Evony Age II - Avoiding the draft.

Getting drafted in Evony, Age 2?

Yeah – me too. Unless you have possession of the largest Historic City in Evony – Atlantis at coordinates (0,0) – you have probably had some of your troops drafted at some point. It is frustrating, but part of the game, and there are a few things you can do about it...

1. When your troops are drafted, the person doing the drafting gets 5% of one of your troop types. I'd guess there is a formula built into the game as to which type of troops gets drafted (it seems random), but I don't know what it is. Sometimes it is scouts, sometimes warriors, even if you have more archers. So – I'd suggest that one way to minimize the damage is to load up on troops that don't get drafted as often and are the easiest to replace – scouts, warriors, workers.
2. Watch to see if there's a particular time of day when you get drafted – the players probably aren't on all day, or they may have a pattern – they do their drafting in the morning, perhaps. Once you've got it figured out, move your most valuable troops into a nearby valley that you own for that part of the day. You may not want to leave them there too long – they consume about 50% more food when they are not in your city.
3. Balance out your troops between your cities – if you have more than one. A lot of players have a “war city” where they keep the bulk of their troops, but if you have your archers split between 2 cities, the drafter will get only 5% of half of your archers. Splitting them up between 5 cities is even better.
4. Those doing the drafting do not have access to troops that are reinforcing the city of someone else in your alliance. You could send some of your troops to reinforce a friend's city – but the problem is that then he/she is stuck feeding your troops. SO, you want to strike a deal – he sends you a couple hundred thousand archers and you send him a matching amount. These troops are protected from being drafted!
5. Move your troops daily – never leave them in the same city for days on end – once the drafter finds out where you have them, he will return periodically to get more. He doesn't want to try to draft troops where there are none, so he shops around and revisits cities where he's found troops in the past. This turns out to be a bit of a crap shoot that he won't find your troops, but it's better than being a sitting duck.

That's all I've got for now – if you've got some suggestions, contact me in Evony (Horatio in NA1) or leave me a note here and I'll update this post.