Troop Overview

Phalanx

A cheap and effective defender. This is your primary defensive unit. Being able to sustain damage against both cavalry and infantry, they are useful throughout the game. However, they lack attack and should not be used to raid with against those who have units in their villages. Defensively, ever run into a giant wall of Phalanx? It's not pretty what goes down! These things are beasts in large quantities. Anyways, only use Phalanx to raid early game on inactives, as they are of a decent speed and a handful of them can rake in resources over time.

Swordsman

Swordsmen are stronger than Axemen, but weaker than Imperians. That is fine, since they are amazing attackers for infantry regardless. These swordsmen will easily use up the iron stores Gauls seem to get (probably through a lot of things costing more clay, and TTs/trebs cost a lot of clay) and are your main escort in clearing waves/catapult waves. I would suggest not getting swordsmen until later on however in your first village, as TTs are much better raiders than swordsmen could ever be.

Pathfinder

The Pathfinder is pretty self-explanatory; they are the scouts for Gauls. You should always have scouts in all of your villages (in oases too if you're paranoid) to see when you have been sought at for a possible attack on you. Also Pathfinders are fast for quick reconnaissance on your foes. However, at a cost of 2 crop per hour, you should always see how many you actually need because instead of a Pathfinder you could be housing other troops.

Theutates Thunder

The TT is an amazing unit and is my personal favourite because of the speed. I am very impatient in Travian and these TTs combined with my Tournament Squares provides me a very open area for targets all over the map. They do very nice damage too and carry a lot of resources, allowing them to be the most notorious of raiders. As a Gaul, try to get these A.S.A.P. If you are lucky, you are now open to a whole new set of targets from your racial counterparts. You can now easily wipe out Macemen from cocky Teutons who still haven't gotten Spearmen, and can take out Praetorians from Romans going into the defensive and also take on Swordsmen and Imperians with ease. A TT hero early on will allow you to clear many players of troops if you keep it alive, and can allow you to become a superpower in your area if you can get some good hits off. However, early game these things are EXPENSIVE! Watch how you spend these things and ensure they don't die.

Druidriders

The Druidrider (DR, Dr) is amazing in times of need. They can quickly travel the map to aide others. With a great defense against infantry, the DR is a crowd-pleaser to those who need defensive troops in times of need.

Haeduans

Haeduans are amazing in two aspects; their high attack damage and defense against cavalry. You will not generally defend against cavalry with these, what a waste of a good offensive unit! Haeduans are your primary clearing cavalry unit along with swordsmen.

Battering Ram

The Gaul Battering Ram, like it's racial counterparts, is used to take down walls. It is best used in your clearing wave because its effects on the wall are calculated before the battle (wall level goes down before damage/defense is calculated) starts. Always use rams, why wouldn't you? They save troops! It hurts me when I see no rams in a losing battle.

Trebuchets

The standard version of Catapults for Gauls. "Expensive" in comparison to Catapults and Fire Catapults. It should be noted that the Trebuchet is also a more powerful weapon when demolishing buildings than Teutonic catapults though.

Chief

The fastest of the conquering units, the Chief is also not as effective when it comes to lowering loyalty compared to Teutonic Chieftains. It is also a whopping 45K+ clay to train. On the bright side, the Gaul chief moves at 5 squares/hour instead of 4 like its racial counterparts. This is vital when time is of the essence; most players losing a village are either always trying to rebuild their residence to prevent conquering, or deleting. If they are deleting, the time it takes in between conquer trips is important! That being said, if someone is active they will most likely build up the residence every time and if you're escorting that chief, you will need cats to clear the residence and speed won't matter now will it?

Settler

Standard settler like the Roman and Teutonic ones. Not much to explain here.

Primary army for a Gaul player:


Early on: Phalanx to raid->TTs and scouts.
Later on: Mass TTs to raid and scouts.

Eventually in your cropper/capital:

Mix of Swordsmen, Haeduans, Rams, Trebs. TTs are sometimes used for raiding as well in the cropper or put in place of Haeduans to use for clearing (or mixed in with them), but attack power really counts and although TTs are only slightly worse, most Gauls will take the Haeduans.

Defensively, well all races can make defensive units on their own in supply villages. Just mass Phalanx as your prime defensive unit. The other for you is the Druid Rider, which does do more defense than Phalanx for infantry, but it doesn't fare as well versus cavalry. A mix of both of these units is ideal.

 

Gallic Techniques

Gauls have many things they can do in order to excel in Travian. One of the best early game is of course the Trapper...

Trapper

As you should know already, the trapper is a great tool early game, although it loses its novelty later on. If people raid or attack a Gaul with traps, and the traps outnumber the units attacking, they become trapped. If the attacker chooses to hit you AGAIN, you can do a little trick here to make them more angry. As soon as you see another attack coming in, release his current trapped troops and train more traps. This way he has more of his troops trapped and you can attack his base with units if your troops are faster (best option here is with TTs) or follow his troops home from the trapper and kill them. Leveling up the trapper becomes overkill after level 9 or so. Sure, you can upgrade it more, but it's best to just rely on your cranny, as you're burning resources on training traps. Later on, taking 200 units out from a 4K+ units army isn't going to do much.

Theutates Thunder Raiding

With a level 10+ tournament square, you are open to a lot of the Travian map to attack. Feel free to send many TTs around farming people far away, even if they aren't anywhere near your territory. Also scout Teutons for macemen. Even if they have some spearmen, TTs easily wipe them out. This gives amazing hero xp early on.

Overnight Raids

What you do is find a spot ~5-6 hours away from you (on a 1-way trip, so 10-12 hours total) and raid them overnight. This way while you aren't on Travian and someone attacks you, your army isn't there to get beaten on, thus allowing your troops to fight another day. This is applicable to every race.

Dodging

Dodging and choosing your battles is very important; do not lose troops for no reason! If you see an incoming attack during the early-game of Travian, send your troops out for a bit. The other thing to do if you want to have control of your troops right away again (e.g. dodging a clearing wave and fighting catapult waves) is to send your troops out and time it to cancel and return the second certain attacks come in.

Hero Choice

I see this type of question a lot on the forums so I will try to explain what you should try to think of for a Gaul hero. I would say to just avoid even bothering to get a hero until you can at least get a TT one, let alone a Haeduan. Most Gauls get Haeduans since speed isn't really an important factor when it comes to clearing waves, and they are stronger attack-wise. However, other Gauls will choose a TT hero because of its speed. Having a TT hero when your villages are spread apart is a great thing for transportation. Attack damage won't matter late-game as much, but early on it saves troops. This should be your general skill/stat point build unless you are going to just farm oases/macemen for experience:

~15 points into attack, just so you can have a little attack early on with your army/solo troops
~5-10 points into regeneration.
-Rest of your points go into offensive bonus. You greatly improve the attack output of your army by investing points into this. Combined with the Plus attack increase and Blacksmith upgrades, your army is dishing out serious damage. The rest will go into defensive bonus.

Note: At level one, you can still change you skill points around. You can "abuse" this in a sense in order to change your hero stats as you wish. The generic example is swapping your 5 points to "Attack" when you are attacking, and then after the battle you would just put your points into regeneration.

I myself would not choose a defensive hero, but it is an available option if you wish to go on a defensive path. In my opinion, I would say to go with a DR instead of a Haeduan since you will run into more infantry always than cavalry, but the choice is yours. Both are great when it comes to defense. The same sort of build would be used as an offensive one except you would probably have to adjust the points around a bit (i.e. getting defense points, defensive bonus, maybe a bit more regeneration).