Travian Journal - 3-July-2006

I've decided to occasionally blog my progress in Travian. That is probably not a brilliant idea, because it is a competitive strategy game, and "the enemy" might read it, whoever he might be. But I'm relying on not being *that* famous, and the potential opponents not googling me (because "Travian Tobold" might well find me on Google). In any case, Travian is a lot slower than World of Warcraft, so there won't be that much to report.

My village on server 6 is now one week old. Which means that my 7-day "newbie protection" is ending now, and my neighbors could now attack me and try to steal my resources by raiding me. No, no, that's not the same sort of raid as in WoW, in Travian a raid is closer to the original meaning of the word, a small attack with the purpose of stealing stuff by force. There are two possible ways to avoid being "farmed" by somebody else: have troops for defense, or try to make sure that the raider doesn't get much from raiding you, and moves on to a more profitable target.

Now troops I don't have any yet, I haven't even built barracks. My village is Roman, and the Romans have good troops, but they are a tad expensive. Also if I use my resources to build troops, I can't use the resources to increase my production, which would slow down my economy. Of course if I had troops I could try to make them pay for their cost by raiding myself, but when the troops are out raiding, they don't defend my village any more. And it's easy to make enemies when raiding other players, unless the other player is inactive.

So currently I'm going for the "unattractive target" strategy. That involves two parts, having very few resources on stock, and preventing the resources I have from getting stolen. Having few resources on stock is in any case a good idea, in Travian you should always invest your resources in increasing your production as soon as you have enough resources for the next upgrade. The trick is to build production of wood, clay, iron, and food in the same proportion that you are using them, so you aren't blocked from building something because of lack of clay, while your iron stocks are overflowing. I'm trying to keep my production on a ratio of 5:6:4:3, which seems to work reasonably well. In any case if you run low in one particular resource, but not the others, building up e.g. clay production costs very little clay, but lots of the other resources, so by building whatever is fastest to build you balance out naturally.

For preventing resources to be stolen Travian has a special building called a "cranny". I think I slightly exaggerated here, because I built up my cranny to level 6, allowing me to hide up to 360 resources of each type from raiders. Even against Teutons, who have a bonus against crannies, I still hide 240 resources of each type. My production levels are around 40 resources of each type per hour, so I can hide up to 9 hours of production away from non-Teuton raiders. So as long as I use up most of my resources before and after work, and before and after going to sleep, I'm pretty well covered. Of course the cranny also did cost me some resources, thus being a drain on my economic development. But I'm thinking of it like some sort of insurance. If no raider comes, lucky me, but if somebody raids me, I'm covered for most of my losses, the raider goes home with little or no loot, and hopefully doesn't come back.

The plan for the next week is to keep increasing production, and not to build any buildings in the village, except maybe upgrading the cranny as needed. That isn't terribly exciting, but I figure that if I stay patient and build up my economy first, I can easily afford good troops later. If I build troops now, I only risk losing them before they earned more resources in raiding than their cost is.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:23 AM Permanent Link