Farewell Guide

I would like to share some knowledge and input about the game. Having said that, it is only fair to my team, if I share things, that are not team related. So I will not be providing any information on kingdom design/structure and operations. Information provided in this guide is about personal development and is also available via travian wiki.

Enjoy. Before we start, I would like to thank heroes of the past, who taught me plenty of tricks,- Hallow and Gaius.

Game structure and starting new server. Plan ahead

Dual/no dual

Yes, game can be played by one person on one account. However, playing good offensive account will require presence of more than 8 hours daily. And yes, it is hard to get along. It is hard to wake up and see how your dual crashed the hammer. Still, I would highly recommend playing at least 2 people on one account. Do not risk waking up and discovering that someone killed your hammer while you were away.

Defensive account provides bigger slack, yet still having second player immensly helps when responding to attacks and going away for vacations.

When choosing dual, keep in mind that game heavily benefits north american players. New grey farms pop at 00:06 GST, and cleaning them out will sometimes take 3-4 hours. Australians typically wake up too late to catch up and europeans are just about to go to bed.

Farming/no farming

I will get to farming techniques later in this guide. Just keep in mind that to be successful player, one must farm. There are notable exceptions, yet farming provides immense advantage in game.

This, in turn, is another reason to have dual. Farming for 6 hours daily is not same as farming for 12.

Settling capital

There are plenty of guides that teach how to do “suicide” settle. This is technique on how to develop starting village quickly using quests and launch settlers. It allows to grab available 15c within a day of starting the game. Look into these or develop your own.

Here is why everybody needs to have cropper as capital-

-Crop is more profitable resource than any other. Crop has one more +25% building than any other resource

-Oasis bonus for crop can easily be +75% upwards to +125%, bonus for other resources is limited to +75% and even that is extremely rare disposition

-Crop is needed simply to feed any decent amount of troops. Ever wondered how people have armies of 200.000 troops and more(regular speed)?-Capital is the only village where your fields can go above level 12. Capital with crop fields and +100% oasis bonus, developed to level 18 provides 76k crop per hour. There is no other way in game to support this many troops, especially when you are offline.

Which level to develop crop fields? It does depend on the server situation and role you are playing. End game hammers/rammers require 18. In any case, bigger is better. 20k and even 40k hammers/anvils are completely negligible past day 80. This is when people finish developing their capitals and launch mass production of troops everywhere.

Gold use. Of course this depends on personal finances, but keep in mind gold does provide serious advantage. Having Plus account is a must for everyone. Consider additional benefits-

+Extra two spots in the village are absolutely nesessary for capital development to higher crop field levels. Even if you're on a tight budget, consider getting these.

Good zoo provides excellent defense early in game and helps to concentrate on development instead of fighting aggressive neighbors

+5% of resource daily is quite a bit.

Development of 15c without gold is really difficult, next to impossible.

Small early game tricks

Learn to loot robber hideouts resource using settlers. This way robbers reappear faster and you can faster launch your first settle. Make sure settlers dont fight, and don't send attack, only raid.

Trading in early game is extremely beneficial. One lucky trade can shave an hour off your launch time.Use rate less than 1:2 to stand out from the crowd.

Chosing tribe 1.0 In order to chose a tribe, one must understand game mechanics, which I will outline below. After that we will get back to gauls, teutons and romans.

Wall/ram mechanics

a)Roman walls provide highest bonus but are fragile. Ratio of rams required to take down wall is 1:3:5 roman/gaul/teuton.

b)Rams strike twice. First time they strike before battle. If at this time wall is destroyed, combat is calculated without impact of wall defense bonus. Number of rams required to take down wall before combat depends on the balance between attacking and defending troops.

c)Run simulator and test it for yourself. I recommend using huge numbers, this way attack power of rams and other factors such as wall strength will be negligible.

Right now(jan 2020) my test is showing 801 non-upgraded ram(534 upgraded rams) is enough to take down level 20 roman wall completely prior to start of combat when armies are equal. Attack with 800 rams is whopping 3% weaker.

d)Stone mason reinforces walls by factor of 3.

e)What does all this mean?

It means that if roman player is defending, and equal number of troops is attacking, 801 ram will be enough to completely negate wall bonus before it applies.

For gaul defender in a same situation attacker would need 2400 rams, and 4000 rams for teuton.

Capital multiplies wall strength by factor of 3, so we are looking at 2400, 7200 and 12000 rams, respectively.

Now, this number was calculated on condition that attacking and defending troops are roughly equal. Relation between attacking and defending force and number of rams required is not linear.

If we look in a situation where power of defending troops is more than power of attacking troops by factor of 2, attacker would require 1687 rams to achieve the same result. Factor of 3 already requires 3003 rams.

All in all, I encourage you to run your own simulations and test various situations to get an understanding of how this works.

f)Using siege does not help, you would still need 800 rams to do the job. Interesting enough, impact of rams is calculated prior to calculation of morale bonus. I will cover morale bonus in the next chapter.

Morale Bonus

Rarely used game mechanics protects smaller players against bigger players. It grows gradually and caps when population of defender is approximately 6 times less than population of attacker. It can provide impressive bonus to defense, up to 50%. Two times the population provides bonus of 15%.

This bonus should be kept in mind when chosing between attacker and defender role. Attackers typically keep smaller population to avoid penalty. Only exception is endgame rammers/hammers as bonus does not apply to Wonder.

Hero equipment, HDT and brewery.

Upgraded barracks build troops much faster. It should be noted that infantry and cavalry helmets also provide bonus to of troop building speed. These two bonuses are multiplied.

Same goes for Roman horse drinking trough, it multiplies by bonus from barracks and helmet.

Lastly, teuton brewery provides 20% bonus to attack, this bonus multiplies with both hero bonus and siege.

Troops

Travian troop mechanics is somewhat hidden, yet is in the plain sight. As example, here's what description for roman imperian says- “

The Imperian is the ultimate attacker of the Empire. He is quick, strong, and the nightmare of all defenders. "

Truth is, imperian is actually the worst and weakest offensive troop in game, he is nowhere near being "ultimate attacker of the empire".

Forget about individual soldier strength. Count production of attack power per hour. I shall not provide a spoiler here, so everyone reading this information, has their thrill of discovery and math calculations. When working on your math table, do not forget about HDT, brewery and helmet bonus. They all multiply and stack up.

Once you do these calculations, you will see that best offense is teutons, followed by romans, followed by gauls. And best defense is gauls, closely followed by teutons, followed by romans.

Keep in mind that romans have cavalry to infantry ratio of more than 2:1, and therefore they are actually weaker against defense that typically consists of phalanx and spearmen.

Chosing tribe 2.0. Types of accounts

Sure, you can play anything. But since travian is a math game, there is always an ultimate solution. Do the math described in previous chapter and you shall see.

a)Defensive governor. Gauls are the ultimate choice. Teutates are best troop for farming due to their capacity and speed. Farm with teutates and build phalanx everywhere. If you have extra resources to spend, haeduans actually make really good defensive troop.

Another option is teuton. Teuton defenders make best dukes and kings due to wall bonus, yet for governor gaul is just much easier.

What about praetorian? Phalanx makes almost two times stronger defense, per hour.

b)Offensive governor. There are two basic types of offensive- hammer and rammer. Rammer is someone who is there to take down wall, and hammer is there to take down buildings/troops.

Teutons make absolutely best rammers, due to their speed of ram production, multiplied by the brewery bonus. Standard composition is clubs+tk+rams.

For hammers, romans have the highest catapult production in game.

c)End game rammer. This is rammer, typically designed to take down wall of World Wonder. Usually such rammer is developed but never used for entire server duration, and only comes out last week. Typically owner of the rammer has satellite rammer just to fight robbers. These are rammers you see in Hall of Fame, typically 200k troops and more. It is really hard to feed, I would recommend going with axe+tk+rams composition, as cost to maintain clubs gets just insane.

d)End game hammer. This would be romans. Main task is to take down levels of World Wonder, and number of catapults that can be produced by romans is suited best for the task.

e)Dukes and kings. Very little choice for defensive nobles here, its teuton and teuton only. First of all, defense bonus of the wall really matters. Second, upgraded paladins make really good farming troops and pay for themselves, where as gaul cavalry does not. Doing so, consider using low population morale bonus. I have never had a chance to try it, but calculations are very promising.

If you choose offense- sure, go ahead with romans, but find out someone else to store treasures.

f)Ghost. This is terminology for strong cavalry unit that attacks treasury, before defensive troops can get there. It is most effectively used middle of the game, and roman EI make the best choice.

g)Interceptor. Typically made out of gaul haeduans, unit is there to catch ghosts. Most teams have one or two of those. Slow and not very effective haeduans really shine when catching surprise attacks.

h)Scout hammer. Some people like building tens of thousands of scouts and sneak peek on other kingdoms. I find no use for this. Most big hammers are constantly farming, anyways.

i)Catapult account. I've seen it a couple times, roman governors without good cropper capital build catapults in every village and send them to follow other players rammers. Roman senators also make the best chiefs.

Economics

Have you ever wondered how to assess what other players have?

Depending on surrounding oases, regular village roughly provides 6k resources per hour.

Capital can be anything, from similar 6k on newbie 6c account, to 80-100k per hour.

How to spot this? Keep an eye at “Top 10 robbers”. This is actually, the most important indicator of player development. Kings and dukes do not fall into this calculation due to tributes, but for others it is extremely accurate.

Same goes for kingdoms, “Top 10 kingdom robbers” shows who is who in world of Travian Kingdoms.

Why this matters- cost to build troops in all 5 buildings is about 100k per hour for roman EC hammer, and 80k for teuton building axe hammer. Everyone else in that range.

Once you start troop production in all 5 facilities, you are building troops that consume 2.5 to 4k crop per hour, per day.

Very quickly, within a month any player gets in the situation when farming is mandatory for troop support. And this is where top 10 comes handy. You simply can not hide anything over 100 thousand troops without farming, and not showing up on the list.

Some in game tricks

1)As a good habit, have two-three cheapest troops defending grey villages and other kingdoms treasuries. This way you will see the attacking army and scale losses of the defender.

2)Don't spike, this ruins game for everyone. Remember- good players farm, and when you get good, you will farm too.

3)Keep an eye on hero experience, attack and defense ratings. All this information matters, just need to learn use it properly.

4)Always run simulations before attacking a known target.

5)Having side hammer to clear out robbers works out better than unnecessary wasting your main hammer.

6)Farm. I can not emphasize how important it is.

7)Early stages of the game, it is really beneficial to clean out those 9 pop grey villages. They typically have 3200 resources and a hero. Clean up them with hero and then raid by troops. Use gold to heal/resurrect your own hero.

8)Always try to make sure farming troops bring good return. Stop farming villages that are giving you less than 30-40%, they are not worth your time. If you really get into control, try to go only after those that give you 80%+ return.

9)Farming clubs pay for themselves in just 3 days, yet very soon you will hit maximum outgoing troop limit, that is 999. Always plan ahead to farm with horses.

10)Tournament square helps to farm all across a map. This immensely helps with staying under 999 limit

11)Always try to farm with minimum amount of troops possible. If you see that 1 soldier always comes back full, increase the number

12)As soon as you develop catapults, consider taking down palace/residence and walls of some grey villages around you. At times, you will be the only one farming this village for several days.

13)If army in grey village is too big, send 1 troop reinforcement. You will know when its clear.

14)Research Engin9tools and Kirilloid inside out, these third party servers provide a great deal of helpful information and data about the game.

15)Always develop your capital. Crop fields>troops in the first 60 days. Run from those who tell you otherwise. Their style is crash and quit. Consider going to at least level 15, and 17-18 if you're serious.

16)Always upgrade troops to maximum and siege robbers. This brings your costs to minimum

17)Another tactics is to clean out robbers and leave some resources in the camp. This way robbers stop coming, and you have perfect hiding spot just for yourself.

18)Talk to people, ask questions. There is a great deal of helpful players out there.

19)Keep an eye on cavalry defense vs infantry defense. There is nothing more terrifying than a dozen of teuthates or a single hero cutting hundreds of clubs.

20)Use herobombing- tactics of suicide killing hero. Helps clear robbers or troops of overly aggressive players.

21)Early stages of the game, try killing enemy hammers on their way back. Dodge the attack, and then calculate return time- catch them and kill same second. Doing so even with a single hero does wonders. You can calculate travel time on Kirilloid

Lastly, a bit about myself-

I have played this game for 6 servers start to finish, 3 of them with BM as governor, dual king, and dual governor. I would like to thank my team for all support and camaraderie during these years. Com2 was my last server, and I am not coming back.

Unfortunately beautiful era of Travian for me is over.

As a postscriptum, I encourage everyone to try and beat two currently standing world records, which I am part of along with [BM]Jak and [BM]Mayo, one of which is largest def score ever recorded on x1 speed server, another one is fastest completion of the capital to level 18(king, 51 days).

Quote from Revolution

Thanks for your sharing.

One thing I don't understand though, why would you think playing defensive as kings/dukes would play Teutons as an optimal tribe?

e)Dukes and kings. Very little choice for defensive nobles here, its teuton and teuton only. First of all, defense bonus of the wall really matters. Second, upgraded paladins make really good farming troops and pay for themselves, where as gaul cavalry does not.

Quote from Xayira

A similarly skilled gaul or roman should outfarm a teuton by a fair margin.

Not with druids or haeduans. And romans simply do not have def cavalry. Whole point of def king is to build def. Sure you could farm with tt or ei. Just your def will be weak

Quote from Revolution

And second, from my experience dualing one of the best defense king, he plays Gaul and build TT to raid, and made to top 2/3 robber for almost every week for a very long time.

That's why I think Gaul is the optimal choice for defensive king.

Give it 3-5 years