Trapper on Speed Rounds

I think that the 2k trapper is a bit OP aswell..troop sizes are definately bigger in speed servers, but the trapper still costs the same so its so much easier to build it up since low levels of trapper can already give a major edge, while getting to greater amount of troops has diminishing returns due to also bigger robbers.

its the only thing gauls have, no horsedrink no brewery
troops amount ared definitely higher on speed and traps are only usefull in the beginning

so let the gauls their traps or give them something like the other tribes have which would be usefull whole server

Thank you for your input Wheat Dragon

So I understand that yo feel trappers are too OP in speed game rounds.

What in your opinion would be the right balance for it?

Any one else has an opinion on it?

You shouldn't waste resources on building trappers/traps, just make troops instead. I never make trappers as a Gaul.

I think you should make the trapper much much more expensive in the later levels, but also make it so that it has a way higher trap capacity, have the traps build much quicker and halve the price. As a downside, make it so you can only build 1 of them. Make it cap at something like 5000 or 10000 on 1x servers so 15000 or 30000 on 3x servers.

Why? Idk. It would be fun though trapping everything that approaches the village.

TK really needs a professional to take a look at the game balance, this game is way out of whack at the moment lol

Or, here comes an innovative one! What if you got 1 cage added to your hero inventory per level of trapper you have in your empire every day? so if you got 3 level 20 trappers in village 1 and a level 15 trapper in village 2 you would get 75 cages at midnight every day. Would this be op? idk. Would it be fun? Oh yes. Would PETA approve? No. Definitel not.

Quote from Hæim#NO

I think you should make the trapper much much more expensive in the later levels, but also make it so that it has a way higher trap capacity, have the traps build much quicker and halve the price. As a downside, make it so you can only build 1 of them. Make it cap at something like 5000 or 10000 on 1x servers so 15000 or 30000 on 3x servers.

Why not use those additional resources to make more troops? I play Gaul a lot and I never build trappers because they are a waste of resources and a building spot. In my experience trappers have never stopped me from having my way with someone's village, them having troops however does drastically improve their chances.

If I could pitch one improvement for the Trapper building, it would be to get rid of it.

Quote from Hæim#NO

Why? Idk. It would be fun though trapping everything that approaches the village.

You can already do this by filling your village with trappers and traps, but then it wouldn't be a very useful village which is why almost nobody does this.

Quote from Hæim#NO

TK really needs a professional to take a look at the game balance, this game is way out of whack at the moment lol

Balance seems fine to me. The #1 determining factor for having a good round is knowledge of the game.

Quote from Hæim#NO

Or, here comes an innovative one! What if you got 1 cage added to your hero inventory per level of trapper you have in your empire every day? so if you got 3 level 20 trappers in village 1 and a level 15 trapper in village 2 you would get 75 cages at midnight every day. Would this be op? idk. Would it be fun? Oh yes. Would PETA approve? No. Definitel not.

Yeah, it would be op. Just no.

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

Why not use those additional resources to make more troops? I play Gaul a lot and I never build trappers because they are a waste of resources and a building spot. In my experience trappers have never stopped me from having my way with someone's village, them having troops however does drastically improve their chances.

If I could pitch one improvement for the Trapper building, it would be to get rid of it.

Traps don't cost any resources to maintain. So once you reach that 600k phalanx point of the server, you can start building traps that doesn't cost you any extra crop per hour Trapper is only really useful if you are getting attacked by someone who uses a lot of cavalry and that leaves large gaps in the attacks giving you time to build enough traps to help you wall his hero. Traps on their own is very rarely useful because either you get attacked too much for them to be useful or you don't get attacked at all in which case, why are you building them? Switching the trapper for something else would be nice, or completely overhauling it would also be great, which is why I made that suggestion of making it give cages. I could probably come up with 20 different ways of doing the unique buildings in more interactive and fun ways, but until they are able to fix the menhir feature that has been out for several years now, I won't even bother with writing them down in words. It will just stay an idea in my mind until that day comes.

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

You can already do this by filling your village with trappers and traps, but then it wouldn't be a very useful village which is why almost nobody does this.

Which is why I wanted to put this feature into just 1 building slot and also make the traps build quicker cause if you want to put anywhere near 20 trappers worth of traps in 1 village, then you better hope you don't get attacked before day 75 cause they will not be done building before then lol

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

Balance seems fine to me. The #1 determining factor for having a good round is knowledge of the game.

Idk if we are playing the same game then, but I know for a fact that we are not playing the same servers. I admit, the game can seem to work just fine on most servers, but the ones where people take things to the extreme you realize just how many broken mechanics and interactions there are in the game that are not being fixed or patched properly at all. If you are not playing on servers with people doing everything in their power to abuse these mechanics and interactions then I would completely understand why you wouldn't see the balance being out of whack, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean that it isn't. And I agree with that other statement, knowledge is the #1 determining factor for having a good round, but #2 is a good team and #3 is the other kingdoms on the server. If the other teams are dead set on ruining the server, then it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. If they set their eyes on you then there is no mid or endgame left for you to play. It's all just struggling to stay alive or start from scratch somewhere else and hope they don't come in for a second round of punishment

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

Yeah, it would be op. Just no.

Yeah, it would be op. But so is HDT and Brewery as well in comparison. +40k crop per hour from HDT and +20% straight up off strength for teutons vs 1000 animals per day for a gaul player where most of them would be spiders and rats if there even is any animals left on the map.

Quote from Hæim#NO

Traps don't cost any resources to maintain. So once you reach that 600k phalanx point of the server, you can start building traps that doesn't cost you any extra crop per hour Trapper is only really useful if you are getting attacked by someone who uses a lot of cavalry and that leaves large gaps in the attacks giving you time to build enough traps to help you wall his hero. Traps on their own is very rarely useful because either you get attacked too much for them to be useful or you don't get attacked at all in which case, why are you building them? Switching the trapper for something else would be nice, or completely overhauling it would also be great, which is why I made that suggestion of making it give cages. I could probably come up with 20 different ways of doing the unique buildings in more interactive and fun ways, but until they are able to fix the menhir feature that has been out for several years now, I won't even bother with writing them down in words. It will just stay an idea in my mind until that day comes.

They still cost resources and time to build the trapper and traps. Troops are actually useful and can be deployed to other villages so building troops is always better than building traps. I guess if you have the resources to build troops and traps then more power to you, but it's still probably a waste of a building slot.

Just wall people with troops + wall. It works for Romans and Teutons.

Quote from Hæim#NO

Idk if we are playing the same game then, but I know for a fact that we are not playing the same servers. I admit, the game can seem to work just fine on most servers, but the ones where people take things to the extreme you realize just how many broken mechanics and interactions there are in the game that are not being fixed or patched properly at all. If you are not playing on servers with people doing everything in their power to abuse these mechanics and interactions then I would completely understand why you wouldn't see the balance being out of whack, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean that it isn't. And I agree with that other statement, knowledge is the #1 determining factor for having a good round, but #2 is a good team and #3 is the other kingdoms on the server. If the other teams are dead set on ruining the server, then it doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. If they set their eyes on you then there is no mid or endgame left for you to play. It's all just struggling to stay alive or start from scratch somewhere else and hope they don't come in for a second round of punishment

I'm on com3x3 atm, it's been a decent server so far. My comment was about balance, and I do think the three races are quite balanced. If any race was more OP than the other then everyone would play it. But most people play Gaul despite your opinion that the Gaul race is inferior to the other two because of the trapper being not as good as the HDT and brewery.

Quote from Hæim#NO

Yeah, it would be op. But so is HDT and Brewery as well in comparison. +40k crop per hour from HDT and +20% straight up off strength for teutons vs 1000 animals per day for a gaul player where most of them would be spiders and rats if there even is any animals left on the map.

1. Free cages would be easily exploited and players would play Gaul to be able to essentially farm gold. You complain about exploits yet you want more exploits. Confusing.

2. So what if Romans have the ability to reduce the cost of unit upkeep, they have other weaknesses that actually make them one of the more challenging races to play as, for most players.

3. 20% brewery bonus is good but not a magic bullet. Clubs are still expensive to maintain, and the brewery has some weaknesses.

Every race has its advantages, I personally think the Gaul race is probably the strongest all-around race, even with the unnecessary trapper building. In the end it really comes down to the skill of the player.

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

They still cost resources and time to build the trapper and traps. Troops are actually useful and can be deployed to other villages so building troops is always better than building traps. I guess if you have the resources to build troops and traps then more power to you, but it's still probably a waste of a building slot.

Just wall people with troops + wall. It works for Romans and Teutons.

The two only real ways to make use of traps is by either using them to harm an attackers economy either by trapping his raiding troops forcing him to either leave them, disband them or rescue them. Even if he rescues them, he still loses 1/4 of the troops to the traps. Just the fact that the trapper exists heavily discourages people from attacking gaul players early on, especially with cavalry only and hero bombing a gaul is pretty much the stupidest thing you can do. The second way to use traps is by building them to soften up an attack that you would have been unable to defend against with just your troops. Early in the game there is usually a lot more clubs running around compared to phalanxes, and building phalanxes beyond a certain point can severely harm your economy. If you have a decent amount of enemies near you, even if you have some phalanxes built you should still build a trapper and have a decent amount of traps ready incase you get attacked. After the first week they are more or less obsolete though, but in that first week they are more or less the most important factor to worry about when it comes to earlygame raiding. If you just menhir to the outside wws without having another team settling right next to you, then the trapper would seem completely useless, and since that is the meta right now, the trapper also does seem useless because of this.

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

I'm on com3x3 atm, it's been a decent server so far. My comment was about balance, and I do think the three races are quite balanced. If any race was more OP than the other then everyone would play it. But most people play Gaul despite your opinion that the Gaul race is inferior to the other two because of the trapper being not as good as the HDT and brewery.

Oh, you got lucky with that server. I hope your luck continues in future servers as well The main reason why gaul is being played by so many players is because phalanxes have a good resource cost distribution. Since it is very hard to specialize a village into just 1 resource other than crops with 15c villages, teuton spearmen become next to impossible to mass without a large amount of gold. If spears had a more balanced distribution, no one would play gaul at all. Basically, gauls are cheaper for your wallet. The 3 tribes are more or less balanced right now, that wasn't actually the thing about the game that I'm thinking is imbalanced. The thing that is imbalanced is all the issues that have shown up with the release of new features to the game that the game developers are unable to assess and respond to. Stuff like Vacation mode and Menhir has been broken for years now, and only just recently did they start trying to do something about it. They partially fixed vacation mode, but menhir is still being abused to this day. Right now as we speak there is a kingdom that is having several of their players capitals zeroed by players abusing the menhir feature as well as dozens of support villages. But they should have expected that to happen right? Yesterday there was no other kingdom near them, but today there is 6 very large hammers just 2 tiles away from their capitals and tomorrow those 6 hammers is next to someone elses capitals destroying them as well.

Quote from Sylar#EN(11)

1. Free cages would be easily exploited and players would play Gaul to be able to essentially farm gold. You complain about exploits yet you want more exploits. Confusing.

2. So what if Romans have the ability to reduce the cost of unit upkeep, they have other weaknesses that actually make them one of the more challenging races to play as, for most players.

3. 20% brewery bonus is good but not a magic bullet. Clubs are still expensive to maintain, and the brewery has some weaknesses.

Every race has its advantages, I personally think the Gaul race is probably the strongest all-around race, even with the unnecessary trapper building. In the end it really comes down to the skill of the player.

1. Cages would be 1 silver each at that point, both because there is too many of them and because there is no animals to catch. If you get yourself 20 level 20 trappers you will get yourself a grand total of 2 gold per day selling cages. Yay. Could just make them not sellable or make it so that 20 random animals joins the village in defense every day if you have a level 20 trapper in the village. There are plenty of ways to get the same effect that cannot be exploited as much.

2. What weakness does romans have? The only one I can think of is that they struggle with investing their entire economy into building just def units unless you are going to build subpar def like EC or EI. But you can easily make up for this buy just building a small hammer on the side or just building a ton of scouts to help out with scouting.

3. Idk what a magic bullet looks like, but to me, if I were to guess what it would look like in travian, then the brewery would be it lol. The only weakness they have is that clubs are weak against cavalry, that clubs have a high maintenance because you build so many of them as well as teutons being a gold intensive tribe.

Since I've already talked about the weaknesses of romans and teutons, why not mention the gauls as well. Gauls biggest weakness is their offensive cavalry. Both thunders and haeduans are very expensive and slow to build compared to the cavalry of the other 2 tribes. This is why most of the biggest hammers are always roman or teuton. Because they realize this and don't want to waste their time playing around with a subpar option. I'm not saying that you can't do it with great success, I'm just saying that if you did the same thing as any other tribe, you would have approximately 20% more success xD (50% if playing teuton)

I think teuton is the strongest all-around tribe. They have the strongest hammers as well as the strongest defensive unit vs natarians as well as any other tribe stacking cavalry hammers. They have options to both go full power with clubs and eco with axes. Paladins is a nice option for def players that also want to farm actively and their wall is by far the best in the mid to late game. Their scouts cost only 1 crop to maintain no matter where they are, so massing them both in defense and in offense is easier than the other 2, though they are slower than both of them and romans can have large offensive scout hammers at just 1 crop per scout as well, they can't get their cheaper cost when defending players that are not roman and also have a hdt in the village. There is also the fact that teuton scouts are slgihtly weaker later in the game due to how smithy upgrades work, but they are still the best defensive scout by far for the entire round.

Quote from Hæim#NO

I admit, the game can seem to work just fine on most servers, but the ones where people take things to the extreme you realize just how many broken mechanics and interactions there are in the game that are not being fixed or patched properly at all.

Interesting conversation, but this in particular is something I would like to know a bit more about.

Please, tell me exactly how and where that is happening, since we have patched up several exploits lately that it is not possible to use them any longer.

We are chasing and investigating all other rumours regarding possible exploits and so far we have not found any.

If you know of any, please, write me a PM and explain what it is, so we can look at it and ensure there are none left.

So far, after the ones we closed I don't know of any exploit that are available or usable. But I am eager to know if there is anything else we can do in that front to keep improving.

Getting back on topic... trappers on speed rounds.

I can only think of one player I have encountered on the current speed round I play on that is going all-in on traps. I still managed to chief a village from him with minimal losses. The trapper is not OP, it's just very situational and most good players don't even bother with them. Phalanx + wall is a much better investment.

Trappers are very annoying for early farmers, but come 'midgame' they are pretty useless, since all serious offenses will have enough troops.

What I think would be a cool and unique building for the gauls is the Coördinator House.

This increases the travel speed by 30% on level 20 between villages in the connecting kingdom when they are send on a mission to Reinforce.

Unknown Are there no stats available for staff on what percentage of players in the top 100 build these buildings in their capital or other villages? I'm sure a tiny percentage of top Gaul players have trappers at the endgame stage.

Quote from iribuya

Unknown Are there no stats available for staff on what percentage of players in the top 100 build these buildings in their capital or other villages? I'm sure a tiny percentage of top Gaul players have trappers at the endgame stage.

You are probably right, but no, I don't have that data.

Regarding the "Coordinator House", is not 30% a huge boost for Gauls who already have a huge speed advantage with some of their troops?

It seems huge, specially for such a defensive tribe...

Quote from Unknown

You are probably right, but no, I don't have that data.

Regarding the "Coordinator House", is not 30% a huge boost for Gauls who already have a huge speed advantage with some of their troops?

It seems huge, specially for such a defensive tribe...

It's just a speedboost for reinforcements in a connecting Kingdom.

Teutons have 20% offensive boost on their main hammer

Romans have 20-30% eating reduction by horses and 20% faster build speed.

Gauls have a silly building that's only usefull start of the game.

The speed could be nerfed to 20% or just for infantry units.

Yes, that makes sense iribuya I will mention this and see where it takes us.

Although the idea of the trapper is that you use it to survive early game and good defenses allow you to survive the later game... so I am not sure how this will tie in with it.

Quote from Unknown

Yes, that makes sense iribuya I will mention this and see where it takes us.

Although the idea of the tramper is that you use it to survive early game and good defenses allow you to survive the later game... so I am not sure how this will tie in with it.

Yes, I agree trapper is a nice building at the beginning of the server, for beginning players.

It just seems unfair that Teutons and Romans have a very viable endgame building that is 100% mandatory for them to have if they play seriously. Perhaps a way to make trapper more usefull would be to increase the trapper size and buildspeed to 10x once a village is turned into a city.

If trapper loses its purpose midgame, then is it possible to "upgrade" it into a different type of building that is more beneficial? Like give cavalry a bit of offensive boost so they kind of carry these traps with them if you can imagine it. Or why not even gaul sell some traps to other tribes to improve trappers qualities while I like the idea of Iribuya too.

Just delete the idea of the Trapper already and give us Gauls something usefull to compete!

Well, may be it is that way on purpose...

Yes, the Gauls are a tribe for beginners and helpful for the start of a game round. But if they would have another building and beat the other tribes in the end game, why would anyone pick another tribe?

Tribes are not just cosmetics, but choosing which tribe to play has a real impact. And this is what keeps the players in game.

If we think we have outgrown the Gauls, we can try playing as Roman and enjoy the different experience (and the slow start).