To Quest or Not to Quest

For the experienced, the new quest system is an albatross of monstrous proportion. To the layman, quests will prove to be quite useful. The monotonous server beginning will be spiced up a bit for them. I did not follow the quest system from start to finish for fear that my eyeballs would combust causing my head to explode. I did however go far enough to receive two days of Travian Plus, gold, a rat and some extra resources (that I ended up spending on quest objectives mind you). From the leftovers I was able to train 2 or 3 Macemen. The problem is that it took a day and a half to get the Macemen out. I stopped the quest short when I was instructed to build up my remaining fields. I’ve seen everything I needed to see to make an educated guess on where the rest of my resources were going, especially without the use of an NPC merchant for lack of a marketplace. Enough was enough – Delete. (More on the quest system later)

Beginning Your Campaign

After starting over, I developed my type-A plan. The quickest way to begin raiding with minimal risk – assuming you’ve started 3 days late and most of your neighbors are out of bp:

Day One

NOTES:
*You start the server with 3k resources, that’s all you have to work with (and only in their current positions. No NPC merchant remember?)
**To make a bad situation worse if you make ONE false step, you could find yourself waiting for hours for any problems to correct themselves.
***Remember, there’s no FREE gold here to start so no extra wood, no Travian Plus, no offensive bonus right away etc.

NEW building steps and approximate times (rounded to the nearest ¼ hour) on normal servers:
1. Main Building lvl 2
(1 wheat) – 45 minutes
2. Rally Point lvl 1
(1 wheat) – 30 minutes
3. Main Building lvl 3
(1 wheat) – 60 minutes
4. Barracks lvl 1
(4 wheat) – 30 minutes
5. Two Macemen
(2 wheat) – 30 minutes

Requirements: Wood – 715; Clay – 565; Iron – 605; Wheat – 330
Don’t be alarmed by the wood requirement for a third maceman (810). Obviously you could wait the extra couple of hours necessary to get the third Maceman or you could play the odds and raid with only two. If you decide to raid with two then you must keep your raids to the sub 8-10 population Teutons. These opponents will most likely have no reinforcements – but it’s always a roll of the dice.

With 3 or more Maces raid Teuton and Roman villages and leave Gauls alone until you have scouts and enough Macemen to bust traps.

On the normal server you start the game with your wheat prod. at 10. The above steps call for the consumption of 10-wheat exactly (if you get the 3rd Maceman), leaving you with a prod. of 0. You’re ready to begin raiding in just 3.5 to 4 hours. Because there is no free gold right away, things will move slowly as you build one structure at a time.

NOTE: Obviously if you wanted to purchase gold you would be able to make use of the quick builds and Travian plus. You’d be able to use the NPC merchant as well. Things move much faster.

Once built, only upgrade your whse and granary as you need to. You should be building so many Maces that you don't have time to stock resources. Build your marketplace as quickly as you can. If you buy gold, be sure to use your resources quickly to build more maceman. If not, trade on the open market as best you can. By hours 8-10 after server start you should still be concentrating on building up your Maces.

Before the end of Day One (24 hours after server start), if you’ve purchased even the minimum gold, you want to get many of your prerequisites out of the way for your Townhall. We’ll hopefully be building that tomorrow. You should conservatively have 40-50 Maces already (some will have more, some less) and about 5 scouts. Your residence should be coming along as well. Before bed, send all of your troops (minus 1 scout if you’re on speed) to a far away 2-5 population village. Make sure the round trip is just about to end when you decide to log on in the morning. No doubt they will have great spoils there. Just make sure you can handle the resources when they return. All available resources should be spent (before bed) where possible on Townhall prerequ’s or more troops.

Of course those on normal servers will experience some delays. Don’t leave your troop queue active the first night if you’re going to break BP on speed. You don’t want them dead when you wake up.

More Quest notes

I do believe that the quest system has some value to more experience players but not at the games beginning. The best part about the quest system is the fact that it keeps everyone around you from building troops with the intensity that they would normally build with. With a population of 10, I attacked a population of 51 with 11 macemen and met only 2 legos and a rat. I lost one Maceman, and the enemy lost both the legos and the rat. Afterwards, you can strip the city bone dry and continue to do so because the once infertile land of your neighbors in times past is now flourishing earlier than ever because the quest system forces them to build up their fields on day one or two. I’ve worked this thing out on S7 and I have no reason to believe that it wouldn’t be even faster and more satisfying on speed server.

After that, everything else is standard fare and in the rest of the guide. Build up troops, raid, expand, terrorize etc. Right before you’ve dropped your second village, I would recommend doing the quests if you like, if not for the free gold then to get that annoying toon off your screen.

Raiding 101:

1. Your initial raids should be in groups of 3 or 4, at least until you start losing them to walls, defenders and enemy population growth.
2. As soon as you get a raid report send out another appropriately sized raiding party immediately if you got spoils.
3. If your report comes back empty and the round trip is an hour, you might as well send out one minimal raid for good measure.
4. If you get nothing a second time, let the city rest and recover for a few hours and repeat.
5. Take note of the release times of your neighbors from the beginner’s protection. Keep a running log so you can raid “IMMEDIATELY” when the protection drops. Set your alarm clocks and make sure you’re in a position to raid right away. Take good stock of your 20x20 and again, keep track of these times – your rivals will be. The raiding party for those that just come out of protection (and are still small enough to have built little infrastructure) I send between 55-75 mace at them, less if the distance is greater. This is to be able to get everything they have in one raid. I don't plan on sharing their resources with strangers. For populations of 2 all you need to send is 54 maces. Each mace will carry 59.23 resources from the maxed out 800 storage.

Psychology Behind Small Raiding Parties:

As mentioned at the outset, your goal is to keep villages from deleting and/or building against you. Sending large raiding parties of 10 or more Maces at a single target is just bad time management. It’s always better to collect 600 resources from 5 different targets than 600 from one target early on. The more targets you hit the better your odds are of getting good returns. What happens if you guess wrong on a raid and you send all 30 Maces at a single target and come up empty? Look at the time you’ve wasted. You’ve allowed your enemy to see exactly how many troops you have, you’ve allowed too much time for your neighbors to recover from your last raids, you’ve given rivals time to raid your neighbors and get resources that you should have at LEAST been able to share and last but not least you’ve got to wait for your whole raiding army to come back home before you can relaunch....waste!

Day Two – Party Time

Your raiding party should be arriving shortly. Check the logs for any attacks. If there are, don’t panic or become belligerent. Don’t contact the offender. Take note of anything missing. Check your messages. Do not respond to flamers. Those that seek mercy should be respected but declined. Be empathetic but continue raiding. Promise to “take a breather” or “choose other targets before I raid again” and stuff like that. It will placate them into sticking it out a while longer.

Nothing is more important today than getting this party started. Parties expensive so there’s no time for small talk. You have to raid quick & often. Be sure to have 5 scouts at home at all times and another 10 scouting your neighbors.

Normal servers are gonna take about 3 or 4 parties to get a second city. Speed only one. Much of your success will depend on how many neighbors you have, especially within your 7x7. Remember, you don’t have any fields built up except for maybe a couple of woodcutters on lvl 1 and a clay on lvl 1.

When your pre-requisites are completed for the Townhall you have to be sure you have enough storage throw the party and to build settlers.

Conservative estimates by the end of day 2: (with decent farming ground and avoiding the loss or overflow of resources – of course normal speed servers with no gold may be a bit behind.)

• Residence: lvl 10 (fast approaching lvl 10 on normal)
• Wheat fields: Appropriate level to allow building and upgrading of structures
• Barracks: Normal lvl 5 / Speed lvl 1-3
• Maces: 100-125
• Scouts: 5-10
• Academy: lvl 10
o Researches: Scouts only!
• Main Building: lvl 10
• Townhall: lvl 1 (1st party well under way on speed, probably just getting started on Normal)
• Woodcutters: Three or four at lvl 1 on Normal
• Clay: Three at lvl 1 on Normal
• No walls, no embassies, no NAPs, no shenanigans

Day Three – Loadin’ Up the Wagon

Day three is an exciting day because it’s time to pack. Whether you’re on speed or normal you know the 2nd village is coming. Whatever you’ve fallen behind on building from day 2 then finish it. Keep raids going and scouts on the move. If you haven’t started your party yet do it today for sure. Check your records to make sure of who’s coming out of protection. Continue to ignore the flamers and ingratiate the farms. Also, pay close attention to alliances forming in your area. You will be recruited undoubtedly. Tell them you’ll seriously consider it and thank them for asking. Right now you just want to concentrate on “getting your village running”. If you see alliances forming, concentrate many of your raids on leadership. Don’t let them get off the ground. They will threaten and yell and tell you about the cata’s they’re going to build against you and remind you that there’s one of you and 5 of them and blah blah blah. The point is that the server just started and they have nothing and they won’t have anything because you won’t let them. One strategy they like to use is to reinforce a member to try and kill your troops. Make sure to scout the leaders and members before attacking.

Conservative Kingdom estimates by the end of day 3: (with decent farming ground and avoiding the loss or overflow of resources)

• Two or Three settlers (One or Two on normal servers)
• 150-200 Maces (under exceptional conditions)
• Barracks: Normal lvl 8 / Speed lvl 5
• Market: about lvl 5 only on normal servers (to prepare for transfers to second village)
• Scouts: 20
• Townhall: (Perhaps 2nd party on speed, possible 1st ending on normal)
• No walls, no embassies, researches, no NAPs, no shenanigans

Day Four – Movin’ Day

Speed server players should be ready to settle their next village, Normal server guys are still be a day or two away, depending on how early you were able to start your first party, and that’s fine. You should still be raiding non-stop and you’ve got enough Maces now to do two hour round trip raids. You honestly shouldn’t be receiving any incoming attacks. You may receive an occasional attack from outside your 20x20. These attacks will probably be from far away alliance mates of your farms within your 13x13. Normally these attacks are no more than 3 or 4 light infantry. No one wants to spend the first week of a server defending anybody so the attacks will be half-hearted just so they can say that they obeyed their leaders. If you are receiving heavy fire then you’re probably doing something wrong. Do an honest observation of yourself and ask a few questions:
1. Am I being aggressive enough?
2. Have I allowed raiders to take too many resources?
3. Have I allowed sleep, work or my small children to encroach upon Travian’s #1 place in my life?

If the answer to any one of these questions is “yes” ... fix it!

Make sure your next party is going as soon as your previous party stops. Once you do settle your second village, make sure you build your rally point right away to watch for incoming attacks. Also, reinforce the village with a few scouts.

Choosing Your Second Village

I’ve debated this topic over and over and I’ve changed my views at least once on the issue. Here is my current conclusion on the matter. If you can look at your 13x13 and honestly evaluate that there is no legitimate rival for you within that space, you can take any square you’d like. If you have a 15 cropper or 9 cropper nearby you have the luxury of waiting or you can take it now. If you don’t take a cropper, make sure that the square you choose is either touching your current village OR moving in the direction of your future cropper – especially on normal servers. Teuton merchants are too slow to have a scattered kingdom, especially early on. You want your Kingdom in a tight box-like formation for easy moving of resources and defenders.

Personally, I try to always choose a 5 clay square second. I do this because the demand for clay is so great early on especially when building woodcutters, crop, cavalry etc.

Sidebar:

For a third village I try to find an adjacent 5 woodcutter which will help when building structures and eventual defenders. My fourth village is either my cropper or my future capital 4x4x4x6. This is an advanced technique and should not be entered into lightly. On a normal speed server I’d probably end up taking my cropper third but no later than fourth depending on the level of competition in my area and the distance it is from my current stronghold.

I DO NOT SETTLE SQUARES WHERE FARMS HAVE DELETED. That's because the game will quickly respawn you a new farm in that hole. There's no worse feeling than having a farm delete that's directly next to you. But, there's nothing better than waking up and having a new roomate in the morning because you left the space unattended. Those spaces will be a revolving door of farms for you for at least the first quarter of the server. Eventually someone will decide to either stick it out, agree to pay tribute or just abandon the village out of frustration. Either way you win.

Risks/Rewards to Consider When You Don’t Choose a Cropper Second:

To be fair, it should be noted that waiting until your third of fourth village to settle a 15 or 9 cropper runs the serious risk of someone else settling it. If you assume this risk then you understand that you have a responsibility to stop all production and build your catapult infrastructure if someone does settle it under your nose. This will cause you to lose significant time and create other risk factors. On speed this should take you about a day but on normal about 2 or 3 days. To get the cropper back, you have to raid the cropper incessantly (and the supply village) to hinder the building of a palace, assemble your clearing squad, build the Cata Infrastructure (including prerequisites and a lvl 20 Rally Point), build at least 20 catas and gather the settlers necessary to populate the village once you’ve destroyed everything in it. This could include building the prerequisites for the settlers in another village if you don’t already have them. I’ve been in this position and it’s not fun, but I overcame it.

Note too that in the meantime, your farms have been left to their own devices and they could make best use of that time by putting up crannies, joining alliances, forming pacts and assembling an offensive against you. You’re not really able to concentrate on raiding efficiently or building more barrack levels and raid infantry. Then you’ll have to factor in the time it will take for you to continually send your catapults back and forth to this village. How far away is it? Do you lose any troops or catas in the process? How long to replace them?

Well with all that risk, what’s the reward? I believe the reward for waiting to settle a cropper until your third of fourth village lies in your immediate ability to fund and build up your cropper once you get it. With 3 or 4 supply villages at your disposal you will be able to quickly and efficiently build up your cropper right away. You won’t have to wait or uses gross amounts of gold. The faster your fields come up the faster you can begin working on your Hammer Infrastructure.

Risks/Rewards to Consider When You Do Choose a Cropper Second:

Choosing a cropper as your second village (especially a 15) puts a lot more pressure on you to do one of two things – either raid more if that’s even possible and/or consistently “who-re” gold. The fact that your first village is supported entirely by raiding and your second village (the 15 cropper) only has one of each resource that you won’t be upgrading anyway, you have to be able to sustain your existence at least for another week and a half on a normal server by strictly raiding. If raid conditions are ideal then this shouldn’t sting much. But if you’ve all of a sudden got rivals for your farms or farms with 8 crannies you’re in a bit of a pickle. No doubt your first village is running at negative crop already.

In addition, your 15 cropper needs resources too if it’s ever going to be the uber offensive village you wish it to be. You could find yourself falling behind in a major way and micromanaging the resources you are bringing in to provide crop for your troops and build wheat fields and Crop Infrastructure (whse, market, granary, flour mill) in your 15 cropper. Once you build the crops up you’ll have to use the market or the NPC merchant to even out your resources to build your Settlement/Party Infrastructure (see below) for your third village... and as you’ll see below, it’s pretty expensive. But if you decide to use your first village to settle your third village (upgrading your Residence to lvl 20 and forgoing the upgrade of your cropper) it will cost you about 4 times the amount you would spend going the Settlement/Party Infrastructure (in your cropper) way. Also, if you don’t upgrade your second village right away then you’ll have to throw “big” parties in your first village to compensate for the Townhall you would have built in your second village. That means upgrading your first Townhall to level 10 and then having to wait twice as long for the parties to finish paying three-four times as much.

Well with all that risk, what’s the reward? The security in knowing that you’ll probably have that cropper until the end of the server. It’s an underrated feeling. Having your ability to build your army secured by landing the cropper is just priceless. And if you choose to use a lot of gold, you can start to build the cropper up at a pretty nice clip.

As you can see, there are pros and cons to both philosophies. You can choose whichever fits your style

 

Day Five – Farmer’s in the Dell

Time to build up the fields in your first village. The faster you get those up the easier it will be to expand. Personally I build up all of the fields to level 4. Then from there I take one woodcutter to lvl 10. I do the same for clay and then for iron a bit later. Once I get wood and clay to 10 I build the bonus buildings up to lvl 2 or 3. I also think about upgrading my storage buildings to full capacity if not at least to lvl 18, you still can’t afford to overflow resources.

Using some supplies from the first village I upgrade the second village. Because it’s a clay village for me I begin to think about using the village for producing a clay heavy troop in the future. Perhaps this will be my defensive TK depot or my first cata factory? At any rate I’ll be upgrading the 2nd village initially with a Settlement infrastructure that includes a lvl 10 residence and a lvl 1 Townhall. Soon I will have nonstop parties in both my cities. This is how I begin most villages. Here are the minimum requirements for building the Settlement/Party infrastructure immediately in a new village:

• Rally Point lvl 1
• Market lvl 1
• Main Building lvl 10
• Academy lvl 10
• Whse lvl 10
• Granary lvl 10
• Residence lvl 10
• Townhall lvl 10
• Party – small (continuous)
• Settlers 3
o You will have to feed all of this so you’re looking at about an 80-90 crop need here. Minimally you should upgrade every wheat field to lvl 2. This should yield you 90+ crop in the village. You could forgo some of the fields and just upgrade your fields to lvl 1 and one to lvl 5 and build/upgrade a flour mill.
o This whole process will take about 190k – have fun!

Day Six – Enjoy Your Creation

You should be the first in your area with a 2nd village. You should also be 1 of about 4 on the whole server that has reached this accomplishment. It’s important to revel only for a moment because this fact puts an arrow on your back. You’ve got to hit your neighbors pretty hard for the next day or so. You don’t want them feeling like they can attack your second village. By this time you should have about 400-500 Maces and both villages should be throwing parties. Keep an eye on your Culture Points. Be ready to settle your third village once you’ve reached the requirements.

Do not stop raiding. Look for those coming out of beginner’s protection. Begin researching Pali’s in your first village. This will extend your raiding range and capacity. Now is not the time to begin troop upgrades of any kind. Just concentrate on raiding your neighbors, tracking those coming out of protection, raiding the new neighbors and establishing your dominance.

By the end of day six, you should have your Settlement Infrastructure in your second village just about complete. Use the subsequent days to throw continuous parties in all villages and continue this pattern and expand another village every couple of days. Remember to keep a tight formation and to continue raiding without let up. Once you reach 5 or 6 villages I would recommend (for my playing style) this configuration if at all possible:

• Village One - 4x4x4x6: Primary raiding village (soon to be phased out to primary supply) – Raiding (2000+ Maces, 400+ Palis) / Supply
• Village Two - 5 clayer: Preliminary Cata Base with small escort / Clay Supply
• Village Three - 5 woodcutter: Scouts / Future Defensive Infantry Base / Wood Supply
• Village Four – 4x4x4x6: Capital / Future Defensive Cavalry / Heavy Supply
• Village Five – 15 cropper: Hammer Headquarters (Axe, TK, Ram) / Heavy Assault
• Village Six – 9 cropper: Future Permanent Raiding Den (Mace, Pali, Rams) / Light Assault

After your initial 6 or 7 villages have been specialized, the rest of the villages in your kingdom will simply serve as some kind of supply depot. Whether it’s resources, defensive infantry, defensive TK’s etc. you’ll be supplying your kingdom quickly and efficiently. The majority of your villages when you’ve reached about 20 or so should serve a dual purpose of resource supply and defensive infantry. I hardly ever go past 25 villages unless a chief opportunity proves too lucrative. 30+ villages serves as a weakness for Teutons I believe. The more villages I have, the more I have to tend, upgrade and defend. My life as a Teuton revolves around keeping my 20x20 in check and supporting my alliance, not transferring resources from village 30 to village 35 etc. to avoid overflows. It's hard enough managing the negative crop without extra burdens. Also, you’ll want some villages with good crop capacity to store your offensive overflow in from your Hammer Headquarters. This will be explained later.

Sitters

This topic is very important and it's probably crossing your mind about now as the nights get longer and longer. Personally, I don’t use sitters. For my playing style I find that they do more harm than good – especially in the games first half. There are some instances during the course of a server where I wish I had one, if only to spell me during the wee hours of the night. If you do decide to take on a sitter, keep in mind that you’ll be giving a LOT of power to someone whom you’ve more than likely never met. The penalties for being a bad Sitter range from being fired to being banned – all from a make believe game world that ultimately means nothing. So it’s important to get a Sitter that cares about your success almost as much as you. It’s best if your Sitter doesn’t share your time zone range. When you’re asleep you want them awake. A sitter is of little value if their sleeping when you’re sleeping.

• Sitters come in many flavors. Two taste good (Mirror Image and Devoted Apprentice) all other flavors taste like varying combinations of pralines and doo doo.

o Mirror Image Sitters (MIS): Experienced players that are intelligent enough to follow your wishes and assertive enough to anticipate your needs. MIS’s won’t allow your storage to overflow and they won’t let your Axe production falter. They’ll know how to use the Village stat model and will be frugal with the NPC Merch. They’ll even kick in the little to purchase 30 gold to keep your hammer from starving in an emergency. You can trust them with large tasks like raiding operations and settling. It really can be liberating, freeing up a couple of hours for your real life roommates like your wife and kids.

There are some drawbacks. Because of their confidence and Travian skill, MIS’s always have the potential to do “too much”. How annoying is it to be logged in at the same time as your sitter? Screens changing, troops moving and resources disappearing. MIS’s are also nosey because of their competitive nature. They’ll read your messages and study all your logs. Also, sometimes they don’t pay attention to the “details” that you put in the instruction igm, such as villages that you DON’T raid. Perhaps you have an agreement with a village to not raid them for a day or two or if you receive tribute from another village. These are all beautiful things that can be ruined if not respected. I like to put a link on my preferences that says “DO NOT ATTACK – XYZ Village xx|xx” for all villages that send me tribute. Sometimes even if I point this out, the MIS will acknowledge it and eventually attack anyway. Not purposely out of spite, just out of pure, blind zeal for raiding. Also, MIS’s have their own Kingdom’s to deal with and may at times do things for you in a “half-hearted” kinda way. Not purposely out of spite, just out of pure, blind zeal for their Kingdoms.

o Devoted Apprentice Sitters (DA): Players that just want to be a part of what you’ve got going on. They recognize that you can help them learn and are willing to listen intently. They sometimes sacrifice their Kingdom’s well being to make sure your Kingdom thrives. DA’s follow directions implicitly. There is no variation from your standing orders. They will be diligent day and night when you need them. They will not use your armies or resources for personal gain or against their personal enemies. When you return to your Kingdom, everything you’ve asked to be done will be done to the best of their ability. If something went askew, you will have a full report message waiting as well.

DA drawbacks can sometimes outweigh their desirable qualities. DA’s are inexperienced, sometimes very much so. The fact that they follow directions exactly as you lay them out is underscored by their inability to “think on the fly” or troubleshoot/investigate a situation. This makes them easy to rattle and confuse because they lack the confidence to improvise. If you receive an incoming attack they will probably panic and clear the village of all troops and resources OR stack the village with troops and wheat to defend. The problem is that all this is done before assessment of the situation is made. Who’s attacking? What is their population? What is their race? Is it just one attack on one village or a more organized attempt? Is the target village a “high priority target?” How fast is the attack coming – infantry? Seige? Cavalry? Is it an enemy alliance or an ally who made a mistake? Would it be smart to contact them or send a counterstrike? Too many details for the DA to deal with.

All things considered, I’d rather have a DA. I run my account competently enough. All I need my sitter to do is follow directions I leave and report the results. I prefer that my sitter NOT be responsible for raiding, unless I’m in need of a resource boost for a special initiative. Also, do yourself a favor and only use Sitters that are in your alliance. If they’re DA’s make sure if they join an alliance, then they get dropped. You don’t want to be the leak that allowed the enemy to pick up the war strategies.