Travian Strategy Guide

In this travian combat strategy guide I will go through a couple of basic combat strategies everyone has to know to play travian well. The strategies and tecniques here will be used from day one and throughout the whole game.

Dodging
I guess this is the most important one to know, and I guess pretty much everyone who’s reading this know what it is. Anyways though, it means sending your army out of your city when another player attacks to avoid a fight and avoid loosing troops. You will be doing this all the time, as you never want to defend your city with offense troops, so you always dodge unless you have defensive troops there with them or you’re certain it’s just a tiny attack that won’t hurt your offense force at all.

Countering
This one is also very important, but many new players don’t know about it. I see all the time players having their clubs killed by my horses and just calling me lucky for hitting them at the exact time they return. It has nothing to do with luck at all, and it’s quite easy using the right tools. I suggest you bookmark this site. It’s webpage where you can put in the starting times and figure out when the army reaches it’s home. First I’ll let you know how to do it when you have troops that have a different speed than the troops the other player attacks you with. Usually you know what kind of troops are coming at you when you see how long time it takes for the attack to reach you. At least in the beginning this is easy, as teutons will have clubs, romans imperians and gauls phalaxes.

Say you have an incoming attack at 2.00.00 pm, just to make it easy. This is from a teauton, so you know how fast his troops move. You have a bunch of imperians yourself, and you wisely decide that it’s better to counter the attack and hit his army at home than it is to defend your own village. Clubs have horrible defense after all. You go to the travel time calculator and type in your own as well as your enemys location and 2.00.00 pm as the starting time, the calculator will then show you when your enemys clubs will be home, say thay are at home at 2.30.00 pm. Now you know you have to send out your imperians so they reach your enemy at exactly 2.30.01 pm, one second after he gets his clubs home, so that he has no chance of sending them away. (Sending them at 2.30.00 might work too, but it’s a gamble and 1 second is good enough) Anyways, now you remember the time 2.30.01 pm, and you type that into the calculator and chose end time instead of starting time, now the calculator will show you when you have to send your imperians to reach there at this time. This will be at some time before 2.00.00 pm as imperians are slower, just look at the exact same time in the calculator and launch your counter attack at this time. If you have say IEs to counter with, you’d launch the attack later as the IEs are much faster than clubs, in fact they are twice as fast.

What if you both have clubs or other type of troops that move at the same speed? Well, then you can’t use this method. What you have to do then is to first dodge and then counter, and the best you can possibly do is to get it like 3 seconds after your enemy returns. That will be good enough against most players though, so I suggest that you still do it. If your enemy arrives at 2.00.00 pm as before, send out your own army say 39 seconds before, at 1.59.21. Then you wait 20 seconds exactly and click the red x to return it home. Now it will return at 2.00.01 pm, one second after your enemys attack has passed by. No you move quick, have another browser window open and send it at your enemy right away. The faster you are with this the harder it will be for your enemy to save his army.

How about if your enemys troops are twice as fast as yours? Well that’s too bad for you, you can’t counter anything that’s twice as fast as you or more, as you’d have to launch your attack at the same time or before your opponent launches his. So unless you can read your enemys mind you have no chance of doing this. All you can do is either research a faster type of troop or build defensive troops to have in your village.

Fake attacks
Fake attacks are attacks that are not real, kinda obvious I guess? They are very real for the one troop that is sent into death though, but who cares. Sometimes you don’t want your enemy to know when your real attack comes so you send out one troop to attack him with now and then, and then suddenly you send your whole force. Alliances also sometimes uses this in wars to attack all their enemy alliances at the same time, so the enemy alliances have no idea what player to defend as they are all under attack. Fakes and real attacks are mixed up this way to confuse your enemys and avoid their defense walls. When sending catapult waves this is also usefull, as you don’t want your target to know which of the hits in the wave is the real clearing attack, so you send a bunch of lone catapults first to confuse him.