Posts by Hæim#NO

I had a lot of fun playing TK. I learned a lot, both about the game and about myself, and I met a lot of wonderful people. But for the last several years, the only reason I have showed up at all was because of the people, because the game was no longer fun. The reason why is because there wouldn't be a day without either a cheater or a team of cheaters being in the spotlight. I honestly don't mind if people cheat, so long as the punishment is swift, accurate and devastating, but currently the punishment is incredibly slow, like throwing a dart in the dark and when it hits, it's like a slap on the back to do better, but not by quitting cheating but by cheating even harder next time.

The thing about cheating in TK is that in theory, you can never lose if you just cheat hard enough. Every problem can be solved with "just make another multi".

They have more players than us? Make another multi.

They have more VP than us? Make another multi.

We can't defend against their hammers? Make another multi.

We can't break their defenses? Make another multi.

Your governer off player who is building 3 hammers is low on resources? Make another multi.

Your other multi account got banned? Make another multi.

Another player on your team got banned? Make another multi.

You need someone to menhir king for you, speed settle to secure your cropper, occupy an enemy cropper/ww spot? Make another multi.

The list goes on and on, as many problems there are in TK, the same amount of problems can be solved by simply making another multi.

This is the equivalent of if you could just print your own money, but the punishment for doing it is losing 10% of your total wealth, as if you didn't print more than 10% of your total wealth, and as if you didn't share any of that wealth with your friends and use it to undermine your enemies for the month you had the printer running. And the people impacted got no compensation whatsoever. I'm glad TK is not running anything more than just a video game, they would be seeing the shadows of pitchforks on their walls within a week if they did.

Also, I just want to mention that I find it really funny how TK has no punishment for a kingdom who is cheating whatsoever. They only ever punish the players. So there is literally no risk if you are creating multies to advantage your kingdom as a whole instead of individual players.

Make it so that multies isn't the answer to everything, or they will be all you have left. Let's just hope they don't stop paying you when the rest of the competition leaves.

- Hæim

It depends on how much gold you have available, and how crowded the server is. Croppers almost always have better production than non-croppers if you have the gold to run them. However, if there is more players than there is croppers, then I would advice that you let each player get at the very least 1 cropper for their capital before you grab multiple, unless there is a chance an enemy will take it.

Day 1 gameplay be like:

Quote from iribuya

Can we ever expect Travian Kingdoms Seasons.

2x speed, 4 rounds per year with each a special theme. Like dry-crop server, no wonder server, furious natar server or whatever to break the spell of the game.

I think this is one of the best ideas I've seen for this game in a long time if not ever.

Quote from Killeri

That is quite bold way to push for CPs!
But I like it. I've usually only been doing the Small Celebrations, and never really found the playstyle to keep doing the Large Celebrations consistently, but only occasionally. And that's why I've needed to upgrade the base CP buildings.

Do you think it has been working well for you? And you have been gold-finishing those last levels of Granary and Town Hall, right?

Yes, I actually spent gold on most of the upgrades leading up to getting that first initial large celebration going in each village, then I just let them upgrade with time without spending any more gold. It's a bit of an upfront investment, but because you get the celebration up and running quickly, it means that you will get to the next village even quicker which starts snowballing very quickly.

The question is when do you start and when do you stop because you obviously don't want to end up with 32 villages and no troops nor do you want to end up with 8 villages and no economy to support your troops. My best answer is do the level 10 resource fields and level 10 croplands in 5 villages quest then start rolling out celebrations 24/7 and you stop anywhere from 13 to 18 slots. Do not ignore your kingdoms needs though, if they need troops right now then build troops right now. it doesn't matter if you have 20 slots and your villages get chiefed by the enemy as soon as they reach level 10 resources.

I like rushing level 10 town hall asap to get large celebrations running as soon as possible. Usually within 2 hours of settling a new village. I ignore pretty much everything else until I get to that point, then I start passively levelling up resource fields until they are maxed since you will already have main building level 10 and enough storage to comfortably get to level 10 resource fields if you want to have space to do large celebrations anyways.

If you remove stuff like top 10 and rankings all together, then have players get kicked out of the server after being there for let's say 2 weeks of playing where they are prompted to either join a "ranked" server that lasts longer or start over on the "training" server for another 2 weeks. speed should be either 3x or 5x. Server should also be permanent with no endgame since no account sticks around for more than 2 weeks anyways

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A certain game has this warning every time you boot it up. Maybe just making it clear what your goal is could be enough? I don't think it's too difficult ending up in a kingdom so long that you at the very least are willing to talk to other people. If you are not even willing to do that, you shouldn't be in a kingdom to begin with because if you can't coordinate, you are practically dead weight.

Quote from Unknown

Yes but you cannot have a whole gameworld with all the work and resources behind it for 10 players... it just doesn't work...

Is it not possible to scale down? Is there a large amount of manual work getting a normal server up and running? Since from a players perspective seems like it could all be automated from picking the day it will launch to the day the server ends, so long as it is being kept an eye on.

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 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.

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.

Hæim = Home

I've never used this nickname before I was prompted for a name when I made this account, and the thought behind it was that whenever I clicked on my own villages, I would always be going home

You could actually say that I wasn't Hæim before I made this account

You know what you have achieved, that's the only thing that really matters in the end. Would you just stop playing once you run out of achievements to obtain?

-Hæim

Have the players that wish to communicate join a seperate SS where they can talk, this way they won't be annoying you with constant spam of messages.

Please don't take away the one use the trapper has. It is quite literally the most useless unique building in the game by a long shot.

Quote from ZloDeySan

This forces the player to attack ONLY with walking units.

It doesn't force you to do anything. This is a solution to the problem that is better than just attacking the village with just cavalry. There are other better solutions like just don't attack the gaul that only builds traps, or cat them to the point where they just give up on the server then you can farm them all you want.

Figuring out who is a good farm and who isn't is a part of the game. You don't need to farm to succeed in this game, but it can certainly accelerate success if done correctly, and people have managed to succeed even with traps being the way they are right now. Would this change help anyone become more successful in farming? I don't think so. If anything it might make people realize that the trapper is actually useless, and it will make people just stack up phalanxes in their robber hideout instead and then send them home to wall any incoming raiders, which is a much much better strategy if you want to avoid getting farmed.

At 0.1x a regular support village would only produce 225 crop per hour and a total of 600 total resources per hour. Considering the fact that you would have around 400 pop when you get to that point, the only villages worth settling would be croppers. Also, endgame hammers would be 20k troops at most, and clearing a natarian village and the ww village would be a formidable challenge. Your best bet would be to just level up your capital and have no troops until you get an attack on you, then build all the troops you need to defend that attack, then suicide what is left. The stolen goods from robber hideouts would be quite likely more than half of your total income. It would be different, but I don't know if it would be playable.

What if your king collects those treasures, then you attack your king and get 10% of the treasures as stolen goods again? You can just repeat this for an incredibly high amount of resources each and every time. In other words, this would be exploited a lot.

Quote from Beach Bunny

Just remove banned people from the game server

It would be the best idea if their programs were perfect at detecting cheating players, but sometimes they seem to catch a lot of innocent players who didn't know what they were doing was against the rules, so it would be a good thing to give them a warning before removing them from the server entirely. I think that repeat offenders who get caught with multies on several servers should have stricter punishments than players who just started playing though. The more prestige you have, the harder the punishment should be.