Posts by Gaius#EN(12)

For fresh players, there is not a whole lot to gain from speed settling.

Essentially, when you speed settle you sacrifice your early economy to grab the strongest late game 15C capitals.

If you are experienced and use a lot of gold, you can make back most of the cons of this as the good 15C capitals can be developed faster than regular villages.

However, i would argue that most new players will have a lot better time settling a 9C or menhiring a 7C village as they lack the experience and/or gold to make the most out of a 15C village.

This discussion is missing one important point

On paper, Praetorians have extremly strong defensive stats and as it has previously been stated, it's high deff/upkeep makes it probably the most cost effective defensive unit in the game. However, since they are slow they are not really that great in active defence situation but they are amazing for more permanent defence such as large treasuries or WW villages. Particularly as those tend to favor horse defence (phalanxes, spears etc etc) with most armies (gaul/teuton) tending to be more infantry heavy.

However, the problem is that there is usually not a whole lot of em.

The biggest downside of praetorians is by far their slow production speed. Compared to the other races the amount of defence you can produce per village as a roman is very low (easily 1/3 of a gaul with phalanx+druids/haeds. This makes them very difficult to play at a high level as you simply can't build enough of them. For smaller players this is less of a concern as they typically struggle with upkeep rather than production speed. But as a reference, check the table below:

The relevant variables when considering how many catapults you need are morale bonus (ratio between attackers population to defenders population), stonemason bonus, as well as the relative strenght of the attacker to the defender (see equation above)

As Renou mentioned, just use the a combat simulator. IMO just use the in game combat simulator: Set up a worst case scenario where you insert the population of players, max stonemason (if capital) and perhaps 4:1 advantage for defenders (or whatever is relevant for you). Then add catapults untill you manage to destroy the buildings. For capitals that usually requires several hundred catapults but for really higher ratios there really isn't an upper limit.

If you expect that you will wall with your attack you should never send several waves as the waves following the main hammer will do no damage due to the extreme defenders advantage they will have.

Something worth mentioning is that stonemason and morale bonus does not apply to WW villages.

It's been some time since i did this so it might have changed but it could be that he/she started as governor and switched to king once he moved to his second village

The requirements you need to fulfill is that you need 200 pop on the account and you need a treasury in one of your villages. As soon as you fulfill these requirements you can switch to king which instantly activates your treasury. Hence ignoring the 12 hour activation

I've found that oasis rank is often a problem or annoyance for capital cities, particularly within your own kingdom. I'm sure many have have been in situations were a kingdom member has forced the nr 1 rank of your cropper capital oasis by settling villages/cities next to the oasis and/or parking large amount of troops in the oasis. Often for a regular village or a 6c capital with low level fields that would recieve a much lower production boost from that oasis than you would.

I would suggestion the following

Instead of oasis influence being affected by village population and the number of troops inside:

1. Oasis influence is based on the production bonus the village would recieve (i.e. total base production). That is, the village that would recieve the higher bonus from the oasis automatically gets rank 1, the second highest, rank 2 and so on.

2. Remove gaining influence and resources from stationing troops inside oasis

With this system you have 2 ways to increase in rank:
1. Increase the level of your fields untill it is higher than your opponent (you would do this with allies)
2. Catapult the other players fields so your fields are higher (this is solution for enemies)

This way, the player that would recieve the highest bonus from the oasis automatically gets it (great for kingdom) and it promotes players to upgrade their fields which is good in the long term. Additionally, we will no longer need to keep worthless troops sitting around in the oasis.

In cases were 2 players are in a tie, for instance two 15c capitals with lvl 18 fields, the one who assigned the oasis first gets the higher rank. That way the guy that was there first gets the highest rank but he still has the option to give it to the other guy if he wants by removing oasis and reassigning it again.

Good idea?

I think the reinforcement is not a big issue in itself as it has been around since the start of travian.

The root of the problem, both for plunderers and spikers alike is that it is to easy to identify which villages to plunder/spike. This makes mass farming and spiking a bit to easy for the average player. It's to easy to spike but at the same time its also to little time investment in mass farming. And it's a huge edge compared to those not farming.

I think the entire issue would improve a lot if you removed that inactive players go grey after 7 days. It would also make it easier for aggresive players to make back their investment for clearing a player as they would have a longer time to get back before everyone else scoops in.

Yeah, that happens sometimes but sometimes you just get a really unlucky streak. Then it would be nice to have the option to buy the build slots for a set amount rather than having to keep on gamling.

If it took an average of 300 gold to get 2 build slots, id put the price for buying them without gamling slighly higher.

That way its still worth to gamble a bit but in case you get really unlucky you can just cut your losses and buy them

I would really like the option of being able to buy the extra build location in a village for a set amount of gold rather than being reliant on the card game.

I'd say something like 50/100 or 100/200 for 1st and 2nd build slot would be appropriate

I typically need 2-4 of em each server, one for capital and one for off village. Sometimes i'm lucky and i get them quickly for only maybe 100-400 gold but this server i was completly out of luck. Had to spend something like 1500 gold just to get 2 which is just way to much randomness for me.

Anyone else have the same experience?

If you are racing
Theoretically gauls should be fastest as they have the cheapest settlers.

Also, part of optimizing the build order is how you handle hero. If you can go heavy on resources while also clearing hideouts and adventures you can save a fair amount of time. Particularly if combined with 2x golden crop and resource chest. Pop one batch during the first day once you hit max production and the second after 00:05.

After that a lot of it comes down to luck. The more resources you get on your adventures the better off you will be. With ress on 3 adventures, as teuton i managed about ~16½ hours this round

Only managed to settle in 16½ hours , you beat me by a full 2 hours

Depending if you are lucky with resources on adventures will make quite a difference on your final settling time. Otherwise this build order is about as solid as it gets

Quote from Curtain

At least defense points tend to be pretty reliable as defending against robbers is much less common that killing them

Untill WW race begins and the kingdoms in the lead cash in huge amounts of deff from natar waves. But i do agree that this is less of a problem as it only affects the server during the last month of the server.

An important change i feel is needed to make the top list of deff and off relevant again would be to remove the off point that you get from killing robbers, natars and nature. Off and deff points should only be rewarded when you are actually fighting players not non player characters.

currently the top 10 attacker is a list of what governor has the most troops more than anything since the size of the hideouts increase with troop numbers. And even if they only count as half it makes a huge difference when you get roughly 1 hideout per day that has 10-30k exp worth of troops in it.

And good luck for dukes and kings to keep up in off points when i can cash in ~40-50K off points per week with very efficient trades against hideouts as those units have no deff bonus, no upgrades and you can siege them. If you also clear oasis it further emphasizes the problem.

I also think there should be an upper limit on the size of hideouts as they can get completly ridiculous when you have a lot of troops as a gov but thats a suggestion for another thread (Screenshot by Lightshot ~34000 exp of units)

As someone that plunders a lot i think it's a shame that a server long ranking does not exist for total plunder during a server. Currently we have a weekly ranking that is resetted every week which i think is nice. But i would really enjoy it if there was a server long ranking on the total amount each player has plundered during the entire server. At the end of the server, a top 3 plunderers of the server could be awarded similar to the most off points and deff points.

Great idea
Nothing worse than a truly one side server for both winners and loosers. Loosers get wrecked without feeling they have a chance to do anything while the winners take home the server while being boored out of their mind due to lack of challange.

Travian is at its best when you have several equal kingdoms all fighting for the win and sadly, that does not happen so often these days. Usually there is to few experienced players on the server so only a few really strong kingdoms get started and they completly wreck any beginners around them.

The end game then devolves into a 1v1 between the two strongest kingdoms. Every once in a while you will have a third party being a meta out of all the lesser kingdoms that cant make it on their own. Makes for a very unexciting end game as a clear winner is usually crowned way before the server actually ends. The rest is just waiting around for them to finish their WW

There are several methods i would recomend depending if you wanna move all treasure, or just excess treasure.

The method described above works well if you only wanna move excess treasure. However it is ill suited for moving all treasure of a duke account.

If you wanna move 100% of treasure quickly the method i would recomend is the following.

1. Deactivate ALL duke treasuries and make sure that the treasury village you want to move the treasury from becomes inactive last

Due to how treasures are automatically transfered to the closest active treasury this means ALL of the treasures will be moved automatically to the final village to be deactivated.

2. Attack the treasury that was deactivate last from the desired storage village (for instance a WW with active treasury)

Even after deactivation of the final treasury, the treasure will still remain in that village. However, unlike with active treasures, you now dont take just 1/3 of the treasure in one attack but all of them.

3. Reactivate all duke treasuries

All in all it takes about 13 hours to do the whole transfer with only about 12 hours of downtime on influence. you dont have to stress on the transfer though as you have 12 hours to complete the treasury transfer while you wait for all the duke villages to reactivate again. all in all it should take 24 hours from start to finish.

IMPORTANT!
You have to take great care when doing this as while the king can steal all treasure in one attack, so can also your enemies. Or things like this may happen

http://prntscr.com/f0mouw

PS: This might change in the future since this method also means you can do massive VP trades between alliance using this method.

This is a bit off topic but..

Quote from Getafix

n the old days of travian it was possible to turn active players into farms (at least for a while) through croplocking.

I really miss those old days, and i really wish that they would make it possible to properly crop lock people again on TK. Before this change it was actually worth attacking non capital villages as you could turn them more or less useless in one attack. Now the same attack will have the village up and running again within a few days even without gold. It's just not worth the time and risk for the off player to hit support villages most of the time.

Through a combination of changes TK has become so much in favour of the defender that it is actually very difficult to make significant damage to an enemy, especially short distance.

The introduction of cities with 200% loyalty, the unremovable WD bonus, attack overview screen, removal of hard croplocks and worst of all the limitation of attacks/s based on attack distance is quite the boost for the defenders...

Sadly i dont think it is likely we will ever see a change in those, but one can always hope.

From reading all of the above and thinking about the problem for a while i think some of the main issues are:

From the point of view against farming
It is currently to easy to farm

The introduction of farm lists and the ease of identifying potential farms have made it a LOT easier to farm compared to earlier versions of travian.

Especially if you consider that a lot of players simply add all inactive villages to farm list through map and then unit scout it to see if its farmable. Even to me that seems a bit to cheap considering the amount of effort you put in and the potential gain.

From the point of view against spiking:
Plunderers are more or less powerless to retaliate against spikers

This goes hand in hand with how easy it is to identify inactive (farmable) villages. In essence what makes it so easy to make farm list now also makes it easy to spike. Moreover stacking defence bonuses and no ability to identify the attacker makes this tactic extremly effective and very frustrating for people who plunder a lot.

Would people be more okay with farming if it was more time consuming and more difficult? In this case i think the solution below would be a good change from both point of views. The goal of the change im sugesting here is to keep all the tactical options for both sides but rebalance the amount of work and resources that can be gained.

1. Remove the visual indicator of inactive players, essentially don't make inactive players turn grey after a week.

This increases the skill cap and effort required from plunderers to create the farm lists. You would still be able to farm if you can put down the time and effort to scout and find all the potential inactive players. It will also make the tactic of blind unit scouting a LOT less viable therefore increasing the skill cap for plundering.

At the same time it allows small scale spiking for people who wants a nearby farm for themselve while making it more difficult to do large scale spiking due to the difficulty of finding the farms in the first place. Without the grey villages to guide you i dont think large scale spiking is likely to happen as it would require a tremendous amount of work. And if it did it would be fine due to the amount of work you would have to put in to make it happen

Moreover this change has no technical limitation and has no unintended impact on the game.

Many of the other sugestions suffer from either being technically very difficult to implement and/or with the risk if interupting game balance.

2. Rebalance how much resources can be gained from inactive can be adjusted by how long a village can stay inactive before dissapearing

This essentially changes how many inactive villages will be available for plunder at any given time during a server and vastly changes the total amount of resources that can be plundered. Here i think we can all agree that we need to strike a balance where plundering is still profitable while not being game breaking. IMO if it requires a lot of effort im fine with top notch farmers being able to farm maybe 1-2 million resources per day and this can be adjusted by reducing the time it takes before the inactive village dissapear (Lower timer ->less farms = less resources). Currently i think you can plunder around 3-5 million per day during the most profitable time so likely the time for deleting inactives should be somewhere around 2 weeks which is significantly shorter than it is currently.

That way we make plundering still viable but require a lot more time and skill to do while balancing the amount of resources that can be gained compared to those who dont plunder. Moreover we dont have to remove any of the tactics non plunderers use to fight against large plunderers while making abbusive large scale spiking much more difficult.

I want to emphasize that the current situation on most situation is not so bad, i would say that the situation could best be described as annoing, not game breaking in any way.

However my argument about this is not what is currently done but what could potentially be done with the system as it is. Right now it is not broken as people choose not to use spiking to its full potential, but it could drastically change how servers play if people abbused it.

Let me give a small scale example of spiking that is maybe more realistic for most players than the "great spike" i described above

Lets say i choose to spike 20-40 large inactive villages per day (random location and time). Its maybe 10 minutes of work sending from the map

I would bet that within 1-2 weeks the total plunder on the server would have more than halfed .(large farmers would like loose something like 500-2000 farming troops per day due to the spikes which is unsustainable in the long run)

Do you honestly thing that its a good thing with a system that allows a single player be able to have that large an impact on the server is a good thing? While its not a big problem now i don't expect it to always be like this since because people are people when they realise what you can actually achieve with spiking a lot more people will use it as a tool, with a tremendous effect on overall gameplay.

Also i think the discussion regarding farming in travian itself is a whole different issue. (you could say this is the argument for why allowing people to farm for resources is a good thing)

farming has existed in all versions of travian, the only difference is that as of late the farm list has made it more available for the average players (not just botters or no lifers). And you have to realise removing the option to farm at a profit would have a profound effect on a travian server as plundering is the main driving force for interaction between players in the early game. If you removed the option to farm players at a profit it would lead to a early game where people ignored eachother as much as possible cause fighting would cause their economic development to stall.

Basically if you remove the option to plunder the best way to develop the account is to sim city and ignore troops. Since the only option to increase the income of the account is to invest all resources into fields. It is also the only way to build really large armies if you arent a king or a duke.

This is why there are so little wars during the early game as people dont wanna fight to destroy their enemy, they want to develop the account quickly so its ready for the real fighting once the end game starts. Removing plunder would signifiantly increase the time it takes for people to reach the stage where they can afford to produce a lot of troops and fight for real.

However spiking has the largest effect on the late game plunder (as people generally dont waste troops either attacking or defending in early game).
The largest off players on the server are ALWAYS the ones who plunder and i would think twice before calling them sim city players just cause they built their accounts by farming inactives. Spiking taken to a higher level would efficiently remove all those players which i think would be an overall bad thing for the game.

I do that sometimes as well when im lazy, its less costly to scout but a lot less time consuming. It's a bit to expensive for my taste most of the time

Quote from paulc_COM

Curtain has spoken well. Spiking farms is simply one tactic among many when it comes to competition between players in Travian. When you're trying to farm, it's annoying. But if one player could figure out how to take a nice dent out of his enemy's hammer by spiking a few farms, and had some decent assurance that he wouldn't be killing his own team-mates offence troops, I think that would be acceptable gameplay.

Yeah but here is the thing im trying to explan, this tactic is not balanced. What im saying is that this tactic is OVERPOWERED for the following reasons

For spiker:
Very easy to do
takes very little time
very efficient trades
Friendly fire can be avoided by targeting specific areas with spiking and by warning alliance members of when spiking happens (or just ignore, the enemy vastly outnumber friendlies after all)
Does not require significant amount of troops to do a lot of damage (heck if you spike 10-20 villages per day that requires very little troops but will case significant damage to plunderers)

For plunderers:

Is extremly time consuming due to:
farm scouting (to find farms that does not give losses)
Farm tuning (to optimize the amount of troops to send on each farm)
required to send regularly throughout the day

Also doing this in an efficient manner while keeping losses as small as possible requires a lot of knowledge and commitment. If you think that all you need is a lot of time to reach top 5 plunderer on a server you are very very wrong. It requires significant skill.

And how are the results?
Basically the spiker will do huge damage to the enemies economy with no risk of counter.

How can you call a tactic balanced when it does huge damage to your enemy with great trades that also does not have a counter tactic? Thats like text book definition of something that is overpowered

This is the reason why plunderers are so frustrated about this

It fucks all our hard work COMPLETLY for almost no effort while there is no possible counterplay. The only thing we can do is stop plundering to avoid the damage. But that isnt an option for people who dont have huge tributes since plunderers are typically dependent on this income and stopping plundering will cause our que to dissapear and our troops to starve.

There is basically no way to win for us and you are saying thats fine? Either the difficulty of spiking needs to increase significantly or there must be some kind of counterplay plunderers can do to avoid spiking. Currently we have nothing