Travian

[skanks]

Introducing Skankius Caesar. Finished up the tutorial a few days back. Been fairly optimal in upgrading my resources by determining my limiting factors and upgrading their production. Nice thing about travian is that upgrading resource x takes less of x than it takes of y and z. Send out some msgs to my neighbors inquiring whether they were friendly or foely. Nobody responded so I started raiding the weakest one once I had 2 legionnaires. Used the profits to buy 2 more legionnaires. Embassy isn't really a priority for me now, but I will get one soon and join the alliance. I figure economic development needs to be consistent if I'm going to thrive. I appear have the benefit of weak neighbors so my military investments should also pay off quickly.

[Vyrosama]

I'm still chugging along waaay south of you. If you want I can ask the head of the alliance if you can join in. We only have four people of which three of us (including myself) do constant raiding of the folks nearby. Our alliance isn't that strong but we are part of a confederacy that has a few big alliances in it (although I'm not sure if the confederacy is some sort of unwritten non-aggression pact between players). My suggestion is to try to ally yourself with some folks closeby, it would makes people think twice before they randomly raid you. I'm waaay too far to help you even if you get in trouble since it'd probably take 26:16:59 for my fastest unit (scout) to get to you. I've been building up my cavalry since most of the abandoned farms nearby have disappeared so I've been forced to search further out for farms.

Just to give you a feel of what army strength should be like, here's my stats:
Class: Romans
Population: 155
Troops:
10 Legionnaires
10 Praetorians
20 Imperians
5 Equites Legati (scout)
15 Equites Imperatoris
1 Rat (still never been attacked/raided yet =P )

I didn't start raiding till late in the game but I've been lucky to have never been attacked/raided myself so my army strength isn't too bad but nothing compared to what my allies have.

Other mistakes that I did that you can learn from, upgrade your resource fields evenly and don't go for the grain mill building (it's not worth it till you probably have all your fields at lvl 5+ also I thought it was a +25% increase but that's a level 5 grain mill building)

[Vyrosama]

Soo..they recently reset server 5 and upgraded it to a new version (I'm guessing the game ended with.... uber big alliance built the first world wonder upto lvl 100....average game lasts around 300 days...)

The cool thing about the new version is that you can build heroes, and take on npc mobs etc. There's about 20,000 accounts on this server and since everyone is starting out at the same time...there's no fear of being farmed by huge cities. I'm in the NE (136,6) (borderline North)...and my screen is filled with new cities....should be interesting to see who's who once the newbie protection wears out......

[Vyrosama]

-quit Server 5, was taking too much time (constant bombardment of attacks required constant decisions to relocate/attack with troops), it was fun to play with the hero though. Although I do imagine it would take a heck of a long time to "level" him up. The addition of oases were also kinda cool; allowed the player to attack things without pissing off other players.

-focusing mainly on S3 now
Expanded to three villages now. Alliance fell apart again, so merged into yet another bigger one. These folks seem to be a bit more organized. They have Battle Groups and the sort to coordinate attacks. Seems they just recently took down a player with 2000 population down to 600ish (apparently he was being an ass...).

Biggest battle so far:
200 imperians, 5 rams, 11 catapults

loss: 178 imperians, 5 rams, 10 catapults worth 140k resources (just to give you an idea, that would require about a week or so to re-create my army)
I probably could have minimized this a lot but due to poor coordination from my alliance and BAD scouting info....we did however convert our target into a farm but.... he joined a friendly wing of my alliance and is now untouchable.. (if they do figure out he's worthless...maybe I'll have a farm back )

Does anyone else play anymore? Some cool tools and stats if you care

--stats--
http://travian-utils.com/?s=com3&idu=42727
Tons of info on my growth, ranking, and even playing activity

--tools--
http://www.traviantoolbox.com/
http://www.kirilloid.ru/travian/index.php

[quantus]

Dude, if you're not playing with the Travian Beyond greasemonkey scripts, you're handicapped.

Here's a listing of my alliance:
http://www.traviantoolbox.com/listes.ph ... es&aid=869
The data in traviantoolbox is about a day old almost. It usually updates between 5 and 7pm PST.
Mostly, I like this graph:
http://www.traviantoolbox.com/listes.ph ... erveur=430

I'm second overall in population in my alliance. Just got my 4th village.

[Peijen]

...

Dude, reply to my email. Punk.

[Vyrosama]

Dude, if you're not playing with the Travian Beyond greasemonkey scripts, you're handicapped.

Here's a listing of my alliance:
http://www.traviantoolbox.com/listes.ph ... es&aid=869
The data in traviantoolbox is about a day old almost. It usually updates between 5 and 7pm PST.
Mostly, I like this graph:
http://www.traviantoolbox.com/listes.ph ... erveur=430

I'm second overall in population in my alliance. Just got my 4th village.

Whoops, read that sentence too fast, just fyi, scripts can get you banned...

Interesting, we're on the same mega-alliance now...Also the battle I mentioned before was with andreiiii who joined your alliance. We pretty much left him without any ability to produce any troops....hopefully he's rebuilding up =)

How's your army count compared to your population? (just trying to figure out how much to produce etc)

[quantus]

I've been low on troop count so far... ~200 each of Phalanx, Swordsmen, and Theutates Thunder. I can generate about 100 Theutate Thunder in a day though at my main city, so I'm not too worried about troops right now since I'm pretty sure I can react fast enough.

I know they "can" get you banned, but these are pretty much UI enhancements without extra polling of the server.

Try these scripts:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28129
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/13693


Also, for imdb, try this:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/11540

[skanks]

I started travian was because I thought it was going to be a team game with Schlag 2B. For the last several months I've been playing on inertia. Slowly, I've built up, raided villages, joined a strong alliance, etc. Now I have a 12 cropper, 300 troops, and am catapult ready.

The alliance "The Dark Tower" and I are an odd fit. The alliance has this excessive Chivalry theme. It attracts people with Tolkien-esq names who make long-winded posts to our forum about rising together, falling together, and standing proudly together. Most alliances tend to have a more vicious motiff. This might be why we attract a lot of women.

The women are loyal and helpful. But when they dish out credit on the forum one guy is never quite mentioned by name: Skankius Caesar.

Geeze, if I knew there were going to be so many female players, I would have chosen a less offensive name.

Anyway, I'm ready to start making cats and fucking up innocent bystandards.

But fuck it, this game takes too long and is too time invasive. I'm already managing EVE.

If anybody wants my account, its yours. Otherwise I'm handing it off to fairygirltot, an Irish girl from my alliance. She probably doesn't even know what skank means. I feel so guilty giving this account to her.

[quantus]

I'm not really interested in having another account since the script for queuing actions doesn't work across multiple accounts and I rely heavily on that to minimize how much I actually have to log in. Besides, as it is, I'm spending a bit too much time with the game.

Oh, why haven't you founded a second village yet? You do realize that you're the player with the highest pop that hasn't expanded yet in your alliance.

[Vyrosama]

I forget but wasn't there something about banning for having multiple accounts over the same ip?...but then again I vaguely remember something about a permanent sitter of some sort for another alliance member. Oh well. Thanks for the offer but one account is enough time spent on this already.

It does suck, that you can't be placed near your friends when you start. I'm getting bored yet compelled to play until something better comes along or until I get totally crushed by another player (a much more interesting way to leave the game). My defenses are finally starting to look a tad better (defense troop count equal to my population which most players I've talked to recommend at the minimum) but I've noticed that the more aggressive players usually have an offensive troop count of 2~3x their population or mega-alliances will gang up and utter destroy a player at whim. So there really is no stopping someone from destroying you entirely if they wanted too ...I just hope to deter those lone wolves (around my population level) from trying to conquer me on a one on one battle. My aim is to be balanced (1x population for offensive, and 1x population of defensive troops). So if someone attacks me, I can at least retaliate with a decent size force.

Random Tidbit: One of my village's name is : Don't Tase Me Bro!. I was doing my usual raid of farms when one of my farms starting to change his village's name to varies names including "Don't attack me bro!" in hopes I would stop farming him. I got a kick out of it so I decided to stop for a few days to see if he actually wised up (ie. use up resources so I don't get anything, build up defenses, build up crannies, etc) or just do nothing and hoard resources ripe for the picking. I resumed raiding a few days later to get a nice bounty. He then messaged me asking if I would stop farming him. I don't know what to do at this point. I could try to actually teach him how to play the game (in which he has failed to learn in the past month or so I've been farming him...heck I thought he quit a long time ago) or I could ignore him and let him be farmed by me or another player....or I could help him and then when he's built up a bit...utterly destroy him with my 11 catapults (need more catapults...25 seems like a nice number...).