Beginer's guide - WELCOME BEGINER
Here we will try to describe to you thing such as what is the farming, how to choose the right location and what you should do in the begining day of your travian play
FARMING
There are a lot of you who do not know what
farming is...this guide is to help you understand what it
is, and how to deal with it.
Farming is being attacked by a
player or players repeatedly, normally for resources or hero points.
When I say for hero points, I mean that when they attack
you and you have troops, their hero kills them. When the hero kills them he
gets points or experience for those kills. The resource part is slightly more
obvious, as they just take your resources preventing you from building anything
or at least slowing you down.
Here is your savior, the
Players Guide to Farming!
This is being written from a few
sources, most notably a previous "Anti-Farming Guide" that had to be
removed for certain reasons that shall remain unknown. I am in no way copying,
nor plagiarizing upon that authors work, just using it as a guide.
What is Travian, it is a game, it is a war
game, not Sim City. It is a game that is about building troops and your city at
the same time, it is about farming, it is about attacking, it is about
coordination. Travian is a game that has many aspects to it. Yes, it is
confusing at first, it was to me and to every other player who is currently
playing and that has played. Everyone starts somewhere, they were all new just
like you are now.
When you first start out you are given a
beginners protection period, that is for your safety to get a foothold in the
game. Depending on how long the server has lasted (so far), the protection
period will vary. (Each server starts out at 3 days, with the exception of
speed which starts at 1 day.)
THE RIGHT LOCATION
In this game, you need a good spawn location to
get anywhere. Let's start with that...
Firstly, the
quadrants of a server are very important. Usually the South quadrants are the
most tranquil, but it varies from server to server. You might want to remember
that when choosing your quadrant. If you don't care, then choose random and
pray.
Once you get your location, take a look at your 7 x
7, if there are a lot of higher population players near you, please consider
deleting and restarting somewhere else. If there are not, then take a look at
your 13 x 13, see what it looks like there. If you see a lot of players that
you feel could be a danger to you, delete and restart. If players around you
are roughly the same size, or if it's a new server and there are not many
players, then you will probably want to stay there. Your neighbors are
potential allies or farms.
This all depends on the age of the
server; if it is newer you will get near a lot of new players, if it is a few
months in there will not be a 'perfect spawn' location. Now, the game has a
built in system that tries to make sure you get near new players, though it is
not a for sure thing.
For more information on how this
works, please see this thread on our sister forum.
FIRST FEW DAYS
Day1-2 Note your start date in your profile so you can track your on progress. Begin building your resource fields, focus on clay, then wood, then iron, and lastly crop. Building resource fields requires more clay than wood, more wood than iron, and very little food. Your objective will be to get 3’s for all clay and wood resources, 2 for iron (3 if Roman), and 2’s for food. I try to keep my food around 50-100 per hour until my resources are finished in a city because more just goes to waste, or has to get traded on the market.. Once you hit 3’s in wood and clay it is time to build a level 3 main building, a barracks, and a rally point, and a warehouse. Once you have two units trained you are ready to raid. Go to /www.traviantool.com/ and do a search for inactives around town. In your first few raids you’ll want to hit people with less than 10 population who are at least 3 days inactive because even 1 defender could slow you down. If your target is the square next to your village, you are in luck. His 3200 resources will soon pay for your first batch of soldiers. Raid this target over and over again until his resources are gone. Spend his resources on more troops and resources upgrades here and there. You may also need to expand your warehouse to hold your new found resources. Once the first farm runs out of resources, move on to the second best farm on your screen. Remember that these farms will tend to refill their resources after a 12 hour period. So, you should hit each of your farms again at the end of the day. Repeat this process over the next couple days until there are no easy resources left within 20 minutes of your capital.
Day 4 At this point an experienced player will start noticing a real difference between Tuton and Roman. As tuton your raiders are dirt cheap and you’ll start amassing them quickly. You will also be ready to hire a few scouts soon. Roman legionare are expensive and slow to train, even with the new found resources from farming they are hard to pay for. While the Tutonic army is rapidly approaching 100 Clubbies! At this point the guide starts to vary some depending on your race. I will follow the Tuton path from here as it is the most aggressive. With 75 club swingers you’ll be able to start raiding villages 2 at one time, and you’ll likely drain their complete stock of resources in 1 hit! This means your ready for bigger fish. I begin hitting any realm within 6 range of my own that is 3 days inactive. If the guy looks scary skip him until you have a scout you should quickly out pace anyone near you. It is important to avoid getting into any real fights. Your only goal in Travian should be to hit people who can’t defend themselves.
Caution If you have active farmers around you, they may see you as an easy farm. It is important to send your army on a 5 hour attack (10 hour total mission) before you log off for the day, and before you go to sleep at night. Your army is your main source of resources, if they die you will suffer a devastating setback. Think of your army as you would your resource fields. You don’t want to lose troops just as you wouldn’t want to lose resource fields!
Day 6 If you raid actively you should be ready for a hero today, just in case any of your farms gets active on you. By this point you should have 150 clubbies, and level 5 resource fields. Your warehouse should always be able to hold 10 times your hourly production, but no more (so you can go to sleep without falling behind). Meanwhile your probably raiding 8-10 separate targets (more if you spend more time on Travian). When you log in ifor the morning open your map screen, right click your targets, open in new tab all 10 of your targets. Go through and send just enough troops to empty out each target. If you can’t remember how many resources each raid target has, keep a text file of the number of troops to send to each target. If a target has 800 of each resource then send 800*4/60= 54 club swingers (or 800*4/40=80 Legionnaire). A target with 1200 of each resource would require 1200*4/60=80 club swingers. By this point if you didn’t start late in the game you should already be shopping around for a small wing of a large alliance to join. You should stand out from your neighbors, and you are ready to contact a big alliance near you and inform them of your successful start. A recruiter looking at your area will easily see that you are the largest town within 10 squares. You can also paste him or her your most successful farm reports so he can see you have quite a large army for your size. If you are not accepted into an alliance don’t be tempted to start your own, it is a clear sign of weakness. Also, do not join a farm alliance unless you can find one that appears larger than your threatening neighbors because it offers you nothing, and gets you put on a "farm list”.
Caution: Lone fast building players are often prime targets for veteran farmers. You won’t really be able to field a decent army, so just stick to your offense plan. Send your army out when your not playing so, under no circumstances should you lose any soldiers on defense or even let someone scout you with your army at home. You will cause them to fear you, which means they will see your existence as a threat to their own. Just let the farmer come in and take what he can get, yet don’t let him slow you down. Keep up the raiding, keep trying to find allies. You may soon out grow your over confident farmer. However, if you happen to load 4 minutes away from a serious player, like yourself, who has a large head start on you, then you may have to restart and try again. But. before you do, you should dump all your resources into training a pure defensive army and hero with as many walls as practical. You will have to build up for several days in a row which means you’ll have to hide them from him. By taking the time and store up a large force, you can wipe out one of his or her raiding forces. This can be especially true if you repeat the event or delete the account before he or she can recover lost resources from you.
Day8 It will be time to expand to a second city soon, slow down club production and start a residence.
Day10 If you make it to this point without being attacked, then it is getting less likely that anyone will attack you. By this point as Tueton I carry 50 spearfighters, and around 600 Clubbies. (In almost all games I get careless and lose 50-100 clubbies beating down my upstart neighbors. This should be avoided if possible as it costs you precious raiders. However, some newbies your size may carry 25-30000 resources with no armies to speak of. By using scouts on all active players before hitting you can make sure they are defenseless, but remember their defense may just be away. By this point in the game I farm the nearest 20-30 inactive players. I also usually have 1 or 2 farms my own size who either didn’t have army, or who had a very small army. I break my army up into groups of 50 and send them out to the nearest 12 targets. As the closer raiders come in, I send them back out again. I do this twice a day, so that I can have enough resources to build settlers, keep up building resource fields, and replacing lost clubbies.
Its time to expand! Army production takes a back seat for 12 hours while the expansion is underway. By the end of day 10 you should have your first expansion. If not you are slacking on your raiding efforts. Once you get large enough you’ll go weeks or months without using defense. However, right now you are extremely vulnerable. If you aren’t in an alliance yet, recontact the people you laid ground work with previously. Point out your drastic increase in population and second village because this will let them know you are a serious player. However, if you started late, you will probably have to go it alone for a while. This means you will have to found multiple villages before a decent alliance will take you seriously. Maintain friendly but not overly pestering contacts with smaller wings of big alliances. L.R. for example is a huge wing and certainly full, but L.R.2 will have fewer and smaller players, thus making them more receptive to new recruits. You’re goal should be to reach the minimum population or army requirements for the alliance you wish to join.
Day11 You should make it to a level 10 forest resource by the end of today. From here the sky and a third village is the limit! Your second village should be starting an army, and begin raiding the villages near it so that it can support itself and stop draining your first town.
If you don’t make it to a large alliance within two weeks because you’re under constant attack, then you have three choices:
- Consider this round a practice run and learn about war and defense ie David vs Goliath.
- Found your second city well away from your farmer, preferably near a large collection farms.
- Restart your account and hope for better position.