Offensive Gaul Guide (Speed) Note: I have began trying to start out on new servers with a very reliable dual before I choose where I am going to start. Start here… http://forum.travian.com/showthread.php?t=88959 If you chose to go at this alone if can still be done. This guide should only be followed by a moderately to highly active player (i.e. 8-14 hours to 14-18 hours) I can not stress finding an active dual enough, EDIT: c69 feels I have written the same things. I disagreee but would like to add a link to his guide for people wanting to read both. http://forum.travian.com/showthread.php?t=68131 I have added a differing view portion of the guide at the bottom which stats differences and why we do not agree, Exact numbers will be updated as I go through my next account. Preface: I started off mostly playing very aggressive Teuton. I found them to be brain-deadingly easy to play, so I decided to try and use my techniques as Teuton and implement them into a Gaul account. This has been HIGHLY successful and I wanted to share how I did it. Every account I have ever had has been in the top 10 at some point in the server life, this includes several of my offensive Gaul test accounts, top 2 week 2 in my current one =) Theory: I see the server life as having 3 stages, I know many of the more experienced player will say this is obviously but I felt I had to be said because MANY people I have spoke to do not fully understand this. Within these stages certain things should be done, and certain things should be avoided at all costs. This guide will focus mainly on stage one as I believe it is the one where there should be no swaying away from. Stage 2 and 3 are where your own play style start to kick in and you decided where to steer your account. Stage 1 (Day 1 to ~Day 60) This to me in by far the most important stage, I believe most people make their biggest mistakes in this stage. It is the difference between a Top 10 account and a Top 1000 account. DO NOT BUILD EMBASSIES/ DO NOT CREATE NAPS/ DO NOT BUILD WALLS/ DO NOT BUILD TRAPS/ ONLY CREATE “RAIDING” UNITS. In speed I believe it is best to start day 1, normal server I think it is day 3 but that is a different story I will go into in a “Normal” server guide if this one gets good reviews =) The most difficult and important days in your new life as a Gaul raider are the day leading up to the training of your first TTs. Day 1 (BP) – Build ONLY resources tiles. NOTHING else I can not stress this enough some people read this and will think nothing else means take your MB to lvl 3. NOTHING else but resources squares. Toward the end of Day 1 your BP will be coming to an end. Here I suggest going straight up the quest-master chain through and choose the Marketplace path. SAVE THE FREE GOLD! If you are a gold user you can extend production but if you are not a gold user save it. Continue building resources tiles only. Pic Afer Day 1:  NOTE: The reason we save the gold is for incoming attacks. Using a spread sheet figure out what is cost to buy a couple resources tiles reallocate the funds using the 1:1 NPC trader. Because I can almost guarantee you will get an attack and have to use the NPC trader I usually keep a 2:! Lumber: Iron offer on the market place. Hey, it’s not much but you want to have everything at your disposal working for you at once. NOTE: In normal servers I would chose Military and raid with Phalx but I have found in speed that even inactives log on and at minimum they get there rat. It takes 15 Phalx to kill a rat without losing anything, And that doesn’t even take into account if they have any troops. In my opinion it’s a waste of resources and time unless you are on a normal server. Again if I get good reviews I will be creating a “Normal” server guide. Day 2 – When your resources tiles get to around 5-6 you should start your journey to training TTs. You have already finished MB requirements in the quest-master chain, So time to build the requirements for TTs. RP, Barracks lvl3, Academy lvl 5, BS lvl 3, Stables lvl 3. You can do this in any order you’d like, As nothing else should be trained or built until this is done. You should have nothing in your village at this point besides the prereqs for TT training, and resource tiles. NOTHING, no troops yet, no embassy, no walls, no researching Swords or Paths. Nothing but TTs prereqs and resources. Now that luck part comes in (well not all lucky, most smart early raiders try to stay away from Gauls.) We are now saving for TTs training, IF you are attacked you should still have enough gold to NPC trade for resources tiles. If you start to run out of gold you may finally have to start building up that Gaul cranny, Most often this has not happened to me, but it has once. The raiding quickly stops when the Teuton finds TTs raiding him. Once you’ve trained TTs it’s off to the races. Intelligent Raiding: Here is probably the most important part of the guide. “Intelligent” raiding is not hard but many struggle with staying on task. STAY ON TASK!!! Stage 1 in the game is not for war, or for making enemies. It is for collecting as many resources as possible to prepare for war later. Be very smart with who you raid and when you chose to do so. With your first 2 TTs start raiding inactives. On speed they should be ~pop 20 stick to Teutons and Roman. This was the biggest difference I found when switching from Teuton to Gaul is that Traps are awful for your TTs. I could just overwhelm a Gaul with clubbies before early game to free troops. This will come later so be patient. Just stick to Teutons and Roman. TTs move extremely fast so if your inactive is being raided look outward rather than attacking larger neighbors, Again this will come later. Once you have a raiding force of ~20 TTs you should be able to follow back just about any clubbie raiding group and make an offensive Teuton a very grumpy player. I usually train 1 phlx and only one, He is used for timing Teuton attacks. (becoz math iz hard). My raiding groups usually consists of 2 TTs – Inactives 5-10 TTs to pop under 100(non Gauls) and I will always scout player larger than 100. Path should be build when you have a raiding force of around 75 TTs. KEEP RAIDING EVERYTHING YOU CAN, CONSTANTLY. Priority order for training/building is going to be building TTs and with anything extra you want to be building resources tiles. Again nothing else but this. We are not going to be building an embassy/walls/Traps/ect. until later in Stage 2. Note: I have began trying to start out very server with a reliable dual before I choose where I am going to start. Start here… http://forum.travian.com/showthread.php?t=88959 If you chose to go at this alone if can still be done but will be much harder for you. I have attained Top 20 without a dual but at the expense of many hours of sleep. If you go at it alone, I will suggest you build your cranny up but still no defensive units, they are just going to be wasted if clubbies come a’knockin. You will get to be a high enough pop where players avoid you like that plague. Gaul traps and crannies have bad reputation and this will come in very handy for you, Until then you must be active, very active. If you chose to go at this alone the single biggest mistake I see people making is leaving troops in their village when they sleep. Think of your TTs as your life force. Send them away 8-9 hour (round trip) while you sleep. If you are going to the store or work/school send them away and give yourself time so when you get back you know they are safe. I can not stress the point of not leaving them in your village enough. Just don’t do it. Next moving day! Were moving on out =)
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Friday, April 10, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Travian combat strategies
In this travian combat strategy guide I will go through a couple of basic combat strategies everyone has to know to play travian well. The strategies and tecniques here will be used from day one and throughout the whole game.
Dodging
I guess this is the most important one to know, and I guess pretty much everyone who’s reading this know what it is. Anyways though, it means sending your army out of your city when another player attacks to avoid a fight and avoid loosing troops. You will be doing this all the time, as you never want to defend your city with offense troops, so you always dodge unless you have defensive troops there with them or you’re certain it’s just a tiny attack that won’t hurt your offense force at all.
Countering
This one is also very important, but many new players don’t know about it. I see all the time players having their clubs killed by my horses and just calling me lucky for hitting them at the exact time they return. It has nothing to do with luck at all, and it’s quite easy using the right tools. I suggest you bookmark this site. It’s webpage where you can put in the starting times and figure out when the army reaches it’s home. First I’ll let you know how to do it when you have troops that have a different speed than the troops the other player attacks you with. Usually you know what kind of troops are coming at you when you see how long time it takes for the attack to reach you. At least in the beginning this is easy, as teutons will have clubs, romans imperians and gauls phalaxes.
Say you have an incoming attack at 2.00.00 pm, just to make it easy. This is from a teauton, so you know how fast his troops move. You have a bunch of imperians yourself, and you wisely decide that it’s better to counter the attack and hit his army at home than it is to defend your own village. Clubs have horrible defense after all. You go to the travel time calculator and type in your own as well as your enemys location and 2.00.00 pm as the starting time, the calculator will then show you when your enemys clubs will be home, say thay are at home at 2.30.00 pm. Now you know you have to send out your imperians so they reach your enemy at exactly 2.30.01 pm, one second after he gets his clubs home, so that he has no chance of sending them away. (Sending them at 2.30.00 might work too, but it’s a gamble and 1 second is good enough) Anyways, now you remember the time 2.30.01 pm, and you type that into the calculator and chose end time instead of starting time, now the calculator will show you when you have to send your imperians to reach there at this time. This will be at some time before 2.00.00 pm as imperians are slower, just look at the exact same time in the calculator and launch your counter attack at this time. If you have say IEs to counter with, you’d launch the attack later as the IEs are much faster than clubs, in fact they are twice as fast.
What if you both have clubs or other type of troops that move at the same speed? Well, then you can’t use this method. What you have to do then is to first dodge and then counter, and the best you can possibly do is to get it like 3 seconds after your enemy returns. That will be good enough against most players though, so I suggest that you still do it. If your enemy arrives at 2.00.00 pm as before, send out your own army say 39 seconds before, at 1.59.21. Then you wait 20 seconds exactly and click the red x to return it home. Now it will return at 2.00.01 pm, one second after your enemys attack has passed by. No you move quick, have another browser window open and send it at your enemy right away. The faster you are with this the harder it will be for your enemy to save his army.
How about if your enemys troops are twice as fast as yours? Well that’s too bad for you, you can’t counter anything that’s twice as fast as you or more, as you’d have to launch your attack at the same time or before your opponent launches his. So unless you can read your enemys mind you have no chance of doing this. All you can do is either research a faster type of troop or build defensive troops to have in your village.
Fake attacks
Fake attacks are attacks that are not real, kinda obvious I guess? They are very real for the one troop that is sent into death though, but who cares. Sometimes you don’t want your enemy to know when your real attack comes so you send out one troop to attack him with now and then, and then suddenly you send your whole force. Alliances also sometimes uses this in wars to attack all their enemy alliances at the same time, so the enemy alliances have no idea what player to defend as they are all under attack. Fakes and real attacks are mixed up this way to confuse your enemys and avoid their defense walls. When sending catapult waves this is also usefull, as you don’t want your target to know which of the hits in the wave is the real clearing attack, so you send a bunch of lone catapults first to confuse him.
Travian starting tutorial
If you want to be successfull and become one of the biggest and most powerfull players in Travian you have to start out farming. I’m sure you already know what that is, but anyways, it means attacking your neighbours for resources. It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing teuton, roman or gaul, they all grow fastest with farming their neighbours. I’ve seen in a lot of of guides where the writer claims the best way to play roman or is to start out slowly building your resource fields and then cranny up, but that’s just plain wrong. With farming you’ll get a good portion of resources from tens to hundreds of villages instead of just one, can’t argue with that. Teutons are more suited for farming from the very start, but all tribes can do it and should do so from the start.
Farming your neighbourhood is closely related with dominating and taking control of your neighbourhood. Teutons can do so from the start, trying to kill off the troops of their neighbours with their clubs, while romans and gauls should avoid conflicts untill they get TTs(theutates thunders) and EI(equites imperatoris). That means depending on which tribe you play you’ll have some different goals from the start, but they all lead to the final goal of farming and dominating your neighbourhood. By your neighbourhood I mean your 7×7 from the very start and expanding it gradually till your 21×21 or possibly even further. I don’t think anyone should start building infrastructure and run parties to get a second village untill this goal is reached.
When creating your account the first thing you should do is to check your area for oases and croppers. I wouldn’t want to stay in an area without at least one 25% crop 25% of something else oasis in your 7×7. There should also be at least one 15 cropper with crop oases in your 13×13, preferably more, and also a few more 9 croppers and 15 croppers in your 21×21. I prefer starting the server 4 or 5 days late so I don’t start in the middle where there usually is a lot of active players, and also so that I can start farming when I’m in protection, but that is up to you. My guides will work for you in either case.
One more thing which is really important is to not get your troops killed. In the beginning there is no reason to have your troops in your village when you’re being attacked, in fact you should never have them at home, they should always be busy raiding. Send them away to some village far away when you’re not active, and if someone attack you just spend all your resources and they will get nothing. This is especially important for teutons as the clubs are horrible for defence, so don’t defend with them, attack with them. Another reason not to have your army at home at any time is to not let anyone find out the size of it, especially for romans and gauls this is important. The other players in the area will expect nothing untill you raid them with a huge army and kill all their troops.
About alliances from the start, don’t join any. You’ll just limit the number of villages you can farm. Usually the alliances who offer people to join them from the start who they don’t know have no clue what their are doing and will just slow you down. Just reply that you will think about their offer and get back to them at a later stage. Try to stay out of politics and conflicts from the start, focus on the main goals, killing the armies of other farmers and domiating and farming your neighbourhood efficiently.
When raiding you can start out sending as little as 2 troops as teuton or roman and 4 as a gaul. Increase this by one if you think they have this rat that they get in the reward program. As soon as you get the report you send out another raiding party and repeat untill you don’t get max resources anymore. Start out with villages with less than 15 pop as chances are they don’t have troops, most romans and gauls less than 30 pop won’t have troops either. Also take note of when players come of protection so that you can launch a raid at them at that very moment if it looks like they are inactivce. Some of those may have maxed warehouses and granarys and you want to be the one getting all that loot. If you start loosing troops increase the size of the raiding party a little, but 3-4 troops usually not for not loosing any unless the target has a high level residence and wall.
When killing off your competitors troops try to do it in a way so that you loose as little of your own troops as possible. As gaul and roman you should attack clubs with your horses, and counter any attach made on you, don’t try to defend it with your defence troops as that will cost you a lot more. To counter efficiently you’ll have to hit your enemys troops exactly after the time they return home, use one of those travel time calculation tools you’ll find online. As a teuton you might have to send your clubs out, then call them back after the enemy attack to then send them out countering. This makes it hard to time it closely, but do your best, even if your enemy has a 4-5 seconds to dodge your counterattack he still may not make it. Be carefull so that your enemy can not use the same tactic against you, that means, don’t attack a player you know have a lot of fast cavallery with slow troops like clubs.
Travian tips the crop lock
I haven’t been writing here in a long time, so I thought I should just write a short post about a travian tip here now. I just got the idea since it’s just happened to me on the server I’m playing at. I’m just playing the account there solo, and recently I haven’t had much time to look after it.
Well the travian tips of today is the crop lock. It’s very annoying since you basically have to spend a lot of gold to fix your village again, and if you only have one village left and don’t have any friends to help you, you’re really in trouble.
What you do to crop lock a village is pretty easy, you just catapult away all their crop fields, as well as the mill and bakery. If it’s a large village, they will now be minues several hundre crop per hour. And without either having people send resources to them, or NPC changing resources themselves, they can’t build anything. You should also bomb their warehouse and granary when doing this, as well as the main building, so that rebuilding takes a long time without speed building, and so that they can’t get more than 800 of each resource sent to them at a time.
Troop tool to manage alliance troops
Troop tool is a really usefull tool for managing the troops of your whole alliance. With this tool you can easily check how many troops are available to reinforce a village in x amount of time, you don’t have to send out messages to your whole alliance and ask them.
The tool basically shows you the troops of all the players in your alliance in a list, and you can easily sort this list seeing who has the largest sweep, the most catapults, most defense and so forth. All you have to have your players do, is to log in to the tool and past their rally point page. Then all their troops and where they are at the time will be added.
You can also put the players in your alliance into groups, and give the group leaders access to the info on the troops the player in their group have. It’s a good idea not to give too many players access to the whole alliance information, in case you happen to have spies in your alliance.
The tool can be downloaded here: http://laffers.net/works/trooptool.php
Travian Cropper Guide
In this travian cropper guide I’ll try to explain how to use a cropper most efficiently, and what you should look for when trying to decide which cropper to chose as your capital.
Well just to start, if anyone don’t know what a cropper is, it’s one of these villages that have 9 or 15 crop fields. Most people refer to these as a 9 cropper and a 15 cropper. Anyways, a 15 cropper is what we will focus on here. Almost all successful players chose to make a 15 cropper their capital, and the reason for that is to optimize resource production. Cause of the 50% bonus oases as well as two bonus buildings being available for crop production, you get much more resources total if you chose a 15 cropper as your capital.
Another reason to chose a 15 cropper as your capital, is to have somewhere to store your attacking troops, your sweep that is, without going heavy into minus crop production. On a normal speed server I usually also build the sweep in my 15 cropper capital, so that even when it’s out attacking there is no or at least not a lot minus in crop production. On a speed server I try to build my attacking troops in a village just beside my 15 cropper capital, preferably another 15 or 9 cropper if available, and just store the troops in the capital when I’m not using it.
The reason for building your sweep in another village on a speed server is to double the troop production using the great barracks and the great stable. This is when you have 20 or so villages, until that you probably won’t have enough resources to train troops in the great buildings. On a normal server you got to have a lot more villages to produce in both the regular and the great buildings, since the resource production is three times lower, so usually you can just take the easy route and build the sweep in your capital and don’t worry about great barracks and stables.
I hope these tips were usefull, and feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions or comments.
Travian village placement tips
ust a few travian village placement tips here. Seems some players just place their villages completely randomly, often too far away from each other for no appearent reason, so I thought I’d write down some stuff on what to look for when building new villages.
1.Build them as close as possible to each other.
This is usually a good idea, as the closer the villages are to each other the quicker it is to transport both resources and troops between them. Generally you’d like your village number 2 to be the closest 15 cropper though, preferably one with 2 or more crop oases, and then you build your next villages close to this one.
1.Build them as close as possible to each other.This is usually a good idea, as the closer the villages are to each other the quicker it is to transport both resources and troops between them. Generally you’d like your village number 2 to be the closest 15 cropper though, preferably one with 2 or more crop oases, and then you build your next villages close to this one.
2.Place them where you get most out of your oases.
As you probably know there are several types of oases in the game, 25% of every resource, 25% of two types or resources as well as the 50% crop oases. If you have a wood oase close to you, chose to found the village on a tile where there is 5 wood, to get the most out of it. Just click all the tiles till you find one.
3.Take the 15 and 9 croppers in your 14×14 quickly.
These villages are very usefull, and it’s worth having a little longer distance to a village if it’s a good 9 or 15 cropper. If you use gold I’d advice you to take just 15 and 9 croppers in the beginning before you build any other types of villages.
This is all for now, feel free to leave comments or questions.
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