Evony: The King's Return Leveling Guide

Read This First: Four Ladders, One Order

Evony has no single level number: four ladders rise together. Your Keep gates your buildings, your Monarch level caps your generals and feeds the Talent tree, your generals carry your marches, and your VIP level speeds everything. Level them in that order — Keep first, Monarch second — or the later ladders stall against the earlier ones.

This guide follows the fan guides' framing: Monarch level is the underrated system, the Keep is the spine, and VIP is a permanent speed buff, not a vanity number. Every claim below is attributed to the guide that measured it; where a figure is dated, the guide says so. Evony is a live-service mobile 4X strategy game by Top Games, currently on version 5.37.0 (October 29, 2026), and its systems change with updates — verify event schedules and prices in game.

If you only read three sections, read The Keep, The Shrine, and VIP Level — those are the three places most accounts lose the most time.

The Keep: The Gate Everything Else Hits

Every building in Evony is capped at your current Keep level, per Packsify's first-thirty-days guide — you cannot push troop tiers, research tiers or Forge gear past what your Keep allows, no matter how many speed-ups you burn elsewhere. That makes the Keep the default occupant of your build queue: when it is upgradeable, every hour spent building anything else is an hour the Keep sat idle.

Upgrading the Keep needs its prerequisite buildings raised first, plus enough resources and the matching Monarch level, per the Empire Build Academy FAQ. After each Keep level-up, check which buildings just unlocked or uncapped, find the next Keep prerequisite, and route your second build queue there — the permanent second queue comes from Academy research, and the free trial of it runs early.

Milestone	What it means	Who it is for
Keep 25	Civilization Cards unlock via the Art Hall	Every account — a whole system gates here
Keep 35	The long-haul milestone most guides treat as endgame entry	Committed players — months of building
Keep 40	5B+ power; T14 troops in reach; serious PvP bracket	Long-term free-to-play challenge; moderate spenders reach it with 10–15B power
Keep 45	Current maximum as of March 2025; the top bracket (K44–K45)	Endgame accounts; buffs regularly exceed 5,000%

The scale of the late Keep is the argument for starting the habit early. The wiki's Shrine table — same gating, same curve — shows a single upgrade taking 488 days at base construction speed by Shrine level 35. Keep upgrades run on the same curve. The only things that bend it are construction-speed buffs (VIP, Monarch talents, Monarch gear), speed-ups, and time. There is no shortcut past the Keep; there is only starting it sooner and never letting its queue sit idle.

The Keep rule in one line: if the Keep can be upgraded, it is being upgraded. Everything else waits for the second queue.

Monarch Level: The Ceiling on Your Generals

Monarch level is the most underrated progression system in Evony, and Packsify's July 2026 guide says so outright. It controls two things that make everything else work better — and most accounts neglect both.

First, Monarch level caps the max level of every general on your account. Generals cannot go past your current Monarch level, however much General EXP you feed them. An account at Monarch level 29 with a top-tier general is capped at general level 29. The same account at Monarch level 45 can push that general much higher, with bigger base stats and buff scaling. Monarch level is a ceiling on your general investment, not just a background number — which is why cultivating a general hard while Monarch level caps it below the levels where the investment pays off is one of the classic mistakes.

Second, every Monarch level gives one Talent Point. Talent Points go into the Monarch Talent tree, which gives passive buffs to construction speed, research speed, resource production, gathering, training speed, march speed and PvP combat stats, depending on the active build. How deep you can go in the tree is gated by Monarch level, so low-level accounts cannot reach the higher-tier talents no matter how many points they have spent.

Monarch level	Talent unlocked	Why it matters
2	Offering / March Speed / Free Speedup Time	Offering is the first pick: +20% Monarch EXP and Prestige per Shrine offering at max
6	Resource Production / Troop Death Rate vs Monsters	Production compounds from the first week
10	Research Speed / Warehouse Protection	Research speed is the second queue's best friend
14	Troop Load / Reduced Healing Cost	March efficiency for farming and events
18	Stamina Regeneration	More marches per day, every day
22	Subordinate City Attack / Revive Speed	Subordinate cities start paying combat dividends
26	Training Speed / Gathering	Troop production at scale
30	Hospital Capacity / Fatal Strike	Fatal Strike turns a proportion of enemy wounded into dead
35+	Subordinate City Health / Attacking Survival	Late-tree power for rally and defense builds

The tree has two saved build slots, so you can keep one growth build and one PvP build and switch between them for a gem cost. Packsify's recommended phasing is the Offering talent first (levels 2–5), then resource production (levels 6–9), then research speed (levels 10–13) — growth before combat, because the buffs that build the account pay for the buffs that fight with it. Resetting talents entirely costs about 2,000 gems, so the early picks are worth getting right rather than fixing later.

The Shrine: Your Daily Monarch EXP Engine

The biggest steady Monarch EXP source is the Shrine: every offering, with gems or Tributes, pays Monarch EXP and Prestige together, and the EXP scales with Shrine level. The Shrine is the system you touch every day, and the numbers reward touching it correctly.

Shrine level	Monarch EXP per offering (with Offering talent)	Monarch EXP per offering (no talent)
1	1,200	1,000
5	1,920	1,600
10	—	3,500
19	12,000	10,000
22	15,960	13,300
25	21,000	17,500
28	30,000	25,000
30–31	39,600	33,000
32–34	45,000	37,500
35–40	48,000	40,000

Source: Evony Guide Wiki Shrine EXP table (with Offering talent) and EvonyGuru (without). The 20% gap is the Offering talent at max level — it adds 20% to both Prestige and Monarch EXP per offering — which is why the talent is the first pick in the tree and why you switch it on before a Tribute batch.

The daily cadence, per Packsify: 6 gem offerings a day. Costs rise and EXP per gem drops steeply after the 6th, so the seventh offering is the worst gem deal in the game. A Tribute offering, by contrast, always pays one full offering's worth of EXP no matter how many gem offerings you made — so the shape of the day is six gem offerings, then Tributes. Keep the Shrine at the highest level your Keep allows, because the EXP per offering is what scales — a Shrine five levels behind is a fifth of the daily income gone.

The Shrine also runs the daily login rewards: the basic tier pays 1,200 gems a week (200 on day 1, 1,000 on day 7) and the advanced tier 2,500 a week (500 on day 1, 2,000 on day 7). Advanced requires Shrine offerings to maintain — the systems feed each other, and the account that offers daily is the account that collects both.

General EXP: Monsters, Books and Subordinate Cities

Generals earn EXP by killing troops, killing monsters, and from EXP books, per the Yaoqiguo guide. Killing or injuring enemy troops pays EXP in proportion to the troops killed — including NPC troops in subordinate cities, where a golden subordinate city pays best — but only 30% of the normal EXP inside the Battlefield, so do not level generals there.

Monster hunting is the practical route. Common, boss and event monsters all have a chance to raise the leading general's EXP, and the Lv4 Monster's Respect skill book adds 25% EXP from killing monsters when the general leads the army. Normal monsters at level 31 and above pay real Monarch EXP too — 2,600 per kill — so the same march that levels your general is feeding your Monarch level at the same time. That double payout is why monster hunting is the default march, not the exception.

Boss kills are the background source. Every boss kill pays Monarch EXP alongside material drops, Prestige, General EXP and Alliance Points, and Hydra chests always include Monarch EXP on top of the kill reward. The Hydra figures are dated — Lv5 Epic Hydra around 17,000 EXP as of July 2024, Hydra levels 1–5 at 3,500 EXP each — so treat them as the shape of the payout, not a current promise.

General EXP books also come from the Battlefield Shop, bought with badges with three free shop refreshes a day, and from King's Path reward chests and events. Books are the flexible EXP: they go to whichever general needs them, when it needs them, without a march. Spend them on one core general first.

Green Monarch EXP books — from gathering, Wheel of Fortune spins, event chests, Undead Invasion and Monarch Competition participation — do not expire, so stockpile them and spend them at a milestone, such as a Monarch level that unlocks a new Talent tier, rather than as soon as they drop. The wiki's worked example puts the ceiling in perspective: up to about 10,000,000 Monarch EXP in one week combining Shrine offers, bosses and monsters — a 2023-era figure, presented as the wiki's example, not a promise.

Building Your First Generals

Spend the EXP on one core general first: historic generals unlock Specialties at level 25 that buff a specific troop type, per Packsify, and those specialties scale through five quality tiers on scarce runestones and specialty fragments. One fully developed general with a matching troop type beats three half-built ones — the fragments are the constraint, and they do not come back.

Match the general to the troop. A ground general leading mounted troops is a wasted Specialty. Pick the troop type your Keep and research already support, pick the general whose Specialty buffs it, and feed that one general until its Specialty tiers are moving. The second general is a support pick, not a second project.

Assistant Generals arrive once a Main General reaches Level 20 and 3 Stars or higher — then you can assign an Assistant to it. That is a mid-game system, not a day-one concern, but it is the reason to push one Main General to 20 and 3 Stars before spreading stars across the roster.

Subordinate cities are the other general system: NPC troops in subordinate cities pay general EXP in proportion to troops killed, and a golden subordinate city pays best. Prestige ranks feed this too — the ArchDuke rank unlocks an extra Subordinate City. If you are leveling generals and ignoring subordinate cities, you are leaving the best troop-kill EXP in the game on the table.

VIP Level: A Permanent Speed Buff With an On Switch

VIP level is set by total VIP points — earned from daily login streaks, pack purchases, Auction House VIP packages and the Alliance Shop, per the Evony Guide Wiki — and it pays permanent buffs to construction speed, research speed, march size, march slots and troop stats. The wiki's table runs from VIP1 to VIP28: VIP8 adds 10% construction speed, VIP10 adds 10% research speed, and VIP15 and above add combat buffs.

The trap is the on switch: raising your VIP level does nothing by itself. The buffs only work while VIP time is active, so you need VIP time items running — a VIP15 account with no active VIP time gets none of its VIP15 buffs. Check the timer before every build session, not after.

Push VIP early, Packsify advises, because the construction-speed buff applies to every building upgrade for the rest of the account's life, and the jump from roughly VIP6 into double digits is where it gets large enough to shorten late-game Keep upgrades that otherwise take days. VIP4 and above, with active VIP time, also adds march size — VIP25 alone adds 160,000 — so VIP feeds the march system as well as the build queue.

The free-to-play path to VIP is the daily login streak and the Alliance Shop, not packs. It is slower, but it is real, and the buffs are permanent once earned. The mistake is not being low VIP — it is being high VIP with the timer off.

Academy Research: The Second Queue and the Speed Tree

Academy research does two things that matter for leveling: it unlocks the permanent second build queue, and it holds the speed research that shortens everything else. The second queue is the priority — with it, the Keep occupies one queue permanently and everything else builds in the other. Without it, every building competes with the Keep, and the Keep always wins, which means everything else waits.

Research speed itself is a ladder: Monarch talents (research speed from level 10), VIP (10% at VIP10), and Monarch gear all feed it. The research that pays first is construction and research speed, then gathering and training speed — the same order as the talent tree, for the same reason. Combat research matters when you fight; speed research matters every hour you are not fighting, which is most of them.

Research priority	Why first	What it unlocks
Second build queue	The Keep stops competing with everything else	Permanent second construction queue
Construction speed	Every Keep upgrade gets shorter, forever	Faster Keep, faster prerequisites
Research speed	The tree eats itself faster	Shorter research across the board
Gathering speed	More resources per march hour	Faster city growth between upgrades
Training speed	Troops at scale for the K39/K40 meta	Deeper layers, faster
Combat research	Only when you fight	PvP buffs — last for a growth account

One more Academy note: research is capped by Keep level like everything else. A research tier you cannot reach because the Keep is behind is not a research problem — it is a Keep problem. The ladders stay in order.

Troops and March Size

Troops are the Keep's output: higher Keep, higher troop tiers, up to T14 in the K39/K40 meta. The layering meta at that level is deep — a K39 account at 3.5 billion power runs around 200,000 troops per tier from T1 through T14 across all four troop types, and top players run 1 million per layer. That is endgame scale, not a target for a new account, but it shows the direction: breadth across tiers, not a single-tier stack.

March size is the other troop number, and it grows with everything. The base comes from the Rally Spot — level 1 is 800 (+800) for 1,600, level 45 is 860,000 (+860,000) for 1,720,000 — and Monarch gear adds on top: the War Horn goes from +2,000 at level 1 to +60,000 at level 15. VIP adds more at VIP25 (+160,000). March size is a sum of systems, and every one of them is a leveling system in this guide — which is why the ladders compound instead of adding.

Troop type	Role	Leveling note
Ground	Front line, siege and defense	The default first troop — most generals and Specialties support it early
Mounted	Speed and flanking	Best for monster hunting marches; speed saves stamina over distance
Ranged	Damage from behind the line	Scales hardest with buffs in the K45 meta; needs protection
Siege	City attacks and rallies	Lower layers in the K39/K40 meta (45K–50K in upper siege tiers)

Match the march to the job. Monster hunting wants mounted speed and a general whose Specialty buffs the troop you send. Gathering wants load capacity, not damage. Rallies want the deepest layers you can field. A march is a tool, and the wrong troop on the wrong job is stamina spent for half the payout.

Stamina: The Fuel Under Everything

Stamina fuels all PvE march activities in Evony. Each time you send a march to attack a monster, search a relic, or harvest from a gem mine, you consume stamina proportional to the distance and the action type. No stamina, no monster drops, no gem income from mining — it is the fuel under the whole leveling loop.

Natural regeneration is 1 point every 4 minutes below the cap — about 360 a day if you keep spending it and do not let the bar sit full. The Tavern gives 25 stamina three times daily (3:30, 9:30, 12:30 server time). Events are where stockpiles come from: Consuming Return thresholds return 100-stamina items, Crazy Eggs targets the James Bowie egg, Dwarf's Lucky Apple spends wishing coins, and Garuda Trial pays 10/50/100 stamina at 10/30/50 kills.

Spend stamina on monsters first. Monster marches pay general EXP, Monarch EXP, materials and event progress at once. Gem mines eat the same stamina for the slowest payout in the game — every gem guide checked says so — so mines are what you do when every better march is exhausted, not the default. Nathaniel Greene leading monster attacks cuts stamina costs by 25%, which is a free quarter of your daily marches back.

The First 30 Days: A Practical Order

Packsify's first-30-days framing is the shape of the early game, and it matches everything above. The order:

Keep, always. One build queue is the Keep's, permanently. Unlock the second queue through Academy research as early as you can.
Shrine daily. Six gem offerings a day, Offering talent maxed, Tributes after. The Shrine is the Monarch engine and the login-gem engine at once.
One general. Feed one historic general toward level 25 and its Specialty. Monster marches led by that general, books to that general.
VIP on. Push VIP with login streaks and the Alliance Shop, and keep VIP time items running — the buffs only work while the timer runs.
Join an alliance on day one. Alliance quests pay gems, alliance events pay the whole alliance's effort, and alliance gifts stack on top of solo play. Evony is an alliance game with a solo mode, not the other way around.
Monsters over mines. Stamina goes to monster marches first; gem mines only when marches would otherwise idle.

At day 30 the account should have a Keep climbing steadily, a Monarch level that is not capping its generals, one general approaching its Specialty, and VIP time running. That is the foundation — everything after it is the same loop at a larger scale.

Common Mistakes

Upgrading research or Forge gear while the Keep sits idle — the Keep caps both.
Cultivating a general hard while Monarch level caps that general below the levels where the investment pays off.
Leveling generals inside the Battlefield, where they earn only 30% of the normal EXP.
Spending Monarch EXP books the moment they drop instead of stockpiling them for a Talent-tier milestone.
Raising VIP level and never activating VIP time, so none of the buffs are live.
Offering at the Shrine past the 6th gem offering a day — costs rise and EXP per gem drops steeply after it.
Spending stamina on gem mines while monsters are available — the slowest payout in the game.
Spreading Specialty fragments across three generals instead of finishing one core general first.

The Daily and Weekly Loop

Every day: collect the Shrine (six gem offerings, then Tributes), run the Tavern stamina claims at 3:30/9:30/12:30 server time, complete 10 solo quests and 5 alliance quests, check the VIP timer, send monster marches with your core general leading, and keep the Keep building. Activity target: 145 a day — it feeds several reward tracks at once.

Every week: Monarch Competition (five stages, three objectives each), World Boss fights, Undead Invasion with the alliance, King's Path, and the Battlefield Shop refreshes (three free a day — spend them on General EXP books). Boss kills and event participation are the background Monarch EXP that stacks on top of the Shrine.

Every Keep level: check what unlocked, find the next prerequisite, route the second queue there. The loop is the same from Keep 5 to Keep 45 — only the timers get longer, which is why the speed buffs (VIP, talents, gear) matter more the further you go.

Patch State (as of November 10, 2026)

Current version: 5.37.0, released October 29, 2026. The version cadence through the autumn was steady — 5.33.1 on August 31, 5.34.0 on September 11, 5.35.0 on September 19, 5.36.0 on October 1 — so expect the next version within weeks of this guide, not months.

Recent seasonal event: the Heavenly Fire Ceremony ran August 28 – September 7, 2026 (display period September 8), an Aztec-themed festival with Epic Historic Generals, Castle Decorations, Champion Skins and Civilization Cards. Civilization Cards unlock at Keep 25 via the Art Hall — another system that gates on the Keep.

Standing state: maximum Keep is K45 as of March 2025. The K45-era meta has buffs regularly exceeding 5,000%, 10-million-troop rallies, and K44–K45 players as the top bracket. No higher Keep level has been verified at research time — the Empire Build Academy FAQ notes higher levels may come.

Evony: The King's Return Evony Gems Farming Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Monarch level do in Evony?

It caps the max level of every general on your account — a general cannot pass your current Monarch level — and each Monarch level grants one Talent Point for the Monarch Talent tree, which buffs construction, research, gathering, training and combat.

What is the fastest way to earn General EXP in Evony?

Monster and boss kills led by the general, troop kills in subordinate cities (a golden subordinate city pays best), and General EXP books from the Battlefield Shop, King's Path and events. Avoid the Battlefield itself: generals earn only 30% of normal EXP there.

Do VIP buffs work without VIP time?

No. Raising your VIP level sets the buffs, but they only apply while VIP time items are active. An account at VIP15 with no VIP time running gets none of its VIP15 buffs.

What is the max Keep level in Evony?

Keep 45 (K45) as of March 2025, per the Empire Build Academy FAQ — though higher levels may come. K35 is the milestone most guides treat as endgame entry, and K40 with 5 billion power is a long-term free-to-play challenge.

How do I raise my Monarch level fast?

The Shrine is the biggest steady source: offer at the Shrine every day, six gem offerings a day at most, with the Offering talent maxed for 20% more EXP per offering. Boss kills and level 31+ monsters are the background sources, and Monarch EXP books stockpile for milestones.

When do generals unlock Specialties?

Historic generals unlock Specialties at level 25, per Packsify. A Specialty buffs a specific troop type and scales through five quality tiers on scarce runestones and specialty fragments — which is why you develop one core general first instead of three half-built ones.

What is the second build queue in Evony?

A permanent second construction queue unlocked through Academy research, with a free trial that runs early. It matters because the Keep should almost always occupy one queue — the second queue is what builds everything else while the Keep climbs.

How much stamina do I get per day in Evony?

Natural regeneration is 1 point per 4 minutes below the cap, about 360 a day if you keep spending it, plus 25 stamina three times daily from the Tavern. Events like Consuming Return, Crazy Eggs and Garuda Trial are where stockpiles come from.

Sources

Every fact in this guide carries its source. Keep, Monarch and VIP figures come from the Evony Guide Wiki and Packsify; stamina figures from the 2026 LDShop stamina guide; dated figures are flagged where they appear. Last checked November 10, 2026.

MMODude Editorial Team

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