Travian Speed 3x
Slikk Huisenga
Basic Tips, Tricks and knowledge
Depending on how far you are along the server, there will be countless situations where you will be attacked. The following are some of the mechanics of attacking. They may be simple points, but it is extremely common to see experienced players falling foul of one of these:
Your Alliance
With the individual strengths, the alliances in question are also important. Depending on how active you and the alliance want to be, a good alliance will be using instant messaging services like skype, IRC, MSN or even a speaking client like x-fire, ventrillo.
Finally, the situation of the attack is incredibly important. The type, strength and speed of attack and persistence of the attacker are dependant on whether he wants your resources, your troops dead, your city in ruins or just taking your city. These targets slowly shift as the game goes along. Be wary of each situation as there are rules which can be used to your advantage later on. For example, taking a village requires the attacking army to be stationed inside the taken village. The army is at the most vulnerable at this point.
Your own targets determines many aspects of your actions. Mostly it will just be to stop the attacks. However, early on, you should be aiming to wipe out the attacker too. A good player will always be trying to control their area and you should be no exception.
Browser selection
Its important to note that some internet browsers do not mix well with travian. I personally hold IE with utter contempt and use firefox instead. Others have mentioned opera as acceptable. Although this is mainly for attacking efficiency, its important to be comfortable with your browser and its page loading speed and its tab system (you NEED tabs with shortkeys to skip between them if you want to be a decent player)
Mentality and Crannies
My views on crannies are controversial. Some players love these, but crannies are just a defensive tool, overly using them is the same as capitulating the fight. Dont rely on them if you want to progress somewhere meaningful in the game. One maxed one is enough in my opinion. Any more and you are just inviting the attacker to repeatedly attack you and that means you will never have a meaningful army while the raider is still attacking. Moving troops to another alliance mate is ok for one attack, but repeatedly moving snippets of troops to another player means the attacker will soon be outproducing you at an exponential rate, gaining catapults while you are still in the stone age. At that point in the game, you might as well quit. Use all your resources before an attack and the remainder will be safe with one cranny.
NB: 1. There are some tricks with the trap such as storing settlers and the like and is useful for new players.
2. version 3.5, to be released in ukx, will increase the number of traps per building. Maybe they will play a part in the earlier games, possibly. However, remember that as the server goes on, armies get pretty ludicrously big, it becomes increasingly obselete.
Aggressive players also dont like players who half heartedly defend their own villages. For example if you have 100 maces, and raid someone with 5 praetorians each time, the attacker will not stop, but in fact increase their frequency, regardless of whether they get any resources or not. The aim is to stop the defenders accummulating enough to do significant damage to the attacking stack and also for hero experience. Do not give such a pointless reason for the attacker to be attacking you. Dodge the attacks if possible, try hard to make sure the attacker gets nothing. If they get nothing, they are wasting time on attacks or they try to save time by splitting up their attack force. When they send 20 instead of 200 maces, you can defend it, you can cause damage, and you can make it expensive to mess with you.
For a lot of the time, the fight will happen. Two aggressive players in a single area cannot exist without either one leaving or a compromise being made. When they do fight, it is usually either early game or later when they both have a decent offensive force. In either case, the first army to catch the other in their base will win. Therefore, dont keep your army in your base! It should always be on the move. At night, it should go off on a long raid across the map.
When counterattacking or defending, dont be afraid to commit all your troops. As mentioned before, travian gives better numbers if you go excessive rather than not. Also dont be afraid to lose all your troops in an attack if the damage given/received ratio is decent. Ie if you lose your entire army counterattacking, but end up doing far more damage to his troops, then its well worth it.
Drawing a whole load of reinforcements from other players and shuffling them into a high level wall is one of the most effective defenses against a large army. Every player involved loses a portion of defense, but the attacker loses it all. When an attacker loses a large army, you will get a long period of peace. However it is rarely a simple case of one attack, one massive army, and one huge defense, and this is where you will have to be creative and think on your feet. How to differentiate between fakes and real attacks are discussed in the last section.
Eg, you are browsing your village, and then an attack appears. It arrives in 5 hours and is from a Gaul player. It takes your haeduans 2 hours, 41 minutes to reinforce the attacking village. Since the haeduans travel at 26 speed, and the attacking force is travelling at X speed,
Basically this means the attacking army is travelling at a speed of 14. The only unit at that speed in gauls is the phalanx. So you can assume that this attack is a fake, since why would someone attack you with a phalanx unit? And if he did attack you with faster units mixed with phalanxes, he would be an utter noob. Either way you can be assured that there are no catapults or rams in the attack, and so you can dodge or wall up with confidence.
You need to have the unit attack screen already set up. After you select the number of units, you press ok, and then the next screen is the right one to lauch the attack. Timing is critical, down to the second. You want to hit the attackers around 1-3 seconds after they arrive.
The great thing about this move is that since most attacking units are weak at defense, a much smaller army can destroy a much larger one. Even if you dont take out the whole army, you can kill so many of the attackers that they will be afraid to attack you again.
The advantage that gold users have is that if there is not time to build another level of residence / palace (or that they are maxed out), they can auto demolish levels until there is. In addition, should you mess up your timing, you can cancel the build, demolish another level and try again, and again, until successful.
As mentioned earlier, it is possible to time the residence build even if all the waves hit on the same second, but you need some luck and things to work out just right. If you see an attack coming in that you suspect is the clearing wave for a takeover, you have a window where you can time a residence build before they launch their waves of chiefs. Remember, Travian times its events to complete in the order they were started, so if you time your build before the waves of chiefs are launched, yours will complete first, even if their chiefs land on the same second as the clearing wave.
If the chief waves are launched from villages farther away to you, than the clearing wave village, then once again if you time your residence build to finish the second before they land, but before the clearing wave is launched, again it will work in your favour.
The trick is to time your counter attack as soon as their last chief arrives. If a player attacks with chieftan waves in one attack, you can cut the waves, and stunt his attack, forcing him to remake chieftans, giving you valuable time for reinfs. If your opponent tries to take over a village by attacks with his main army WITH chiefs, you can really screw him. When he moves in for the final attack, you can calaculate the attack time arrival, dodge the attack, and wipe out his offensive army.
In the above situation, you are trapping the attacker to destroy his army. However, you can just retake a village because you want it back! As said before, the newly lost village is at its most vulnerable to takeover, so make sure you get your chiefs in as soon as possible. Residence level 1 takes approximately 10 minutes to build, and will no doubt be the first thing built after a takeover, so adjust your catapult strategy accordingly.
Defending the organised attacks
These are tough because not only do you not know where am attack will strike, but several attackers on one village, for example, will mean that village is crippled. You can call for reinforcements but where do they go? You have to use some common sense.
In the beginning of the game, you should focus on just Macemen: they are cheap and effective as early raiders. As you begin to develop further into the game, more troops will be necessity. By day three or four of a start of the server, Gaul tribes will have developed a small army of cavalry, usually Theutates Thunders, but some Gauls raid with Druid Riders. Because of this, Spearmen will be necessary. You MUST have Spearmen by the fifth day. If not, you will slowly dissolve into being a farm.
You may think how you can develop this massive army. At the beginning of your Travian career, you will NEED wood and clay. Iron will not be needed for a few days or weeks. With me, I usually have my wood production 200 to 300 higher than my iron, and 100 above my clay. As you develop into a more advanced and skilled player, about a month into the server, you will need to level out your production as Axmen are heavy on iron, and Teutonic Knights and catapults heavy on clay. When you start producing Teutonic Knights and catapults, you can trade surplus wood for clay in the marketplace.
c80f0f1006