let's play

Playing on the Travian speed server can undoubtedly be one of the funniest experiences because things happen so fast. You can finally justify building an extra village in a crazy location or suiciding your army on someone’s village because it doesn’t take weeks to rebuild.

What are some of these fun things that you can do to make you smile and laugh as your conquer other players? (Warning: Some of these tips are downright hateful)

·         Build a village right next to a farm. If you have a farm that gives you over 25,000 wood/clay/iron/crop every day you may consider building a village right next to it to get more raids in every day.

·         Build a village away from your cluster but close to your friends or alliance. This way you can farm new players and destroy new hammers. Having a “hybrid” village that destroys everything around has been a source of fun on my account.

·         Rename your village names “1, 2, 3, etc. ” Almost every player has numbers at the beginning of his/her villages so that they can be accessed and referenced easily on the keyboard. However doing this will give you at least one shipment of free resources each week from players who accidentally send you resources originally intending to send them to one of their villages.

·         Zero a village. I know this isn’t very rational, but sometimes when I’m having a bad day I’ll just take it out on a player on Travian. If you have 1000 catapults, there’s no reason why you can’t experiment or destroy a village in 8 seconds. What’s one village anyway?

·         Cranny up x 10. If you have a village that someone near you is trying to chief, you can always destroy some of the more important buildings and replace them with crannies. There is nothing more humiliating than stealing a village that has 12 level 10 crannies. Or better, yet, destroy your own village completely because you don’t want it turning over to the wrong hands.

Ever want to know all the intricate details about something before you jump into it? Well chiefing a village in Travian sure can feel like a pretty big task considering everything that needs to be lined up for it to work properly. Here are some things you probably did not know.

·         Your chiefing attacks are more effective when they come from a village where a big party is being held.

·         If you use the 10% offensive bonus from Travian Plus loyalty goes down faster.

·         No matter how perfect your plan is, something will almost always go wrong. Have a backup plan in the residence is rebuilt or your chiefs are killed.

·         You can build 3 chiefs with a level 20 palace, destroy the palace and build it elsewhere allowing you to build the palace elsewhere and build 3 more chiefs.

·         When you take over a village, the upgrades and researches are all undone. However the buildings that you upgraded them in are all in-tact.

·         You can send 2 chiefs in one attack and get the same % decrease of loyalty as though you had sent two separate chiefs in two separate attacks.

·         Chiefs can be safely stored in a Gaul’s trap. Provided of course that the trapper itself is not demolished or the village destroyed.

·         Your friends can help you chief a village. If for example you have one chief and you want to take/conquer a village, you can have your friend use his three chiefs to lower the village’s loyalty. Then you can do the final attacks and take the village.

·         Chiefing one village with 5 chiefs may be impressive, but chiefing three villages in one day with 7 – 8 chiefs is doable and even more effective.

·         While conquering villages is a good economy-wise decision, it can also be a very effective end game solution for stealing crop boosters and starving enemy armies.

Farming in Travian can be fun; however there comes a certain point in your “farming career” where you can make some really stupid mistakes that cause you more grief than the resource that you steal do you good. What are these traps? How does one avoid them? Read on.

·         My target will never grow: If the person you are raiding is active they are growing. They likely have several crannies set up and as soon as they have troops in their village they send them somewhere safe. Scout out the surrounding villages near your farm to be sure his/her troops are not getting ready for a major assault on your village.

·         Raiding at the same hour every day: If you farm a player at the same time every day they will make sure they spend down or send their troops out during those times. To maintain inconsistency, raid your farms when you get up to go to the bathroom in the night. Your wife may think you’re crazy but you can assure her that you are being considerate (of your troops).

·         Oasis/Reinforcements: Some farms will store their troops in your oasis. If they do so, you will be feeding them. Storing troops in a village is very obvious. However storing them in an oasis is not. Throw a quick glance at your rally point statistics so that you know what troops are in your village.

·         Neglect to read a farm’s profile: When you are farming 50 or more farms every day it’s easy to forget to look at their profile page. Some farms are being protected by bigger alliances or players. You don’t want to wake up to find you had 3 villages catapulted to zero because you forgot to read a farm’s profile and scooped up 150 crop. Be aware of who you are raiding and who is messaging you.

In order to expect another play to willingly send you resources in exchange for protection or not raiding him at all you must go about it tactfully. Here are some of the steps that you may need to cover in order to convince someone to do ‘work’ with you.

·         Do not ask for resources for the entire game. No player wants to have to do that. Instead ask for 1hr’s worth each day for a 2 or 3 weeks or less. This way you both win.

·         Be honest and respect your vassals. Don’t chief the village of one of your vassals. Most of the time it doesn’t matter because you have 100,000 troops and your farm has less than 100. However, you never know who will pick up and learn how to play the game and come back to haunt you later on.

·         Appeal to the human side of your farm/vassal. Don’t appear like a robot to them. Give them the benefit of the doubt that you’re human and that you can reason with them.

·         Vassals/Farms are other human beings. There is no reason to be disrespectful, unkind or hateful to anyone in Travian. A player may be going through hard times in Real Life (RL). Try to be understanding if you choose to communicate with farms.

Most players don’t bother with vassals because they’d rather send 1000 Theutates Thunder to scoop up all the resources. Having a vassal is another fun strategy that ads to the fun of playing Travian and dominating over other players (if you enjoy that sort of thing).