Defensive Roman Strategy Guide #1

Introduction

This guide will explain to you the basics of turning your village into an economical
powerhouse, and it will teach you how to defend your resources
effectively and with minimal expenses. If you want to be a heavy attacker
who leaves behind a series of burning villages right from the start of the
game, this is not the guide for you, although you may find it beneficial
to read it anyway - even heavy attackers will need some economy. However,
if you don’t mind biding your time and staying relatively low-profile
for about 2 months before happily and easily grinding those nasty heavy
attackers into the dust, please read on.

Also note that in my opinion, a defensive strategy does not mean you
shouldn’t attack. It just means that attacking serves the higher purpose of
maintaining a high growth rate and does not become a goal in itself, and
that economy is the most important goal.

I will try to cover all the fundamental principles, and explain these with
examples. I will also spend some time on the psychological and interactive
aspects of playing a game like travian. After the theoretical part, I will give
a walkthrough for the first 2 months of the game.

Why Romans?

Romans have expensive and slow units, why would I want them? A good
question, and this guide could be used without too much trouble by a gaul,
and even by a teuton (although the teuton will have better strategies available).
But the good thing about romans is that their units, while expensive,
are the most powerful in the game. No other race can match the raw power
of roman infantry, not even with cavalry. Praetorians and Imperians are
the best specialists in the game, and legionnaires are among the best generalists.
At the start, training costs really hurt since at that moment these
costs are the limiting factor for military size. Later in the game it is space
efficiency that counts, meaning attack/defence power per unit of crop produced.
And that is where Romans shine. Therefore our strategy will be
targeted towards reaching this point as quickly as possible by putting a lot
of effort into building a strong economy and keeping military and other
expenses low during development.



Principles

Have patience
When you start playing, you will quickly notice that Travian is a slowpaced
game at the start and that it takes you weeks or months to get any-where. Therefore, the first principle is: have patience! Even though development
may seem slow at times, keep the longer-term goals in mind and
you will notice you are getting ever closer to them.

Set goals
That immediately introduces the second principle: Work towards longterm
goals and don’t let events (such as attacks on you) carry you away
from them. Instead, deal with these diversions and then immediately return
to your long-term goals.

Maintain exponential growth
The third principle of this strategy is: maintain exponential growth. This
means you continuously have to invest your resources in such a way that
they increase your growth rate. This means you will grow ever faster and
faster, allowing you to eventually catch up and pass people who initially
may seem to grow faster.

Don’t get into conflicts
You are not out there alone, and people (especially children in web games)
are less reserved than in real life. Many players around you will be immature
and react emotionally and with verbal violence to your actions, or
derive enjoyment from acting bad. Some will even go to great lengths, hampering
their own growth, just to annoy you, others will abuse you if you
give them half the opportunity. The most dangerous (and the rarest) will
try to play psychological games with you.

You cannot avoid this, but you can do a great deal to stay out of trouble.
Make friends, join an alliance, and be polite but firm. Never give in to
threats, harassment or extortion, but don’t provoke people by being smug,
defiant or triumphant. Be firm, rational and calm, don’t hesitate to call bluff
and never, never, react to insults or do anything that might insult people
yourself. Don’t get into pissing contests about who has the most allies. And
stay away from the few really big and organized alliances.

And finally, don’t offend people with your actions. Sure, you can attack
them, but don’t do it ten times a day, and politely react to messages asking
you to stop without promising to and then breaking your promises. Be
honest and open that you will attack them again if they dont defend themselves.
They will still hate you, but they will be less likely to invest a lot of
time and effort in destroying you.

In short, don’t do anything that will get you dragged into long-lasting
and potentially growth limiting conflicts.

Guideline

Based on these principles, we can now formulate guidelines:
1. Most important: invest resources into production fields;
2. Only build buildings when you can easily afford them in terms of
hourly production;
3. Only build buildings when doing so will make you grow faster;
4. Build a minimal defence that is just big enough to make raiding you
unprofitable;
5. Build offence to raid inactives and undefended actives only.

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Contributor : Lulus