Posts by spinix

Quote from Renuo#EN

Nice, you totally ruined your kingdom. Will you even have a player left on your return? How many gold users will be dissatisfied with players doing what you are doing?

Kings need to be available and that is something you should have taken into consideration when joining a server. Have any idea how poor this is for your team?

To enter any sort of vacation mode you should abdicate first and allow someone active to take the reins.

Pandering to players like spinix is why we are in this mess in the first place.

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Thank you for expressing you view.

You will note that under the rule changes that came in with kingdom unions kings have no option to abdicate although I'm sure you will appreciate that I see no obligation to do so in my circumstance.

I appreciate that you're not here so you don't know but to give you further context.....
I started the server a month after it started with the intention only of looking at the mechanics of the king role. When people joined me, which was only by accident of geography only (I made no recruitment efforts at all), I made this clear and advised that not only was it unrealistic to attempt it when there were already clear contenders with large, strong pre-formed kingdom groups but that I had absolutely no intentions of attempting to be a major power on the server.
No player that joined the kingdom expressed any desire to alter our stance.
I negotiated an alliance with another smaller kingdom with a very aggressive attitude to allow those who wished to to join co-ordinated attacks to have a crack since I had no offence capability and no-one else in the kingdom had the activity levels required to act as offence co-ordinator.
That allied kingdom fell by the wayside to retaliatory attacks and when the Wonders got released I brokered a deal with the king of the leading kingdom to allow any of my players who wished to, to join his kingdom. The numbers at that time were something like 95 in his kingdom and 12 in mine, they had over 8 million vp's, we had 300k or so.
I have been by some way the most active player in the kingdom and, I think, the only gold buyer (certainly the 2 Dukes I sit for do not use gold and they are among the other higher activity players).
It cannot be known but I suspect that had I played the server with more ambition then most of the few players I had in the kingdom would have seen a little more action but over a shorter period and would have been destroyed by one of the major powers and would have quit well before now.
The server is now to all intents and purposes over.
I'm now going on holiday with my family and my conscience is entirely clear.
Not activating vacation mode would, in all probability, be more damaging to my kingdom (given that clearly I'm not going to tell my kids to go play on the beach on their own because Daddy's too busy playing a persistent universe online multi-player game and the dozen people he met up with online over the past few months are more important to me than you are).

What I would say is that if I were the only active leader in a kingdom that was in with a real chance of competing for victory or some other rewarding endgame goal then the decision would not be so easy, however it is highly unlikely that a kingdom without a strong leadership team of at least 4 or 5 players would be in such a position and again I would be comfortable in leaving them to get on with it.. I have twice in only two previous kingdoms servers I have played, had the misfortune of playing under kings that went awol (in the second case completely, never heard of again, within a week of union). The leadership team that I was part of in each case was frustrated with the situation and it certainly held us back but in the first case we won the server despite the king's lack of contribution because of the strength of the team and in the second we managed a creditable performance despite having no king at all for months. The absence of a single member in a game such as this even if the king is not the determining factor for "ruining the kingdom" especially not if it's for a week on the beach.

The approach you bring to the game is not the same as many, there are plenty with a far more casual attitude then that which you display.
"Pandering to players like spinix is why we are in this mess in the first place." - really? I think you're overplaying your cards here. It's not a "mess". You are occasionally getting frustrated in having farms closed off from you or targets hiding away before you finish them off, is that really game breaking for you? Annoying yes but seriously hampering your progress in the game? I very much doubt it. And really it's not pandering to enable someone to take a break from a game that takes months to complete when it's necessary.

I'm about to go on holiday to the North Devon coast, a bit of beach cricket with my son, a bit of body surfing with my daughter that kind of thing. I have no interest in taking a mobile device down to the beach and I will likely be there for hours on end. In addition, when I'm not on the beach, those of you who understand the infrastructure on the peripheries of the UK will appreciate that there is no certainty other than that on occasion I will be unable to connect to the world outside the coastal village I shall be staying in.
The server I am currently playing is not particularly engaging having been dominated throughout by two kingdoms that are on friendly terms with each other and who between them now have the 6 leading wonders the highest of which is in the mid eighties.
I am a small king of one of the smaller kingdoms but I'm a top 10 defender on the server despite being in the 180's for population and wish to try to finish as high as I can on that rating so am not ready to quit.
However my sitter has really had enough of what has been a pretty dull experience for her (for which I bear some responsibility as her king but I don't think there was much I could do in the grand scheme of things) she will likely have quit by the time I get back from Devon.
I will be using the vacation function it's by far the best option for me in my circumstance.
I would like to be able to continue rebuilding my walls and treasuries while I'm away if I am able to get the occasional successful log in in the evenings.
I would not like to be open to attack during the 12-16 hour days out and about that I will have during the vacation, my kingdom has recently been pestered regularly by treasure hunting attacks launched by players from one of the leading kingdoms who are 8 hours away. We killed one of them yesterday but two others are still active.
If I start the vacation countdown now and one of those attacks is launched in 42 hours time I would like it to be prevented. However if one is launched tomorrow I'd like to be free to deploy my troops to defend either myself or my Dukes before I go.
The vacation function works exactly the way I need it to (although I'd rather the timer was 24 not 48 hours if I had the choice) and I consider it perfectly reasonable and fair for me to use it the way I intend to.

Quote from Ariakus

No its not. But the upkeep for the roman is lower.

As I said in terms of total cost of ownership troops are cheaper for Romans.
If you take three players, a teuton, a gaul and a roman each with fully developed offence villages whose armies have been wiped out and they each start their army rebuild running 24 hours a day on all troop queues at the same time, the teuton will use the least resources initially but fairly soon the roman will be using less than him and well before the time the three armies could usefully be described as big hammers the teuton will be using far more resources in order to keep going round the clock. True if they each do manage to keep their training going with zero voids the teuton will have more attack power but both absolutely and proportionately the resources used will without doubt be more.

Quote from Knez

Romans are bad in every aspect, they are too expansive,

Being expansive is a good thing in my book. If you don't expand then you're not going to make the most of the server and it certainly is the case that the dual build ability does make the Romans the most expansive tribe.

I think however you may have meant expensive and here I must also disagree with you

Roman troops are cheaper than the other tribes in terms of total cost of ownership if you presume that they aren't being sent out to die with in a couple of days of being trained.

Particularly for big hammer builders who are training their main army for a couple of months the cost of keeping building round the clock as a Roman is cheaper than as a teuton.

And that's one reason servers have fewer Teutons.
Teuton troops are more expensive so you need to be really active to make the most of Teutons, to keep raiding income coming in.
It's also a reason why you only ever see people who like playing Teutons complaining about raid number limits, it's them that have trouble keeping their training queues full because they need more resources to keep going round the clock.

Quote from Imran Palash

I have seen some tuton player make axes instead of clubs. they like better crop consumption in axes.
i like to play roman. in roman i always make EI. i know EC is better at attack per time. but i need to raid. EI is better than that.
i have a friend who think he should make gaul hammer, cause he find raiding is easy with TT than EI.
i played with one tuton player. he raided 20M a week ( was top robber for sure) with clubs. he dont needed EI or TT. but it will be tough for me or my friend with clubs.
I have seen a Queen, who didnt make any imperian and only make EI. and with that he was top raider, steal lots of Treasures and kill hammers in quick attack. ............

. ............"all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"

Quote from Gaius#EN(12)

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.

As someone that plunders a bit I think it's a shame that I can't track just how far behind the leading (clearly very dedicated) plunderers I am on a server-long basis. However I'd rather have it that way and be anonymous by virtue of placing 11th+ week by week.
As a compromise how about it's tracked but not published until the server's finished.

This continues to bug me, does anyone know the calculation?

Another weird one for someone else to test if they have boots and TS and are on a speed server:
According to Kirilloid:
TS 20
Boots of Archon 100%
TT base speed 38

Time to travel 20 tiles = 20/38 = 31:34
Time to travel 40 tiles = 40/(mystery speed calculation) = 31:34

So it takes exactly the same time to travel twice as far. Or if you prefer assuming the descriptions for TS and Boots of Archon are correct and they have an effect only over 20 tiles, then the second 20 tiles of this journey takes no time whatsoever .......

The combined boost at this level also allows for a TT raider to travel 100 tiles in slightly under three quarters of an hour. I've never played a speed server but does this ring true?

Please someone put me out of my misery and explain how the combined boosts works.

Hi Curtain, I just bought myself some cheap 35% boots to try some like for like testing against Kirilloid and so far every test has matched his result (bar one single exception where a one second difference came up, presumably a rounding error). I wasn't able to mimic the 21 tiles quicker than 20 tiles effect presumably because the 35% boots just don't give quite enough boost.

The small table at the base of my post is my in game testing using those 115 boots.
From the comparisons over longer distances that I did comparing my 115 boots with the 100 setting on Kirilloid and the same TS setting I would say his numbers are correct (and he always used to be a pretty darned relaible source too).

Yes I sought out targets that were exact tile distances away and used the EC as the test unit so that I could more easily check the results on a calculator to make sure I hadn't got any exel formulae wrong but the results are precise.
I suspected I may get the time warp anomaly at just over twenty tiles last night after doing the numbers on the longer distances before turning in.

Have a play around with Kirilloid's calculator

Travian :: distance calculator

Here its set for 21 tiles EC speed with TS 20 and 85% Archon boots giving a travel time of 1:59:19 where a 20 tile result with the boosts not active would obviously be 2:00:00. (You can also flip the server to T4 and see the Legends calculation which was the simple addition you remember).
Kirilloid's calculator acts in the way I describe (it's just it doesn't cater for the hero boot/gem variety that we have now) but I haven't been able to do precise comparisons to check it's exactly as in game since I only have the 115% boots at the moment.

It's very easy to calculate if you're using either tournament square or go-faster hero boots, unfortunately not so easy if you're using both.

With either/or you simply multiply up the boost x base speed and apply that for the distance over 20 and the base speed for the first 20 tiles and add them together.

Example
EC travels with a base speed of 10 tiles/hr
example distance to travel 40
time to target with no boosts 4 hours

Using TS 10
Time for first 20 tiles = 2 hours
Time for second 20 tiles = 1 hour [calculated as 20 tiles/(base speed of 10*(1+TS boost of 100%))]
Total time to target = 3 hours

Alternatively
Using no TS but boots of Archon giving 100% speed boost
Time for first 20 tiles = 2 hours
Time for second 20 tiles = 1 hour [calculated as 20 tiles/(base speed of 10*(1+Archon boost of 100%))]
Total time to target = 3 hours

In both cases the boost at 100% from either TS or boots doubles your EC's speed to 20 tiles/hour for the second part of the journey.

In T4 legends if you had both boosts you could just add the two together giving, in this example, triple the speed and a time to target of 2 hours 40 minutes however in Kingdoms something very different happens making a much more pronounced but variable effect so that the example with both Archon 100% and TS 10 boost of 100% results in a time to target of 2 hours 15 minutes implying a speed for the second 20 tiles of 80 tiles/hour. Change the distance however and that speed over the part of the journey over 20 tiles appears to change. Over a distance of 60 tiles for example the time is 2 hours 40 minutes implying a speed for the section over 20 tiles of 60 tiles/hour. So there’s a very peculiar formula at play.

Feel free to try it, calculate the time to travel 20 tiles at the base speed for your unit then subtract that from time to targets at two differing distances using the same unit with hero in boots from a village with TS. From that you can work out the speed of march for the section over 20 tiles. It will be slower for the longer distance.

I have no idea what the formula is that produces this result however Kirilloid had it (I used his site to check the examples). Unfortunately he no longer updates his site so the hero equipment he has as options doesn’t cover all the possibilities now available.

I’d be very interested to hear if anyone has managed to work it out.

Added the next morning - you know how sometimes things just bug you

In fact right at the margin something else is apparent. Based on real game tests it would appear that although with just boots or just TS boost there is no effect on speed under 20 tiles, there must be an effect when they are used together (this doesn't effect journeys under 20 tiles but the portion of the journey under 20 tiles when the total distance is over 20)
Using TS16 and archon boots with 115% I get the following results at the margin with an EC base speed of 10 I get the following:

So you can cover 26 tiles faster than 20 which implies that either time goes backwards between 20 and 26 tiles (which seems an unlikely thing for the devs to code) or the impact of the combined TS/Boots applies below 20 tiles or at least to some part of the distance below 20 tiles.

Test results appear consistent with the theory that the two boosts work exactly the same way when applied separately but instead of stacking (as they did in T4 legends) or multiplying when applied together an entirely different mechanism is brought into play.

So just an addendum to this thread. The next robber hideout was much stronger on defensive units so I thought I'd train up a bit more offence before dealing with them but it seems I waited a bit too long and they launched their attack on my capital with half their numbers (at a very slow march speed as advised here). I sent my offence at the half that was left in the hideout and destroyed it sometime while I was away from desk. I've just come back to find that the attack that was incoming has vanished. I presume that's normal and it might help others to know this.

You're absolutely right SacredLegend once my healed troops got back from their attack they, plus the stable output over the previous day meant it wasn't that troublesome to take out those robbers at all.
Screenshot by Lightshot
Thanks all.

Thanks Curtain that's added to the picture.
We're just started on endgame so kingdom defence is now deployed to Wonder or treasuries and I'm just a lowly governor (and one that's already used his offence at that - I'm really not any kind of defensive priority) so I'm not sure I'd either want to call for defence help or indeed expect to get much but now I know the timetable and a few more details I'm more comfortable of handling it.

Thanks Jallu.
The last hideout I cleared before I used my army took about three hours stable queue to replace the losses actually (robbers were very heavily skewed to infantry defence so I didn't send my imperians). Throughout I've I figured it was a good enough trade for the way I wanted to play..... until that is I got to my present problem. Still a good time left to find a way through. Thanks for the info.

Hi,

These guys
Screenshot by Lightshot
are spoiling for a fight but I used my army last night and have nowhere near enough offence left to deal with them.
I've never in two servers played waited for them the come to me so could some one confirm for me do they only ever attack your capital village and how much notice do you get that they're on the way?

Quote from Curtain

This for example is a better suggestion. It doesn't exactly stop the meta from forming but the leaders of the strongest kingdom might avoid from taking in too many players in hopes of making the pot bigger for themselves.

But safeguards would be required to prevent the leaders of the massive Kingdom that guarantees the win from booting out all but the chosen few in the final stages.

Hi Wizzball

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

To summarize your response if I may, you contend that it is a deliberate part of the game design that an event external to the game that affects one person can provide negative consequences (not punishment) for maybe 60 people who have already committed at least 30 days (probably much longer) that will significantly disadvantage that group for the remainder of the game round perhaps months in time terms and that it was a conscious and deliberate design decision to ensure that there is no mechanism within the game by which that group can restore parity at any point during that time.

You suggest that when this possibility was considered by the design team it was decided that this would enhance gameplay by providing a further challenge to those people.

You contend that when players consider whether to enter into a union this possibility should be part of the consideration process because you honestly believe that under the new duke and vice king arrangements its a viable decision to NOT enter into a union.

I too hope that this scenario doesn't repeat itself often before the design team recognize the errors in your thinking and change it.

That notwithstanding could you let me know at what point the treasuries in the king's village will cease to be active? Is it when the king goes grey or do they remain active right up until the point of auto-deletion and further is the timing of that auto-deletion something that we can predict?

Additional question:
If we have reinforcements defending the king's treasury village at the point at which he is auto-deleted, do they simply get sent home or are they lost when it's removed from the map?

No advice from the people who devised the new rules?

Any thoughts from anyone at all?

Hi. I need some clarity on what will happen under the new union rules for kings.

The situation is that shortly after our kingdom union our extremely active king suddenly went absent and all attempts to contact him through his other Travian server account and through Facebook have failed over the course of several weeks now. Leaving aside the worrying high probability that this implies something very significantly bad has happened to either him or someone very close to him it does give us some questions in the game.

Previously if this had happened with a bit of jiggery pokery you could end up with a senior Duke taking up the mantle but I understand that in order to enforce commitment from kings and 'vice-kings' this is now impossible, why this should be necessary when it hasn't been previously is something of a mystery to me and it does seem a little unfair to be honest, after all the punishment for that failure in commitment falls not on the guilty party* but on those left behind, but it is what it is.
(*and in this case we are as close to 100% certain as we can be that the "guilty party" is far from guilty but has in fact suffered some terrible misfortune).

We can limp along in some fashion for the time being however at some point we understand that his sitter will be prevented from logging in on his account due to him not keeping his account active himself (when will this be?). Further once the sitter has not been able to log in for 7 days we're going to have a grey king and some time after that (how long in this circumstance?) our king will be automatically deleted from the server.

At any point is there any action that we can take to mitigate the negative effects that this train of events will bring to us?

The server is in it's 58th day and our kingdom is in the top 10 by victory points and fairly well placed territoriality for Wonder release.

Thanks.