Posts by Yangus

I really don't see any good reason for delaying this server anymore.

The server is more or less dead. 719 players "active" for the moment.

The general problem with normal speed servers is that they take too long time (many days) to finish.

I have spoken with many players and responded several times in surveys, that you need to shorten this.

And no, speed servers is not the answer. The level of activity required on a speed server is different.

We need normal speed servers where:

• First phase is ok in length. Players build and fight.
• Mid-game should be shortened by 10-15 days. Too less things really happen in this phase. Many players are quitting.
• End game, before WW is meaningless long. Reduce with 50%. Even more players are quitting.
• WW-phase is just boring. Reduce building time of infrastructure with 50%. Those players outside WW teams just see "send more crop". messages

Too compensate for less time to build hammers, it is possible to decrease building time of troops in general or reduce building time for each phase.

I think normal speed servers do have a place in the game set-up, but need to reduce the calendar time madness.

BridgetB wrote:

Dear players,

as mentioned in this thread: Halloween Hunt - 3rd day lagging issues

we were monitoring the Halloween Hunt game world very closely over the weekend.

Other than the Card Game getting confused with the European winter time and some rare single stopped events, the Halloween Hunt round ran smoothly.

You all were very active over the weekend Thank you! You’ve also completed two quests and caught a lot of spiders and bats! Don’t forget to collect your rewards in the browsers.

There is an iOS App bug connected to the Night Truce notifications. We’ve already submitted a hotfix and you should be able to update your Kingdoms App today.

Have you already participated in creating the special achievement for you all?

You all deserve a special achievement for sticking with us through thick and thin. We are so grateful having you as players and appreciate your supportive behavior.

If you haven’t already, go to the embassy and participate in the name and description finding process for this special achievement. We only grant this achievement to the players on comx5.

Create your special THANK YOU achievement

Check out the great ideas that players already put there and give a like to your favorite idea.

Your Travian Kingdoms Team

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"

Other than the Card Game getting confused with the European winter time and some rare single stopped events, the Halloween Hunt round ran smoothly.

"

This statement Bridget is only beaten by two persons in real life:

Chemical Ali - Iraqi Minister

N.N - American President

1: Crop

2: Reinforcement

3: Treasure

4: Shield

5: Ointment

6: Praetorian

7: Bakery

8: Cranny

9: Tiger

10: Farmlist

Maybe time to recommend your devs to adapt at lest the basic principles of system and SW development.
Before a new version / revision is launched, it is pretty normal to perform at least a high level regression test.
- Launch the application (would have got an idea of something wrong already here)
- Perform one small test of each basic function (upgrade one field, upgrade one building, navigate the map, access the hero, send a raid,..)
- Perform some more tests on the new functions / changes

I do not understand that a failure to load on an iphone is impossible to find before a new version is released. This sounds like an extreme "last-minute-fix" which is something you never do without at least a regression test. If this is necessary, then you postpone the release until the test is performed. And there isn't really anything time critical on the app. I am no fan of it, but you were able to play (sim) acceptably with it.

I have absolutely no problem to understand that bugs come and go with new versions as they often are the result of a combination of events and activities and thus difficult to find by test, but this one is too easy.
I have been working on complex development for 20 years so I have seen a fair amount of trouble, but you added another dimension by this one.....

There are a lot of interesting ideas here, which could improve the game for all of us.

I would like to comment on the criticism of the possibilities for having many treasuries in one village. It makes it easier to defend treasures initially, but actually makes it worse later in the game (which I do like!).
Coming from com6 and as part of the Phoenix group, we ended up having coordinated attacks from 3 kingdoms on WW and our main treasury villages.
With the amount of treasures we had in these villages, 30-60k, it actually became necessary to treat them as a WW village. You simply cannot afford to loose one of them.
We lost the server, mainly because we failed on defending one of the treasuries and lost 50k treasures and a huuuuuge amount of VP as we were rank 1.

We had 8-15 sieges on WW + 4 treasury villages (not 100% sure about the number) in addition to a huge number of normal attacks on the same + a few other villages.
If you believe that it is easy to defend 4 villages against this, then you should take a look at the reports posted elsewhere on the forum. We had quite a few 110k defense in all villages in addition to 1-1.5 million in WW, but lost one battle and then the server.

Even if we lost, I am still a fan of the idea of having many treasuries in one village. It gives attackers more important villages to coordinate on and thus an easier game than just defending WW.

I also do not see that this favors the big metas more than before. We were big enough, but against well coordinated attacks, we did not manage.
This is a major improvement of the game and encouraged quite much new thinking on strategy. Well done developers!

I have been playing travian for 12 years roughly and one thing has not changed: End Game is boooooooring! Too many players quit in mid and end game.

Speed servers is requiring too much 24/7 activity and I like the pace of normal servers better, but they are too long.

• I think Tier 1 phase is well defined and works perfectly according to the intention. Building up villages, troops and relationships.

• I think Tier 2 phase is too long. A lot of strategic decisions and important work to be done, but mostly for leaders. Please consider cutting it down by 2-3 weeks at least.

• I think Tier 3 (End Game) is meaningless long and totally uninteresting for most players.

The idea would be to cut down building of all infrastructure in the WW village down to 50% (wall, granary, warehouse, GG, GW). Keep the Wonder building times as they are.
This will reduce the time when, for all but the WW team, players see more or less nothing happening. Seeing on com2 now that players has been quitting for some time already.

I would also like to try and include the kingdom members more in the WW part, in addition to the "crop-calls" and "def calls".

Why don't you develop a counter, visible only for kingdom members, how many minutes left until empty granary in WW. This would give players that never had or seen a WW, some hint about the crop challenge, WITHOUT indicating anything on the def troop count!

This could be supplemented by some alarm-indication, similar to attack-indication, on the urgency of crop supply.

I would also like to see more ideas for involving the members that are not in the WW team. I generally do not believe too much in the importance of spies. they have always been there, will always be there, and I do not really care.
Please let us make the game even more interesting for the majority instead of adapting it to the few negative elements

Batcountry#EN wrote:

1. Vacation mode: has been covered in the other threads so I won't say much more

2. Travian needs to recruit more Multihunters - at the moment it feels like they are relying too heavily on players reporting potential abuses rather than actually actively hunting out people cheating

3. Much more needs to be done to crack down on multi-accounts - if it's obvious to other players which players are using multi accounts it should be just as obvious to the admins

4. Kingdom stacking is one issue - Kingdoms that are stacking their kingdom with as many accounts as they can get away with to boost the amount of treasures/VP they get. So many accounts are clearly being opened with no intention other than adding to the population of a kingdom and generating treasures/tributes and maybe extra defensive troops. I'm not sure how to best tell the difference between these accounts and players who are simply not that active, so open to suggestions

5. Same as above with obvious farms. I regularly run into accounts that reach a certain point and then don't build any buildings or troops, but still remain active and generate resources. A lot of these accounts are clearly being maintained by somebody as a farm and multihunter should be auditing any accounts like this to identify who is doing it.

6. Again, open to suggestions about the best approach to do this but something needs to be done about players using bots for farming and building up their cities. I think at this point the level of programming available has overtaken the ability of the Travian mods to identify bots. I think that multihunters should be regularly auditing the accounts of the top raiders and any player that shows a sudden spike in activity to identify the discrepancies between when they are online and when they have bots running their account for them. At a minimum it should be obvious that accounts that a running their farming lists 24/7 are using bots - I know some Travian players don't sleep much but everybody needs to sleep at some point.

7. I think that the punishments for people getting caught cheating need to be stricter. If you are caught cheating your MAIN account should be banned completely - not whichever smaller account you don't care about.

8. This will probably be controversial but I think that there needs to be a punishment for the Kingdom when a player gets caught cheating too. I think that any treasures,VP and tributes that the cheating player has generated should be removed from their Kingdom. I appreciate with this view that it can be hard as a King/Duke to know if one of your players is cheating, but at the same time I don't think a Kingdom should be allowed to have gained anything from a player that was cheating. Imho I also think that the leadership team of a kingdom needs to take some responsibility for the behaviour of the players they choose to recruit.

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I am, as you very tired of the extensive cheating in this game.
But I think you mix a few things here and a couple of the points, I definitely disagree to.

@1. Haven't read the posts about it, but even if it is a way to get away from attacks, it is hard to claim this as cheating.

@2. Sure agreed but it will not have any impact unless the MH are better trained and given better tools to reveal cheaters.

@3. Again agreed, but it boils down to the tools available. Not everything that looks suspicious from the outside is cheating. Sometimes more activity, better skills or pure luck can be the difference.

@4. Not understood at all. Do you mean that recruiting many players to a kingdom is cheating? If it is multi, yes, please reveal them. Otherwise, I do not see why this is cheating?

@5. If it is use of active sitters within the game rules, this has nothing to do with cheating. Here I assume that it is not multi and then, like it or not, this is allowed. It also only has a limited effect in the very early days. Later this is of little or no value.

@6. Agreed. If players are using bots, then I would like to get rid of them. Some are most likely doing it. I report them and quite often they are banned afterwards. But the game relies on trusting and accepting the decisions of MHs. know several players that claim this is not always correct. I choose to have no opinion. The alternative is to stop playing.

@7. Agreed, and I believe this is done. If some is using multi, then both (or all) of the accounts are banned. Have seen this on several servers recently

@8. Disagree completely! To punish a kingdom / king / duke for acts of a single player, is meaningless. As a player, I have no chance to reveal cheaters normally. I know no means for checking if a player has several accounts, is using bots or cheating in other ways. I can sometimes see some suspicious patterns and then I report them, but to expect that I (if I am a royal) should be responsible for other players actions is just meaningless. In an extreme situation, I could join the enemy kingdom, start illegal activities, multi / bot or whatever, and create penalties for the kingdom.
If this would be the case, I would quit the game immediately. I take responsibility for myself and no NOT cheat. What others do, is their responsibility.

General, yes this game would be much more interesting if there was less cheating. But please do not turn this into a surveillance nightmare.

Screenshot by Lightshot

Can we get rid of this message now?
It is incredibly annoying ALWAYS having to wait for this message to disappear.
I have my own account, playing dual on another server and are sitting a couple of players.

This means that I see this message (and waste the 5 sec) at least 50 to 100 times a day.

It would have been completely normal to have a check box for "Do not show this message again"
The lobby is consuming enough CPU / time without such additional wait states.

If that only were correct....
For some reason, it often takes hours before a trade (1:1) is set up and until a sitter can accept it.
I have checked it many times.
The trade is visible for other players but not when I log into the account I am sitting.
I understand that you want to prevent illegal pushing, but I am afraid this has gone too far

I would like to see what we have in Legends since long.
The ability to mark each incoming raid / attack / siege with a green / orange / red color depending on how dangerous you think this is.
This makes it easier to see new incomings without all the work in excel or other tools.

Based on this, an ability to group and hide e.g. the green ones. This would at least reduce the noise introduced by kingdom fake actions

It would not change at all
This is what you have clever duals for

I do understand that Travian GmbH is eager to get players from all countries. That is generally a good thing as more players means more money to develop the game.
I also do understand that on the different national domains, it is important to support the official language(s) for each country / region.

I have given up the national domain for me (.no) as so few players are playing, that it just gets ridiculous. My last RoA server just died because only one alliance did manage to survive and expand. And this was NOT a stupid meta!

Thus, I prefer to play on international servers (.com)

But the development of features here is not promising in my opinion.
The last change log contains, among many corrections, the following:
"Secret societies: When you want to create a Secret society, you get now an error notice when the name of it already exists. Also, Cyrillic letters are now allowed to use in the name."

I am currently playing on two servers and it is more and more annoying to see the vast usage of national characters in player names, village names, kingdom names etc.
I have no problem with Russian players. Have been playing together with several of them many times and still are.
But the support and use of e.g. cyrillic is making the game more cumbersome and difficult.

I have no chance to look up the kingdom / player in the stats without going to the map and find the player first or via kingdom and scrolling. Then copy the name.
I have no chance to set up attacks without doing the same.
I have no chance to send resources or reinf without doing the same.
I cannot refer to a player / kingdom in messages without doing the same.
I cannot write to the player without doing the same.

The list could be longer but I assume that those that want to, see my point.
I am not complaining about this for giving the Russians (or Arab, Chech, Scandinavians, Chinese) an advantage. It is the extra time that is the issue.
I do spend quite a lot of time on this game already and this language support requires me to spend even more time, without achieving anything.

I remember there was a rule that only the applicable language for a domain was allowed in game interface and that would have meant English or at least English /western) characters on .com
There is a reason why I do not play on Russian or Chines servers......
I want to get rid of the support of national characters in the user interface on .com.
I am raising a question if this should be again the requirement?

If not, then I am afraid that my 10 years with the game in different variants will soon be over. My first game was the T2.5 a looooong time ago

Is there any status report on com3?
It is not possible to send crop to villages where troops are dying.
It is not possible to finish buildings.

The Jerk com3

In your case, I do not see the point in moving treasures from 1st to 3rd village. As long as you are not a duke (I guess you are not since you were invited because of a 3rd village inside the kingdom) you have no benefit from these treasures.
You better ask your king or one of the dukes to attack you and transfer the treasures to one of their village with an active treasury. This way your kingdom earn Victory Points.
This is valid for treasures you steal from other players.
Treasures you steal from Robbers Hideout/Camps are different.
Remember to sell them in the 3rd village so you get crop for them also, and the kingdom get VP again

Thank you. This was perfect information.
I like many of the changes described here. And I do know a couple of players that will need to re-think slightly

That sounds like perfect music in my ears. It does not remove the possibilities for Metas but at least it means that the WW holder, king and dukes cannot back stab the ones that has been supporting them the whole server, in last minute.
Is this stated in some official post from Travian GmbH too?

Not too bad.

After a long time without Kingdoms, I needed to get the changes sorted out.
Spent the last couple of hours reading the thread about Metas (and mainly somewhat exaggerated discussion on the happenings of com5).
I was on Circle side and must admit it is funny to read now.
The Titan guys used (or misused) the possibilities of hidden Metas and late merge. Titan Chip tried to recruit us too, but luckily, Torn (darkmatter) turned him down.
We may have many wrong ideas about what was going on in Titan and Bob, but that is for sure the same thing regarding what especially Titan Chip writes about Circle.
I am reading VVV as more reflected and telling a story I can recognize but at least partially disagree to. Chip is way off and will not be commented more by me.

I think we actually did a quite nice job considering having 3 more or less inactive kings for half the server. Only randomly logging in to keep the account alive. To count players on both sides is not interesting at all. We were a very small group of people that played any role in any activities in the last couple of months.
If Torn would have accepted "the offer" from Chip, this would have been even more SImCity.
But not the important part here. Titan won and I do not really care.

Now I am finally playing again, and to my horror, I see discussions about hidden cooperation and late merges AGAIN including WWs!
From your posts Mayo, from Darkmatter and also the thread starter, I saw several possibilities for reducing the outcome of such crap.

The Alliance is removed but the Kingdom feature still enable this strategy I think?

Is there any change I have missed regarding this subject, any in-development-plans or even just a small hope for something?

I am trying to understand the details related to earning Victory Points but so far, I have not found anything on Wiki.
I of course understand that you get VP according to the number of treasures a kingdom has, but there are so many aspects not that obvious:

1. When is daily VP added? At mid-night each day?

2. Do you get VP only for the treasures that fit within the maximum of your active treasury? Meaning that "overflowing" treasures are wasted for the moment?

3. I assume that when two kingdoms are merged, then the VP gained by the left kingdom is gone?

4. I assume that the WW bonus is added at the final end only? It is not a cumulative bonus added every day or week?

5. When you steal treasures from a number 1 kingdom and get the bonus VP for them, are these VP also subtracted from the already gained VP of the number 1 kingdom?