Games Walkthrough

Walkthrough

This walkthrough is not a step-by-step description of every action you must
take. It just tells you what your goals should be at each stage and what you
must concentrate upon. Please feel free to follow it to the point where your own
opinion and playing style starts to deviate from the one I advocate here, and be
creative and adaptive. No two villages are alike. Thefore there is no best
strategy, and I sure don't claim to have it. Nevertheless, this walkthrough
follows the principles and guidelines I outlined here, and therefore I think
this is a good way to go for a defensive player. I know from experience that you
will be able to grow faster than the vast majority of players if you follow it.

In this walkthrough, I will assume you play on a server that has about 7 to 9
days of protection for new players. If you have more protection, you might want
to move military training a bit to the back and instead continue working on your
fields a little longer.

Day 0
So, you just started! As you will see, you start off with a lot of resources,
but with very little production per hour and with an almost empty village. Do
you feel the temptation already to do something about it? I'm sure you do.
However, you must resist. This guide is not for those without self-restraint, so
think long-term.

Our long term goal is to get your production up as quickly as possible, all your
fields to L10, in the time span of about 8-10 weeks, while also producing a
sufficiently strong defensive force and a modest raiding force. All fields at
L10 is where this guide will end: at that point you can easily found a second
and even a third village, or you can build a strong military and switch to
offensive strategies. Anyway, when you have played for 2 months you don't need a
beginners strategy guide anymore.

Now, we touch upon a very important aspect of Travian: Whenever you upgrade a
field of wood, clay or iron, your production of those resources will increase,
but your crop production will decrease! Similarly, whenever you build or upgrade
a building, and whenever you build military, your crop production will decrease.
This may not seem too bad, but you need crop to upgrade or build those fields,
buildings and military, so you always need to have sufficient crop production.
You won't be the first person to end up with no crop and no crop production,
making it impossible to upgrade crop fields to increase your production... You
don't want that. Therefore, watch your crop production carefully. Whenever crop
production lags behind, be sure to upgrade crop fields!

As we are trying to boost economy, we will spend our resources mainly on
boosting resource production by upgrading resource production fields. If we
check the total costs of upgrading all fields, we'll see that we need clay the
most, followed by wood, followed by iron, and we need crop least. For fastest
growth, the ratio between wood:clay:iron:crop production should be something
like 10:12:8:6. This means you should try to always produce the most clay, then
wood, then iron, and finally crop, while crop production should be about half
that of clay, sometimes more but never less! If you maintain this ratio, you
will be able to grow slightly faster than people who try to upgrade an equal
amount of every field. You will notice that if you just build whatever field you
can build first at any time (so if it takes 4 hours of resource production
before you can upgrade clay, 3 before you can upgrade wood, 3 for crop, and 2
for iron, build iron as soon as you can), you will automatically approach the
ratio above. Travian plus can really help you here (you can buy it at the
website for a small fee, which gives you certain user interface benefits and
also helps the people behind Travian to support the game and keep it banner
free), as it shows how much time you have to wait before you can upgrade each of
your fields.

Also, never have more than 1 level difference between fields of the same kind.
For example, never upgrade a wood L5 field to L6 if you still have L4 wood
fields. Instead, upgrade your L4 wood fields to L5 first before starting on L6.
This because the return on investment, the gains you get from an upgraded field
versus the costs upgrading that field cost you, become ever lower at higher
levels. There is one exception to this rule: Because of the high crop costs of
L1 fields, directly upgrading clay, wood and iron (but not crop) fields from L1
to L2 and L3 before starting on a new L1 field results in slightly faster
growth, however the maximum time gain you get from doing this is less than 6
percent. So I'd say don't bother, unless you really want the best performance.

Still with me? Told you you'd need patience, but now we can start playing! Use
the resources you got at the start to upgrade your fields, starting with clay.
You will notice that you can only upgrade 1 field at a time and that it takes a
while before the field is built. Just hang on to your resources for a while,
don't spend them on buildings, and upgrade the next field when the first is
finished. If you have Travian plus, you can put one field in the building queue
to ensure the upgrade starts as soon as the previous one is finished.

In this way, upgrade your fields (sticking to the ratio I gave before) until
your resources are all spent. As upgrading fields uses more of the other
resources than crop and you start off with an equal amount of each resource, you
can afford to produce slightly less crop than you would according to the ratio,
until you use all the stored crop. However, only do this if you are confident
you will be able to upgrade crop production in time and not end up with 0 crop!
When your resources reach 0, just wait until you've produced them again, and
spend all resources you gain as soon as you can.

During the first 7 or more days you cannot be attacked. Therefore, there is no
need to do anything about defence during these days. However, as the 7th day
approaches, you will want to start spending time and resources on defence!

There's two ways you can defend yourself: one is limiting the amount of
resources attackers can take, the other is by producing defence to deter or kill
attackers. At this moment in time, you don't have enough resource production to
start building lots of troops already. However, you can do the second option:
build a cranny! Crannies protect resources from being stolen. So build a cranny
and upgrade it to L3 or 4. It will not protect all your resources, but attackers
will not gain much from attacking you.

After 8 to 10 days
During the 8th to 10th day you should be able to reach the first turning point
in the game: All your fields have reached L3. You now have a solid resource
production of about 60/60/60/40 per hour, and now it is time to take a small
break. Upgrading fields to L4 seems very expensive and the 7 extra resources
don't seem to be worth it, so we need a boost. We're finally going to build
buildings! Upgrade your main building to L3, build a rally point and a barracks.
Also, if you happen to be away from Travian for more than 9 hours, you will want
to build a warehouse. And if you want to join an alliance (which I strongly
recommend as raiders will be much less likely to attack an alliance member), you
have to build an embassy. And finally, a marketplace will come in handy, as it
allows you to trade away excess resources for stuff you need.

When your barracks are built, train about 4-6 legionnaires. These are the basic
roman troops, and they are good for both offence and defence. For now, we will
use them to raid our inactive neighbours. You will see that some people in your
neighbourhood are not growing at all, often even staying at size 2. These can be
raided for resources. For the next few days, raid these people as often as you
can until they are empty, but make sure you don't attack people who are your
size or who you suspect to have any military. You don't want to lose those
precious legionnaires or make enemies! They start making a profit only after 12
successful raids, and therefore you have to keep them alive for at least that
long. So, be careful!

You might be attacked in this period. If you are, make sure to have a big enough
cranny, but don't keep your troops at home unless they greatly outnumber the
enemy. And communicate! Politely ask the attacker to stop and tell him you will
start defensive troops and upgrade your cranny to make sure he won't make profit
out of you. But do this in a nice and positive manner, and don't make it
personal. And read the what to do when being farmed guide on the forums for
more details.

Don't neglect your growth though. As soon as the buildings and troops are in,
start working towards your next interim goal: all fields at L6! Keep raiding
inactives, expanding your target range when those inactives closest to you are
inactive. In the meanwhile, you don't need any new buildings except for the
granary to store your ever increasing crop production. And upgrade your
warehouse and granary as you grow. Also gradually expand your military force, as
this becomes ever cheaper while you grow. When you have all your fields at L6,
you will want to have a force of about 30 legionnaires, more if you have
threatening neighbours.

3 to 4 weeks
After approximately 3-4 weeks of play in total, you should reach the point where
all fields are at L6, assuming you did not have major trouble with attackers. At
this point, we will take another short break. The upgrade to L7 is again very
expensive compared to the gains you get from it, so income can use another
boost. Also, by now some of your neighbours will become dangerous and since
legionnaires are not the best defenders, your defence needs to be reorganized.

Upgrade your barracks to L3 and build an academy, and upgrade it to L5. Build an
armory, a blacksmith and upgrade the blacksmith to L3. Build stables L1. In the
meanwhile, research in your academy the praetorian, imperian and equites legatis
as they become available. Also train about 30 praetorians or more depending on
the amount of aggressive neighbours you have, and 30 imperians or less if you
have few attractive targets. Train 3 legates. And build a mill! Don't build the
mill earlier, this is the point where a L1 mill starts making you a profit. Wait
with the L2 mill for a while. You will probably also want to expand your market
a bit to get more merchants.

Legates can be used for scouting. This means you can now see whether all those
neighbours you never dared to attack have defence! Use them to scout around, and
then visit the undefended neighbours with your legionnaires and imperians. Keep
the praetorians at home, they are your defenders.

This will have kept you from growing a few days, and therefore it's high time to
return to growth. Over the next 4 weeks, expand your fields to L10. Make sure to
keep improving your defence, as you are now becoming an attractive target for
the big fish out there. I would suggest having 100 of either defence unit at L10
at least. Your offence probably does not need a big boost, as those 30 imperians
and legionnaires are enough to raid the inactives and players without defence in
your neighbourhood. However, if you feel you need more capacity, expand your
offence a little bit. But don't fall into the trap of raiding people with large
armies! We are only raiding for profit and quick returns, we won't switch to
full offensive power just yet...

While growing, you may want to upgrade your stables to L5 and research equites
imperatoris. These are not particularly strong, but they are fast, and if you
build 10 of them you might be able to expand your raiding range considerably,
being able to target more inactives and undefended players. However, the costs
are considerable and I would not suggest doing this before all your fields are
at L7, and it may not be the effort at all. I at least am too lazy to spend much
time on raiding people for relatively little profit, and raiding with imperians
keeps me occupied enough already.

Also slowly expand the mill until it reaches L5 when all other fields reach L10.
Then, you will want to build bakery, iron foundry, sawmill and brickworks and
upgrade them. You now have maximum production!

8 to 10 weeks
At L10 this guide ends. There are a number of things you will want to do now:

- Build new villages and expand them using the huge production of your primary
village
- Start raiding active, well-defended players with a huge army
- Upgrade buidings, research catapults, build a few and start harrassing other
players, possibly fighting in alliance wars
- Take revenge on those silly Teutons with a big force but no production
capacity of their own by fighting a war of attrition

But whatever you do, have fun with your full-grown village and complacently lean
back while people start asking you how you possibly can grow this fast. Enjoy
the full options this game gives you once you've taken the effort to get the
income to use them all!