are going live very soon!
The formal name of the game at release will be Evony – Age One – Genesis(pronounced ‘ev?ni’)..
Our technicians have been working around the clock to create more stable and lag-free servers. We hope you have noticed the difference and we intend to improve server performance even more as the game goes live.
We’ve listened to your concerns and we are currently working on some changes to how medals are earned. We understand the frustration players experience when trying to earn medals and our goal is to strike a balance between reward and difficulty in earning them. We want players to be able to earn the medals, but they need to be challenging enough that you feel a sense of accomplishment when receiving them. We’ll have more details soon, so hang in there!
We also wanted to announce a brand new Evony project, tentatively named Evony – Age Two – Battlefield!
Age Two will expand on the success and strengths of Age One and will offer tremendous improvements to all areas of gameplay.
One of the most exciting features we have planned for Age Two will be a new Revolution Stage. This will be a server-wide event which will require players on the server to join forces for an epic undertaking to advance from Age One to Age Two.
While we develop Age Two, we will, of course, continue to support, develop and improve Age One. We also want player feedback on bugs from Age One and improvements they would like to see in Age Two. This is a community-based game, and your feedback is crucial to our success, so keep it coming on the forums or by email!
Thanks for continuing to play and support Evony, and we’ll see you on the battlefield!

Ranks in Civony Evony and how many towns they allow.

Lieutenant - 1 town
Knight       – 2 towns
Baronet     – 3 towns
Baron        – 4 towns
Viscount    – 5 towns
Earl           – 6 towns
Marquis      – 7 towns
Duke          - 8 towns
Furstin       – 9 towns
Prinzessin   - 10 towns

The new medals system is going out very soon.

• Medals will be given via PVE battles, by attacking valleys and barbarian citys.
• The drop rate will be raise to 50%-90%.
• High level medals will be harder to get due to high defense troops in NPC cities.
• In our latest patch, we raised the % by 200. Which is around 20% maximum.
• high level medals can only be obtained from NPC citys(barb villages), but lower level medals you can obtain via both valleys and barbarian city
• We’re still awaiting the patch to implement this new medal system

Data from evony forum

Since the latest patch was applied obtaining medals has become next to impossible. Through reading and experimenting this is what has worked for me so far.

You need to capture the valley and not just beat the defenders.

Civony medal post patch

This was a level 6 valley and about the 10th valley I hit and got the medal.

I hit hundreds without conquering the valley and recieved none.

Hopefuly this method will be proved to be solid in the coming days. I will keep the post updated as i learn more and my alliance finds more medals.

Another medal ontained in less than 10 more hits

Civony medal after the big patch

This was a level 9 valley