Travian Information

Introduction

This guide will explain to you the basics of turning your village into an economical powerhouse, and will teach you how to defend your resources effectively and with minimal expenses. If you want to be a heavy attacker who leaves behind a series of burning villages right from the start of the game, this is not the guide for you, although you may find it beneficial to read it anyway = even heavy attackers will need some economy. However, if you don’t mind biding your time and staying relatively low-profile for about 2 months before happily and easily grinding those nasty heavy attackers into the dust, please read on.

Also note that in my opinion, a defensive strategy does not mean you shouldn’t attack. It just means that attacking server the higher purpose of maintaining a high growth rate and does not become a goal in itself, and that economy is the most important goal.

I will try to cover all the fundamental principles, and explain them with examples. I will also spend some time on the psychological and interactive aspects of playing a game like Travian. After the theoretical part, I will give a walkthrough for the first two months of the game.

Why Romans?

Romans have expensive and slow units, why would I want them? A good question, and this guide could be used without too much trouble by a gaul, and even by a teuton (although the teuton will have better strategies available). But the good thing about romans is that their units, while expensive, are the most powerful in the game. No other race can match the power of roman infantry, not even with cavalry. Praetorians and Imperians are the best specialists in the game, and Legionnaires are among the best generalists. At the start, training costs really hurt since at that moment these costs are the limiting factor for military size. Later in the game it is space efficiency that counts, meaning attack/defense power per unit of crop produced. And that is where romans shine. Therefore our strategy will be targeted towards reaching this point as quickly as possible by putting a lot of effort into building a strong economy and keeping military and other expenses low during development.

Principles

Have Patience

When you start playing, you will quickly notice that Travian is a slow-paced game at the start and that it takes you weeks or months to get anywhere. Therefore, the first principle is to have patience! Even though development may seem slow at times, keep the longer-term goals in mind and you will notice you re getting ever closer to them.

Set Goals

That immediately introduces the second principle: Work towards long-term goals and don’t let events (such as attacks on you) carry you away from them. Instead, deal with these diversions and then immediately return to your long term goals.

Maintain Exponential Growth

The third principle of this strategy is: maintain exponential growth. This means that you continuously have to invest your resources in such a way that they increase your growth rate. This means you will grow ever faster and faster, allowing you to eventually catch up and pass people who initially may seem to grow faster.

Don’t get into conflicts

You are not out there alone, and people (especially children in web games) are less reserved than in real life. Many players around you will be immature and react emotionally and with verbal violence to your actions, or derive enjoyment from acting “bad”. Some will even go to great lengths, hampering their own growth, just to annoy you, others will abuse you if you give them half the opportunity. The most dangerous (and the rarest) will try to play psychological games with you.
Note: If you are receiving abusive messages, please report this to the multihunter on your server.

You cannot avoid this, but you can do a great deal to stay out of trouble. Make friends, join an alliance, and be polite but firm. Never give in to threats, harassment or extortion, but don’t provoke people by being smug, defiant or triumphant. Be firm, rational and calm, don’t hesitate to call bluff and never, never, never react to insults or do anything that might insult people yourself. Don’t get into contests about who has the most allies. And stay away from the really big and organized alliances.

Finally, don’t offend people with your actions. Sure, you can attack them, but don’t do it ten times a day, and politely react to messages asking you to stop without promising to and then breaking your promises. Be honest and open that you will attack them again if they don’t defend themselves. They will still hate you, but they will be less likely to invest a lot of time and effort in destroying you.

In short, don’t do anything that will get you dragged into long-lasting and potentially growth limiting conflicts.

Guideline

Based on these principles, we can now formulate guidelines:

1. Most important: invest resources into production fields
2. Only build buildings when you can easily afford them in terms of hourly production
3. Only build buildings when doing so will make you grow faster
4. Build a minimal defense that is just big enough to make raiding you unprofitable
5. Build offense to raid inactives and undefended actives only

Walkthrough

This walkthrough is not a step-by-step description of every action you must take. It just tells you what your goals should be at each stage and what you must concentrate upon. Please feel free to follow it to the point where your own opinion and playing style starts to deviate from the one I advocate here, and be creative and adaptive. No two villages are alike. Therefore there is no best strategy, and I sure don’t claim to have it. Nevertheless, this walkthrough follows the principles and guidelines I outlined here, and therefore I think this is a good way to go for a defensive player. I know from experience that you will be able to grow faster that the vast majority of players if you follow it.

In this walkthrough, I will assume you play on a server that has about 7-9 days of protection for new players. If you have more protection, you might want to move military training a bit to the back and instead continue working on your fields a little longer.

Day 0

So, you just started! As you will see, you start off with a lot of resources, but with very little production per hour and with an almost empty village. Do you feel the temptation to do something about it? I’m sure you do. However, you must resist. This guide is not for those without self-restraint, so think long-term.

Our long term goal is to get your resource production up as quickly as possible, all your fields to level 10, in the time span of about 8-10 weeks, while also producing a sufficiently strong defensive force and a modest raiding force. All fields at level 10 is where this guide will end: at that point you can easily found a second and even a third village, or you can build a strong military and switch to offensive strategies. Anyway, when you have played for two months you don’t need a beginners strategy guide any more.

Now, we touch upon a very important aspect of Travian: Whenever you upgrade a field of wood, clay or iron, your production of those resources will increase but your crop production will decrease! Similarly, whenever you build or upgrade a building, and whenever you build military, your crop production will decrease. This may not seem too bad, but you need crop to upgrade or build those buildings, fields and military, so you always need to have sufficient crop production. You won’t be the first person to end up with no crop and no crop production, making it impossible to upgrade crop fields to increase your crop production…. You don’t want though though! Therefore, watch your crop production carefully. Whenever your crop production lags behinds, be sure to upgrade your crop fields!

As we are trying to boost economy, we will spend our resources mainly on boosting resource production by upgrading resource production fields. If we check the total costs of upgrading all fields, we’ll see that we need clay the most, followed by wood, then iron, the finally crop. For fastest growth, the ratio between wood:clay:iron:crop should be something like 10:12:8:6. Crop production should be about half that of clay, sometimes more but never less!

If you maintain this ratio, you will be able to grow slightly faster than people who upgrade an equal amount of every field. You will notice that if you just build whatever field you can build first at any time (so if it takes 4 hours before you can build clay, 3 for wood, and 2 for iron, upgrade iron as soon as you can), you will automatically approach the ratio above. Travian Plus can really help you here as it shows how much time you have to wait before you can upgrade each of your fields.

Also, never have more than one level difference between fields of the same kind. For example, never upgrade a wood field from level 5 to level 6 if you have level 4 wood fields. Instead, upgrade your level four wood fields to level five before starting on level six. This is because the return on the investment, the gains you get from each upgraded field versus the costs of upgrading that field, become ever lower at higher field levels.

Still with me? Told you you would need patience, but now we can start playing. Use the resources you got at the start to upgrade your fields, starting with clay. You will notice that you can only upgrade one field at a time and that it takes a while before that field is built. Just hang on to your resources for a while, don’t spend them on buildings, and upgrade the next field when the first is finished. If you have Travian Plus then you can put another field in the building queue to ensure the upgrade starts as soon as the previous one is finished.

In this way, upgrade your fields (sticking to the ratio I gave before) until your resources are all spent. As upgrading fields uses more of the other resources than crop, and you start off with an equal amount of each resource, you can afford to produce slightly less crop according to the ratio until you use all the stored crop. However, only do this if you are confident that you will be able to upgrade crop production in time and not end up with 0 crop! When your resources are too low to upgrade more fields, just wait until you have produced them again and spend all resources as soon as you can.

During your beginners protection period you cannot be attacked. Therefore there is no need to do anything about defense during these days. However, as the end of your beginners protection approaches, you will want to start spending time and resources on defense!

There are two ways you can defend yourself: one is limiting the amount of resources attackers can take, the other is producing defense to deter or kill attackers. At this moment in time, you don’t have enough resource production to start building sufficient defense. However, crannies are cheap and efficient! Crannies protect resources from being stolen. So build a cranny and upgrade it to level 3 or 4. It won’t protect all your resources, but attackers will not be able to take all your resources from attacking you.

After 8-10 days

During the 8th to 10th day you should be able to reach the first turning point in the game: All your fields have reached level 3. You now have a solid resource production of about 60/60/60/40 per hour, and it is now time to take a small break. Upgrading fields to level 4 is relatively expensive and the 7 extra resources you get from building them are not much of a reward, so we need a boost to get past level 3 quickly. We’re finally going to build buildings and get military! Upgrade your main building to level 3, build a rally point and a barracks. Also, if you are sometimes away from Travian from more than 9 hours, you will want to build a warehouse and granary to store your resources. And if you want to join an alliance (which I strongly recommend as raiders will be much less likely to attack an alliance member), you have to build an embassy. Finally a market place will come in handy, as it allows you to trade away your excess resources for those that you need.

When your barracks are built, train about 4-6 legionnaires. These are the basic roman troops, and thet are good for both offense and defense. For now, we will use them to raid our inactive neighbourse. You’ll see what some people in your neighbourhood are not growing at all, often staying at a population of 2. These can be raided for resources. For the next few days, raid these people as often as you can until they are empty, but make sure that you don’t attack people who are your size or who you expect to have any military, You don’t want to lose those precious legionnaires or make any enemies. Legionnaires start making a profit only after 12 successful raids, and therefore you have to keep them alive for at least that long, so be careful!

You might be attacked in this period. If you are, make sure to have a big enough cranny, but don’t keep your troops at home unless they greatly outnumber the enemy. Communicate! Politely ask the attacker to stop and tell him that you will start defensive reoop and upgrade your cranny to make sure that he won’t make a profit from you. But it is important to do this in a nice and positive manner, and don’t make it personal. Also, read the “What to do when being farmed” guide for more details.

Don’t neglect your growth though. As soon as the buildings and troops are in, start working towards your next interim goal: all fields to level 6. Keep raiding inactives, expanding your target range when those inactives closest to you are empty. In the meanwhile, you don’t need any new buildings. Upgrade your warehouse and granary as you grow. Also expand your military force, as this becomes cheaper while you grow. When you have all your fields at level 6, you will want to have a force of about 30 legionnaires, more if you are threatening neighbours.

3-4 weeks

After approximately 3-4 weeks of play in total, you should reach the point where all fields are level 6, assuming you did not have any major trouble with attackers. At this point, we will take another short break. The upgrade to level 7 is again very expensive compared to the gains you will get from it, so income can use another boost. Also, by now some of your neighbours will become dangerous and since legionnaires are not the best defenders, your defense needs to be reorganized.

Upgrade your barracks to level 3 and build an academy, and upgrade it to level 5. Build an armoury, a blacksmithm and upgrade the blacksmith to level 3. Build stables level 1. In the meantime, reseach in your academy the praetorian, imperian, and equites legati as they become available. Also train about 30 praetorians or more depending on the amount of aggressive neighbours you have, and 30 imperians or less if you have few attractive targets. Train 3 equites legati and build a flour mill. This is the point where a flour mill level 1 makes a profit. Wait a while before upgrading the flour mill to level 2. You will also want to upgrade your market a couple of levels to get some more merchants.

Equites Legati can be used for scouting. This means you can now see whether all those neighbours you never dared to attack have any defense! Use them to scout around, and then visit the undefended neighbours with your legionnaires and imperians. Keep the praetorians at home, they are your defenders.

This will have kept you from growing for a few days, and therefore it is time to return to the growth. Over the next 4 weeks, expend your fields to level 10. Make sure to keep improving your defense, as you are now becoming an attractive target for the big fish out there. In would suggest having at least 100 praetorians. Your offense will not need a big boost as those 30 imperians and 30 legionnaires are enough to raid the inactives and defenseless players in your neighbourhood. However, if you feel you need more capacity, expand your offense a little bit, but don’t fall into the trap of raiding people with large armies! We are only raiding for profits and quick returns, we don’t want to switch to full offensive power just yet….

While growing, you may want to upgrade your stables to level 5 and research equites imperatoris. These are not particularly strong but they are fast, and if you build 10 of them then you might be able to expand your raiding range considerably, being able to target more inactives and undefended players. However, the costs are considerable and I would not suggest doing this before all your fields are level 7 or 8, and it may not be worth the effort at all. I at least am too lazy to spend much time on raiding people for relatively little profit, and raiding with imperians keeps me occupied enough already.

When all your fields are at level 8, there is a nice trick to speed up your growth somewhat. When your clay, wood and iron fields reach level 10 you are able to build production enhancing buildings for these resources. These function like a flour mill, but unlike the mill the first levels of these buildings come at almost no cost compared to the cost of field upgrades. Therefore the best strategy is to upgrade a clay field to level 9, then the same field to level 10 before doing anything else. This allows you to build the brickworks. Do so, and immediately upgrade it to level 4. This will give you a 17% higher return on investment than upgrading an equivalent amount of fields to level 9. Us the same trick for wood, and then iron, and only then return to upgrading the rest of fields to level 9 and then level 10. This should save you a couple of days.

For wheat, the story is more complex as both the flour mill and bakery increase production. The appropriate times for upgrading your mill are as follows:

Level 1 flour mill: 5 fields level 5, 1 level 6
Level 2 flour mill: 3 fields level 6, 3 level 7
Level 3 flour mill: 1 field level 7, 5 level 8
Level 4 flour mill: 5 fields level 9, 1 level 10
Level 5 flour mill: all fields level 10 OR 5 fields level 9, 1 field level 10

In principle, the level 4 and 5 upgrades are so expensive that they only become profitable when all your fields are level 10. However, when you have a level 5 flour mill and a level 10 wheat field, you can build a bakery, which is very lucrative. By doing the maths I have shown that it is actually worth it to build a level 5 mill and a level 4 bakery as soon as you have 1 level 10 crop field and 5 level 9 crop fields, but the investment costs are about 120k resources in total. This may be too much at this stage, although you do get over 35% higher return on investment.

To keep this guide simple to understand, I refer those interested in the maths to this post: http://forum.travian.com/viewtopic.php?t=2843

8-10 weeks

At level 10 this guide ends. There are a number of things you will want to do now:

• Build new villages and expand them using the huge production of your primary village
• Start raiding active, well-defended players with a huge army
• Upgrade buildings, research catapults, build a few and start harassing other players, possibly fighting in alliance wars
• Take revenge on those silly teutons with a big army but no production capacity of their own

But whatever you do, have fun with your full grown village and complacently lean back while people start asking how you possibly can grow this fast. Enjoy the full options this game gives you once you have taken the effort to get the income to use them all!

View the original article at http://ionutbatman.trei.ro/

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