Posts by Hæim#NO

Quote from Unknown

First I will say that one of the reasons we don't published the punishment guidelines is to ensure players don't "calculate" what is worth doing or not.

So if you published them, would there be a way to calculate some form of cheating that would be worth doing?

Shouldn't all cheating not be worth doing, or am I missing a point here?

Also, players are going to figure this out even if you post them or not. There are already players who are testing the limits of what they can get away with and what they can't.

1. Track the multies for at the very least a couple of days, preferrably a week to gather evidence to figure out the perpetrators behind them. Who do they trade, who do they send their def to, who do they get raided by (is it just 1 person or is it several people?) and is that player raiding them getting raided by someone else? Where do the value of the account end up? That's the guy you need to ban. The multies are replaceable, the main account is not. It might seem like this is more work than just banning them on the spot, but trust me when I say that these are the same people doing it over and over again because it works, and it works really really well.

2. Ban the avatar, not the account on just 1 gameworld. Ban them on every gameworld and force them to either stop playing or make a new character with 0 prestige. This way we will know which players are the scum and which players actually deserve the prestige they possess.

It would make it easier to make hammers that specialize in damaging world wonder villages. You would lose out on a bit of killing power and gain more destructive power. The benefit would be that you can maybe get that 1 extra level shaved off of the WW that could change the tide of battle in the endgame, but it could also be the reason why you weren't able to pull through a treasury attack earlier on because you wore that instead of a cavalry helmet for instance. Also, it would make ww hammers a bit cheaper to feed. As for benefits, you would have more options on where you want to take your account. More options means more strategies which means more replayability.

- Hæim

People are too busy playing to talk, we got something to do this time, not just sit and wait for the server to end

I feel like truces don't really make all that much sense anymore now that we have got vacation mode in the game. It only affects the players that currently can't take use of vacation mode, like kings and dukes.

I would like to see a 1 million troop quest. The 100k one is finished before ww even has a chance to spawn, so any troops beyond that can only really be tracked by checking troops lost in light society SS stats, though that is not always accurate, and it only works for def players. That would be sufficient to be able to track it to some extent imo.

Quote from Алёнка Алкашка

I'm just amazed, what are we discussing now? You're not planning a new tribe ... Okay.

Let's throw in a couple of ideas that will not be difficult to implement:

Let's start with the hero: The hero has 4 characteristics, which are fully pumped at level 100 of the hero.

Let's add a hero after level 150, but an additional siege parameter or an additional one. bonus siege weapons. Pumping heroes will be relevant primarily for kings (after all, they are the ones who build the largest hammers). The rest of the players will also think about pumping a new skill.

You can also add talents to the hero, for example, recovery from troops or the chance of additional damage, there are a lot of options.

The buildings:

Add one new building: Temple, which is only built in a village with WW, which casts a blessing on one player and gives a bonus in attack / defense depending on the level of the building once a day (other times are possible)

New items:

I noticed that many big kingdoms like to build big hammers, why not present a helmet for the catapult and ram? Let the player decide if he needs warriors or siege machines! You can also add jewelry: attack / defense rings, necklaces to restore life or summon animals (in a necklace, the hero summons animals once a day and has an increased chance of catching more animals in the oasis)

pour me some more vodka and I’ll come up with so many ideas for 5 of your games.

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I've heard rumors that heroes become cheaper and quicker to revive for every level above 100. Haven't checked it out myself yet though

To start off with, this was just pure curiocity, but after spending about 30 minutes looking into this, I've realized that there are a few issues that I think needs to be resolved actually.

1: Legionnaires, Phalanxes and Spearmen are too cheap/build too quickly.

You can build def units in every village you make at the 1x price cost of building them in a regular barracks, and you can group them up and have them fight as a single fighting force. In the early game they are not too cheap though, but the moment off players have to build in great barracks and great stable to keep up, def players will pull ahead big time since the cost of off units are effectively doubled from that point onwards. This means that even the super cheap off unit clubmen cost 360 resources, almost the same as a praetorian, which is the only def unit I haven't included in this list because I think it's the only def unit that might actually be balanced in terms of cost. I think bringing the other infantry defensive units more in line with praetorians in terms of cost would be a good first step. Just doing something like increasing the cost of all of them by 80 resources each would be a good start. This would also put defensive infantry units more in line with defensive cavalry units, so I don't know why they were this cheap to begin with.

Legionnaires: 305 resources each (example: 95 wood, 65 clay and 145 iron)

Phalanxes: 315 resources each (example: 105 wood, 145 clay and 65 iron)

Spearmen : 320 resources each (example: 170 wood, 65 clay and 85 iron)

Praetorian: 340 resources each (unchanged)

This issue could also possibly be fixed by making the units trained in the Great Barracks and the Great Stable cheaper. As it stands, in the endgame of speed servers, def units are running rampant, and off armies are completely unable to keep up. on 1x servers this is not so much the case though, but most of my experience is from playing 3x and 5x servers, so if someone with more 1x experience would give a few words on this idea, then that would be great

2: Teuton def costs a lot of wood to build. Both spearmen and paladins cost way more wood than any other resource.

I think that one of the reasons why teutons aren't played a lot as def is because of this fact, because it costs way more gold to run a def teuton account compared to a def gaul account, and it's not a whole lot better. A way to change this is to make the teuton paladin cost more clay than it does wood. This is not really going to change the power level of the teutons at the top level, but it will make the barrier for entry for playing def teutons a lot lower, and I think that is the reason why almost no one plays it. Gauls are just a lot more simple in comparison since phalanxes are more balanced in terms of cost, and because of how robber camps work you are almost forced to take balanced 4446 villages when you settle if you don't want to get killed by your own kingdom. This means that as a teuton def you are forced to npc regularly to make up for the excessive amount of clay and iron you have to make up for the huge lack of wood, and since the only other common playstyle that has excess wood is romans building EC and catapults, and since the def teuton also has to compete with off teutons which is way more popular, trading clay for wood on the marketplace tends to be difficult.

Just changing the wood and clay cost around would be sufficient.

Paladins: (170 wood, 330 clay and 200 iron)

One issue with this is that it might seem too similar to the gaul def combo of phalanxes + druids.

Edit: I would also like to mention that just because 1x servers are balanced, does not mean that 3x servers are balanced, because they are both running 2 completely different versions of the game. What do I mean? 1x servers end up having on average 3x as many VP since there are 3 times as many days where VP gets counted. This means that stealing VP on 3x servers is way more significant, and due to this chances of large swings are much more likely on those servers. Also, maintenance on 1x servers and 3x servers is the same. This is actually the direct cause that def is so much stronger on 3x servers compared to 1x servers. Production is 3x as high and training time is 3x as short, but because the maintenance is the same, it means that if you have 20k production after factoring in the production cost on a 1x server, and 60k on a 3x server, the time it takes for the 1x server to run out of resource production is the same as the 3x server takes to run out of production. Why does this matter? Because on 3x servers, as a def gaul player you can more or less run 15 level 20 barracks until the end of the server from day 35, but if you tried to do the same on a 1x server you would end up with too many troops to feed after 20 days of building, and then if you didn't lose a lot of them in battle, you would have to stop production in several villages, reducing the amount of def you will have in total later on. This is where off players finally get a chance to shine because off units are on average stronger than def units per crop spent on maintenance.

Unknown

Have you guys considered rebalancing the troops already in the game? I know that they were made a lot cheaper in kingdoms compared to legends, but the stats of the units has been the same for over a decade now. I guess I'm just curious about whether or not you have considered it, and if so which changes were considered.

I'm pretty sure this is caused by the tribute coffer of the duke not being updated when the duke claims tributes from his governers. I experienced the same thing when I was playing as a king and had a particular duke send me many angry messages that I was not claiming his tributes. Best way to deal with this is by coordinating when your dukes are claiming their tributes since it will very quickly overflow their tributes, particularly if they have a small warehouse in their treasury village.

1k troop limit is really good actually. You are already taking in a player that has no economy since their fields in their only village will get nuked in the process. The number of troops they have should not be a deciding factor whether you want to recruit them or not, you will recruit them based on your estimation of their future potential if you even think that far before recruiting someone. If they have more than 1k troops then you are already doing fine where you are, and if you still want to move then that means you have some kind of enemy near you that is a threat to you, or you were just lazy with getting your menhir done. People already play around menhir by not settling more than 1 village, so they sure can play around not having more than 1k troops as well. The difference is that you only need 1 village to build a hammer, but you can't build a hammer that can deal significant amounts of damage in the next 24 hours if you can't start with more than 1k troops with the exception of the first 14 days of a 1x server, but that's not something you can account for even if you removed all troops completely from the account when you are using the menhir feature.

The thing the 1k troop restriction doesn't remove is the multi account strategy of building up fields high then menhiring over to main account and collect all the resource crates they got back after menhiring. The only real way to combat this is by making it so that you can't raid resources from a player that menhired over for the next week on 1x servers or the next 3 days on 3x servers since by that time, rebuilding fields would give more resources than holding on to the crates, but they could still just rebuild their villages and use them as farm accounts. The issue with this is that this would severely limit early game attacks since pretty much everyone uses the menhir feature in the early game, and thus farming would get hit very hard. It would make it a little bit easier for new players to transition into a new kingdom though since menhiring someone over just to attack them and take their resources would no longer give any profits, and thus you would no longer give new players that kind of experience until after the first week of gameplay, so they will have some time to grow in relative peace even after BP ends. You would still be able to catapult these players and you would still be able to steal tributes from them, including treasures, just not resources they have stored in their warehouse.

How do you define such an item so that there would be no room for misinterpretation? Natarian horn makes sense since it has natarian in it's name, but what would you call this item that would make it impossible for the players to think that it could also be used against anything but Natarians, Robbers and nature if they decide to include that? War horn, as mentioned above would easily be interpreted as being able to be used against player as well, wouldn't it? And also, wouldn't this just make it so that every player would want to get this item? I feel like the game needs more items that are situational like the natarian horn, and not just another scale armor. But at the same time, if you add more items, you make the rest of them more rare as well, since there is a larger pool to pull from.

On another note, I think that the unique item cap should be removed. At the moment you cannot recieve an item from adventures if you already have it in your inventory, or on your person. You have to sell the item before you can get it again. This means that items that everyone want, like club weapon, become even more sparse than other items because once you get an item, or buy an item, you can never get duplicates of said item, thus your account has no chance of supplying that item to the game anymore. If you have proof that contradicts this, then please do present it to me in the form of screenshot of reports and screenshot of inventory. Need to be 2 of the same unique item.

-Hæim

Royal Ascent

Royal Ascent is a new spin on the normal Travian Kingdoms gameplay loop. You start off in a small local feud fighting for supremacy, then you take the friends you made along the way and try to fight to be the first kingdom to reach level 100.

The gameworld is split into 7 relatively equal regions. When you register to a Royal Ascent world, instead of choosing the cardinal direction you want to be placed in like you would on a regular server you instead get the decision to choose between 7 different World Wonders you want to get placed near. No player can settle, attack, send reinforcements, resources or take any other action that could affect players in other regions than the one they started in. You are locked to your area for better or for worse, so make sure you ask your friends which World Wonder to pick so you don't end up in the wrong region on your own.

1. Pyramid

2. Garden

3. Statue

4. Temple

5. Mausoleum

6. Colossus

7. Lighthouse

The gameworld runs like normal, but menhir will be disabled because each of the 7 regions are relatively small, so you will spawn close enough to your friends that they are no more than a short trip with your settlers away almost no matter what.

Gameworld info:

Type: Royal Ascent.

Building and production speed: 3x.

Troop speed: 1x.

Tier 2 items: Day 14.

Tier 3 items: Day 27.

Maximum players per region: approximately 200.

Maximum players per world: approximately 1400.

Night truce: Active for the first 50 days (World Wonder is not affected by night truce).

Menhir: Disabled.

Vacation mode: Governers can activate it for the first 43 days for up to 7 days total during a single server.

Win condition: First World Wonder to reach level 100 wins the server.

Note: Victory points are not relevant for this server type, but treasures still improve selling stolen goods, help producing crop in treasuries as well as being needed to open new treasuries. Also, there will be no map expansion, so once a region is full, it's full.

The world wonder will be available from day 1, and if your kingdom is able to chief it and level it all the way to level 50 before day 50, then you will achieve a Grand Victory.

Grand Victory: Achieved when a player levels the World Wonder to level 50. The kingdom that this player belongs to will be given 25% bonus resource and crop production until day 50 of the server, stacking multiplicatively with every other bonus. Every player that does not belong to the kingdom that won the Grand Victory for their region will get deleted 3 days after the Grand Victory was achieved, or when day 50 arrives, whichever one comes first. They can join the kingdom to mitigate this. If no kingdom achieves a grand victory before day 50, then every player in the region will get deleted, and the world wonder will be made unavailable for other regions to chief. If no kingdom in either region is able to achieve a grand victory, natarians win the server.

World Wonder:

Opens: Day 1

Level 51+ available after day 50.

Build speed: 3x

Natarian attack: every 5 levels, and after reaching level 50 there will be an extra attack that launches on the World Wonder every 24 hours at midnight with the same strength of a level 60 wave until day 50, then it proceeds as normal with extra natarian waves on level 96, 97, 98 and 99.

The Royal Ascent:

Day 50 is the day where the final race begins. A lot of things will happen on this day, so here is the 7 rules of the Royal Ascent:

1: First and foremost, every player that is not in a kingdom that has won a Grand Victory will be removed from the server.

2: You can no longer join a new kingdom, so if you leave your currnet kingdom, you will be on your own for the rest of the server.

3: The king and dukes can no longer abdicate.

4: Every village that is not in the mist will get removed from the world map. This means that even if you are in one of the kingdoms that won the Grand Victory, if you do not have a single village inside of the mist, then your account will get deleted.

5: The 7 regions of the world map open up, and you can interact with players that are in other regions.

6: The level 51 World Wonder upgrade opens up. The race is on!

7: Have fun! Remember that this is just a game, and remember that the person on the other side of the screen is a living human being as well. Treat each other with respect please.

notes:

So, honestly I think this idea is probably super flawed, but I just wanted to put it out there. I think that having something like this makes it way easier for newer players to come into the game in a more manageable enviroment. Having to jump straight into a 1500 player server right away can feel overwhelming, so having something smaller like a 200 player server can feel much more manageble. This also means that you won't have a single kingdom with multiple world wonders, though it is possible that a single team could take 2 wonders by taking control of 2 different regions, but they will not be in the same kingdom no matter what. Something interesting with this is that you could open up so that different regions are available for different nationalities, so you could have 1 region where only french can register, 1 where only spanish players can register etc, and then on day 50 you would have each region duke it out with each other to show which region is the strongest one. Also by deleting villages outside of the mist and limiting the villages to a specific amount of players you can heavily restrict the strength of metas. Every region that is able to level their World Wonder to level 50 before day 50 will also most likely be able to build on every tile of the mist, so no kingdom will be able to completely run away with a server by building 20 million def and making every hammer completely null and void. Biggest con for this is just the amount of enginework that has to be done to make it, but it should be somewhat manageable to make a prototype for this.

Anyways, let me know what you think

The questions section gives "page not found", and usually it is 24 hours countdown before a vacation starts on x3 servers, 1x servers has 48 hour countdown. Is this a new feature, or a typo? Everything else seems fine

For a game centered around kings and kingdoms, there is a serious lack of Royal Regalia involved. My suggestion is to add items that only kings can obtain.

An example could be something like this: You can attach a Royal Sapphire, a Royal Emerald or a Royal Ruby to any tier helmet and it would give the same bonus as that helmet normally would, but it would take on the appearance a variety of different crowns based on what kind of royal gem you used. You can only get these royal gems if you are a king yourself, and you can only get them from long adventures. It could be entirely cosmetic, or it could add some kind of benefit. You could also make it so that you can add these gems to other pieces of equipment as well to make a full royal outfit to suit your cosmetic needs.

Every part of this is up for discussion other than the part that there is a very distict lack of Royal Regalia in this game.

I have a couple of potential solutions

1. You can only menhir to a kingdom that is at the very least 7 days old (3 days for 3x servers)

2. You will keep all resource fields, but you can only menhir if you have a 4-4-4-6 village, and you can only be menhired to other 4-4-4-6 abandoned valleys.

*1 makes it so that for sneak attacks with menhiring players next to an enemy treasury has a longer delay, requiring a king or a duke to settle a new village there before doing the normal activation process. this gives time both to shut down the village before it activates, as well as giving the usual time to react before a menhired player can attack you. You could even make it so that activating a treasury takes 24 hours instead of 12 hours, activating and deactivating treasuries is not really something that should be done on a whim, but should be a large decision made by the kingdom.

*2 This will stop the resource pile boosting, and will also not punish newer players when they menhir after a couple of days of building resource fields. Having to rebuild your resource fields after moving can be a bit of a daunting task because it feels to them like they just wasted the last couple of days of upgrading resources.

First I want to say that I don't think I've ever seen someone who was already under constant attacks when they went into vacation mode not be bombarded again once they leave unless they relocated to somewhere else in the meantime, which they could do without having to wait 24 hours for it to activate. Vacation mode is only really helpful if you are able to stay out of harms way for the duration of the boost to allow you catch up (or in some cases surpass) your peers. Until you do, you will be weaker than them in fighting strength, and be a prime target for attacks because you are also twice as good of a farm now.

The main thing that is being taken advantage of right now is the bonus production you get after the vacation ends. For there to be a reduced advantage for experienced players, and for there to not be any downsides for normal players, I would suggest that you give resource crates instead equal to the amount of production they should have produced if they weren't on vacation based on their villages production as they entered vacation mode. Not at the end of it. This should also scale based on when in the server the vacation is used. A week 1 vacation would set you back much further than a week 10 vacation would since you are already starting to flatten the growth curve. There are other catchup mechanics like adventures giving resources based on time since you registered on the server, but I still think that it should have a bit of extra scaling for the first week or so of the server. Ofcourse, this will not solve the issue with someone being able to build up their cropper, but at the very least it makes it so that people can't just build up 3 villages in a single day to then get almost a weeks extra production that they should not have had.

The second way vacation is used is to be able to sim up before building a large army at thalf the cost, or at twice the normal speed. A fix to this one that both stops veteran players from being able to take advantage of it, and helping newer players would be that you converted a certain % of the resources you should have produced during vacation straight into either def troops, or the base troop of that tribe (clubs, legos or phalanxes) as soon as the vacation ends. If they are def troops then they will also be a little bit more safe from attackers as they leave vacation mode, since they otherwise would have next to no def troops for the first day after leaving vacation mode.

That's what I got for now.

I agree with this and would play on a eunx3 server.

Quote from Skadi

Hi th0mm#NL,

With the vacation mode it should be possible to be offline for a few days, without running the risk that the account is completely destroyed or has become a popular attack target, when you come back.

There is no reward of resources or troops if you use the vacation mode. Wood, Clay and Iron production is paused during the vacation mode and this is the reason why you get the boost after you are back. The same with the troop production, it's paused as well.

The biggest advantage of the vacation mode is, that you can't be attacked. It's possible that some players only need a break from being attacked if they are using the vacation mode. But it's better to have such a break than to delete.

Best regards,

Skadi

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Skadi

Hello there! I would like to refute your claim of there being no rewards for using vacation mode. You said that wood, clay and iron are paused during vacation time, but crop is not. You can start activating vacation as soon as the server starts and then rush to settle your second village. If you settle your second village is a 15c village, then when vacation starts you will still get the full crop production of the cropper. this means that you can build up the village without getting any attacks with next to no drawbacks until your vacation runs out.

If this was all there was to vacation mode, then I wouldn't have minded that it exists, but because you get double resource production and half the time to train troops, the whole thing goes haywire. You might be thinking that since you have a 15c village you won't be getting any bonuses from the vacation boost, but that's not true at all. in the 7 days that you were on vacation, you will have been upgrading buildings and resources and passively accumulated culture points to the point that when you get out of vacation you can settle up to 4 villages in the same day, and given that you might have over 100k crop production in your cropper already by this point, you can upgrade all these villages to level 10 all resources in a matter of a couple, if not a single day. So, what does that make your production for the next 6 days look like? You now have 4 villages with 6 croplands producing normal amounts of crop, but double of every other resource, so it's as if every 6c village you have has 30 tiles instead of the regular 18, and they are half the effective cost of what they normally would be. So you are now sitting with what is equivalent to 8 villages worth of resource production, and 4 villages worth of crop production as well as a very highly upgraded 15 cropper. Now, what do you do with these resources?

What if you let's say decided that you wanted to build some troops, how much could you build? You have already spent 1 day after vacation mode ended on doing resource and infrastructure upgrades in your support villages, so you have 6 days left. But this is not 6 regular days, this is 6 days where you build troops in half the time. what does this mean? first and foremost, if you just want to build troops efficiently, you could just queue in level 20 barracks, stable and workshop and ignore the greats, and you would still be keeping the same pace as someone who is building in both great barracks and great stable, but you will also build siege in half the time that they do, so it's as if you get a free built in great barracks, great stable and great workshop until vacation ends. The sillyness starts when you start building troops in great barracks and stable as well, because all of a sudden you can get 12 days of troops built out of level 20 barracks, level 20 stable, level 20 workshop, level 20 great barracks, level 20 great stable and ready to use on day 15 of the server, and because you have the production equivalent to 7 villages and a high cropper, you can actually afford to do this to some extent as just a governer.

So, how does the math work here exactly? When you activate vacation mode, you kinda save up resource production to claim it later. Imagine that from the second before vacation mode starts and the second it ends, there is just 1 second between them. Now, what would happen if all of a sudden in that 1 second your total production went from 1000 to 100 000, and you gained enough culture points for 4 new villages. That is the true strength of the current vacation mode.

So, how would I go about fixing this? Simple. Make it so that you can't upgrade buildings in vacation mode. This whole strategy relies on that to be able to function, and it's not really something that should hinder someone who is actually going on vacation. There is still a way to use it by going in vacation mode the second you start building an endgame hammer, and just spend all the crop you have extra on building up queue until you exit and then spend all resources on keeping queues going. this would make it so that you only have to pay 1/4 of the resources in maintenance if you are planning on building the hammer for just 2 weeks, but if it's longer then it will accumulate back up quickly.

But still, why do I love using vacation mode so much? I have only used it on 2 servers so far, and it has been a very enjoyable experience. Why is that? It's not because I'm not getting attacked. I honestly wouldn't care if I did because that's just how things are normally. What I love about vacation mode is that you can customize your playstyle to a whole new level that you have never been able to do before. It adds a new way to play the game through sacrificing your early game for a stronger mid game, and I think that this is something that should be encouraged as most people don't really understand the strength of timing pushes and power spikes. If there was a way to make it more obvious that you should be building troops right now, or you should be building villages right now, then that would help a lot for a lot of inexperienced players when it comes to teaching them how to play the game better.

So in a weird way, this oversight of yours added new levels of depth to the game to explore by the ones that found it, and gave us a new fun experience compared to the way travian kingdoms has been for the past years.

Be2-e4 The wave limit is just a limit to the number of attacks that you can send out of each village per second. You can circumvent it by sending more attacks at different speeds to land on the same second. So for instance if you launch 4 attacks, then level up tournament square once, then send 4 more attacks you can land 8 attacks in the same second. And since they weren't launched on the same second, the game won't prevent it.