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If all else fails, you can always join your enemy’s alliance to stop a farmer. The first time I did this I felt really stupid, but I came to realize that it isn’t a bad way to find a good alliance since players who are good at Travian are always raiding and driving everyone else crazy.

If you want to join your enemy’s alliance make sure you do it right. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when joining your attacker’s alliance:

?    Your allegiance to your former team of player is important. Make sure you leave it on as good a standing as possible. Have you helped other players in your alliance? If you have contributed in any way to your previous union they will be less likely to pound you with catapults when you leave theirs for another.

?    Try to get into an alliance that can protect you and is stronger than your previous one. This means if the player who is raiding you is inferior to most of the players you are teamed with, it’s a better strategy to stand up to him/her with reinforcements from friends. Always move upward as you change from one team to the next.

?    Be discreet. Even at the beginning of the server, one small slip up where your name is found on two forum application threads can make a bigger player want you dead. Especially speed servers where everything happens faster. Keep confidential messages closed and only post/send a message when you meet the requirements of the alliance you want to join. A player who takes 2 weeks to join is more likely to be attacked than one taking 2 days to join and get in.

These tips go beyond the obvious polite words, being nice and having a team spirit tips that are mentioned on every alliance page. The three tips above come from experience and can completely ruin your game if you get them wrong. Make sure you do your homework.

In order to found additional villages in Travian one must have the required number of culture points. In your Town Hall you can host parties to build more culture points (CP) faster. This tip is integral to getting ahead of other players.

Once your fields are at levels 6-7 you should build a Town Hall. You will need to bring an Academy to level 10 as well as your main building. This is an excellent thing to begin doing in villages that already have a level 10 Residence and sufficient storage resources coming in from raids. Hosting parties will seem like it’s a drain on resources at first. Even the big parties that are hosted in a level 10 Town Hall are expensive. But think about it, more CP = more villages = more fields = more resources = more troops (and parties).

This is the formula that you must keep in mind.   In the first 3 months of a regular round it is arguably more important to host parties than build troops. This means if you have the choice to host a big party, or build 350 troops, first host the party and then focus your remaining resources on troops.   On the speed server I usually settle a new village every 3 days, and I’m not even hosting as many parties as I should be. On the regular server that would translate into a new village every 9 days. This strategy accounts for incredible internal strength, as long as you build troops later on as well.   Town Halls are expensive only because they are extremely valuable.

Travian has a special unit referred to as the “hero”. Unlike the other units your hero can gain experience with every battle that he engages in and kills troops. Even if your hero dies he will still get experience from the troops that were killed.

If you are an offensive player, attacking units and building up your hero can be very easy, since you have the right kind of units that need to escort him into battle. However, as a defensive player this can be a problem since defending units make terrible attackers.

How do you solve this problem?

Having a hero and making him powerful ads a fun element to the game that should not ignored. For the first half of the server however, you will have to accept that with the exception of raiding oases, your hero will not level up very much. About halfway through the server things will change.

As a defensive player you can always have an offensive army even though it is not your primary goal. Halfway through the server bring your blacksmith to 20 in one of your villas and upgrade your best offensive unit to level 20 (imperians, axmen, swordsmen). At the same time start building a “mini-hammer” in that village. I’ve seen some pretty impressive 30,000 “mini-hammers” that build level 20-25 heroes.

Accept that you will have to wait until half of the server is done. This is because you need to have enough internal strength to focus on both offensive and defensive troops in an effective way.

Good luck!

There are a few signs that distinguish a good alliance from a bad (or poorly run) one. With the reliance on collaboration that Travian has, one would think that no alliance could be imperfect however this is not always the case. Here are some of the signs you should be looking out for when considering joining.

Are there any mentions about the word “farm”? Of course no alliance wants farms. But usually, an alliance that even acknowledges that being farmed is something it wants to have little to do with is admitting that it has been a problem in the past. Experienced players farm more than they are farmed and know how to deal with players who farm them.

Whether the forum is hosted internally or externally will indicate the level of commitment that the leaders of the alliance have toward their members. Externally hosted forums are usually much better; but not always.

The requirements to join an alliance tell a lot about the kind of communication that takes place within the alliance and how effective it is. Does the alliance interview applicants (placed as sitter, they check out your account)? Do they require that you use a third party messaging software such as Skype, MSN or Yahoo? Do they ask for a reference within the alliance?

These requirements show consideration that goes beyond the simple questions like “What is your troop/population ratio?” and “Are you a defensive/offensive player?”

Be on the lookout for signs that an alliance was founded by committed mature players who know how to run a good team of players.

Harsh realities aside, there are many good reasons why you would want to be farmed at the beginning of your experience playing Travian. When most players leave the beginners? protection which lasts 3-7 days they get farmed for weeks. However the most farming takes place at the beginning of a server. As time wears on the players who stole everyone else?s resources have gotten sufficiently ahead that they don?t need to rely on raiding as much. But what have you learned from being farmed?Since it is highly probable that you will be farmed at the beginning of the game you need to prepare yourself mentally. Why would a player want to be farmed? In other words, why would they want to have their resources stolen from them by another player?1.     Being attacked at the beginning of the game makes you think about troops early on. If your villages are isolated from all others you are much less likely to build a large army and think offensively. Getting raided puts you in the right frame of mind you need to be in so that you will have bigger hammers than the other players around you. 2.     You build up good defence. Most players don?t have sufficient defence. They may build offensive troops, but they don?t have the defence troops to back themselves us. 3.     Be farmed brings you closer to other players in the game. Travian cannot be played as a single player. You must work with others in order to survive. If you are being farmed you will need to call on others for help to fight your attacker off. This builds rapport with the other players around you. It also develops team work.

While your family might describe Travian as being ?mindless? and ?for kids,? there is no doubt that the game runs best when older and mature players play the game. So what can you do to appear as smart and experienced as you can? Here are a few pointers:1)    Village Names: Make your village names something that follows a series or group of words. For example, you could start with January, February, March, etc. . . Or, you could do Death Star, Endor, Tatoonie, etc. . . What you are communicating to other players is that you are a smart player and know that you will be covering all the planets/months eventually. This sends a ?big? message to others. 2)    When sending troops to raid with, send them in batches of 100 or 1000 rather than odd numbers like 493 or 253. If you send a nice round number it looks like you had 6000 troops to pick from and divided them equally. If you send 253 it looks you sent off all you have. 3)    Spelling and Grammar: Everyone appreciates properly spelled words with punctuation in the right places. No big player is going to think twice about a message like this: ?supp dud plz plz plz stop rading me!!!? It does not bode well for your public appearance. 4)    Don?t spam people who are raiding you. Even if they are attacking you and sending catapults, you should respond in a civil manner. Send one message and follow up with a second one a day later if you do not get a reply. 5)   Think Big and Kick Ass: Trump?s book under this title encourages his business audience to think in a big way. You can do the same in Travian. Send 400 scouts instead of 20; scout all the people in your area instead of scouting 2 or 3 rounds each day. These points will make you appear like someone who means business and is an experienced player.

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).