This is a great read and can really help people who are just starting and have not played games like Evony.
Let’s start with the goal — by the end of your first week you want to have a highly-productive kingdom that is an unattractive target for other players to attack. I stress “unattractive” because (unless you’re spending a ton of money) you simply cannot make yourself anything like as strong as players who have been playing a long time. If they want to hit you and take your stuff, they can so the trick is making it not worth their while.
Early days: Focus on production
Evony is a game where economic investment pays high returns. You start off producing tiny amounts of basic goods but in a week you’ll be producing relatively vast amounts. Where you end up on the production curve will be determined largely by how quickly you move up it during those critical early days.Meanwhile you have an incredibly powerful asset — beginner protection. Mightier than the tallest wall full of defenses, beginner protection means you are absolutely untouchable by other players while it lasts. Because of this, any resources you spend on defense are dead until the protection period ends. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t build any — you’ll need troops to conquer valleys and you need to improve your wall to improve your town hall, for example — but building defenses should only be done as a means to building up production, not as an end in and of itself.
Do whatever you can to avoid running out of investment resources. Their unit-for-unit value is very high for you in the early days because whenever you run out you are losing time which is your true scarce resource. You should use each of your levies early on. You’ll recover from the discontent easily and with the quest bonus you get plenty of goods to make it worthwhile. (Later on the quest bonus will be trivial and levying won’t be particularly exciting as an option.)
You should also look at buying resources, with gold and/or game cents. (Even if you plan to play for free you begin with a small amount of money and one of your quests is to spend it.) One cent translates to 4,000 lumber. When you’re producing over a million lumber per hour that’s not much help but early on that could mean the difference between making your next investment and waiting an hour or more.
Don’t waste time. Again, it is your scarce resource — you have a lot to accomplish in your first week! You’ll notice that your outdoor buildings can be built up to level 2 or 3 (depending on the resource) with the “instant speedup” option, so start off using that. Then try to minimize your dead time as you build up your production engine.
Focus on Lumber more than the other resources — it’s more valuable to you in the early game and has a higher trade value on the marketplace (at least currently) so at the moment it’s almost strictly superior to the other goods.
Follow the quests in a balanced way. They are useful both because they provide you a reasonable guideline of how to develop and because the bonuses are often more than the cost, but think about how each one will affect your development. An easy beginner mistake to make is completing a quest and then getting to work on the next one right away. You almost never want to complete the next level of a particular quest immediately — there will be something easier and more rewarding elsewhere.