Travian Strategy Guide

If you want to be successfull and become one of the biggest and most powerfull players in Travian you have to start out farming. I’m sure you already know what that is, but anyways, it means attacking your neighbours for resources. It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing teuton, roman or gaul, they all grow fastest with farming their neighbours. I’ve seen in a lot of of guides where the writer claims the best way to play roman or is to start out slowly building your resource fields and then cranny up, but that’s just plain wrong. With farming you’ll get a good portion of resources from tens to hundreds of villages instead of just one, can’t argue with that. Teutons are more suited for farming from the very start, but all tribes can do it and should do so from the start.

Farming your neighbourhood is closely related with dominating and taking control of your neighbourhood. Teutons can do so from the start, trying to kill off the troops of their neighbours with their clubs, while romans and gauls should avoid conflicts untill they get TTs(theutates thunders) and EI(equites imperatoris). That means depending on which tribe you play you’ll have some different goals from the start, but they all lead to the final goal of farming and dominating your neighbourhood. By your neighbourhood I mean your 7×7 from the very start and expanding it gradually till your 21×21 or possibly even further. I don’t think anyone should start building infrastructure and run parties to get a second village untill this goal is reached.

When creating your account the first thing you should do is to check your area for oases and croppers. I wouldn’t want to stay in an area without at least one 25% crop 25% of something else oasis in your 7×7. There should also be at least one 15 cropper with crop oases in your 13×13, preferably more, and also a few more 9 croppers and 15 croppers in your 21×21. I prefer starting the server 4 or 5 days late so I don’t start in the middle where there usually is a lot of active players, and also so that I can start farming when I’m in protection, but that is up to you. My guides will work for you in either case.

One more thing which is really important is to not get your troops killed. In the beginning there is no reason to have your troops in your village when you’re being attacked, in fact you should never have them at home, they should always be busy raiding. Send them away to some village far away when you’re not active, and if someone attack you just spend all your resources and they will get nothing. This is especially important for teutons as the clubs are horrible for defence, so don’t defend with them, attack with them. Another reason not to have your army at home at any time is to not let anyone find out the size of it, especially for romans and gauls this is important. The other players in the area will expect nothing untill you raid them with a huge army and kill all their troops.

About alliances from the start, don’t join any. You’ll just limit the number of villages you can farm. Usually the alliances who offer people to join them from the start who they don’t know have no clue what their are doing and will just slow you down. Just reply that you will think about their offer and get back to them at a later stage. Try to stay out of politics and conflicts from the start, focus on the main goals, killing the armies of other farmers and domiating and farming your neighbourhood efficiently.

When raiding you can start out sending as little as 2 troops as teuton or roman and 4 as a gaul. Increase this by one if you think they have this rat that they get in the reward program. As soon as you get the report you send out another raiding party and repeat untill you don’t get max resources anymore. Start out with villages with less than 15 pop as chances are they don’t have troops, most romans and gauls less than 30 pop won’t have troops either. Also take note of when players come of protection so that you can launch a raid at them at that very moment if it looks like they are inactivce. Some of those may have maxed warehouses and granarys and you want to be the one getting all that loot. If you start loosing troops increase the size of the raiding party a little, but 3-4 troops usually not for not loosing any unless the target has a high level residence and wall.

When killing off your competitors troops try to do it in a way so that you loose as little of your own troops as possible. As gaul and roman you should attack clubs with your horses, and counter any attach made on you, don’t try to defend it with your defence troops as that will cost you a lot more. To counter efficiently you’ll have to hit your enemys troops exactly after the time they return home, use one of those travel time calculation tools you’ll find online. As a teuton you might have to send your clubs out, then call them back after the enemy attack to then send them out countering. This makes it hard to time it closely, but do your best, even if your enemy has a 4-5 seconds to dodge your counterattack he still may not make it. Be carefull so that your enemy can not use the same tactic against you, that means, don’t attack a player you know have a lot of fast cavallery with slow troops like clubs.