Defensive Roman Strategy Guide #3

Walkthrough

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 is relatively expensive and the 7 extra resources you get from doing are not much of a reward, so we need a boost to get past L3 quickly. We’re finally going to build buildings and get military! Upgrade your main building to L3, build a rally point and a barracks. Also, if you are sometimes away from Travian for more than 9
hours, you will want to build a warehouse to store your resources. 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 5 Travian Defensive Roman Strategy Guide 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. Legionnaires 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 empty. 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 or L8, 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.

When all your fields are at L8, there is a nice trick to speed up your growth somewhat. When your clay, wood and iron fields reach L10 you are able to build production enhancing buildings for these resources. These function much like a mill, but unlike the mill the first levels of these buildings come at almost no cost compared to the cost of field upgrades. Therefore, the best strategy is to upgrade a clay field to L9 and immediately to L10 before doing anything else. This allows you to build the brickworks. Do so, and immediately upgrade it to L4. This will give you a 17 percent higher return on investment than upgrading an equivalent amount of clay fields to L9. Use the same trick for wood (which will be faster as this upgrade mainly consumes a lot of clay) and iron, and only then return to upgrading the rest of the fields to L9 and L10. This should save you a couple of days.

In principle, the L4 and L5 upgrade are so expensive that they only become profitable when all your fields are L10. However, when you have a mill L5 and a wheat field L10, you can build a bakery, which is very lucrative. By doing the maths I have shown that it is actually worth it to build a L5 mill and a L4 bakery as soon as you have 1 L10 crop field (and 5 L9 fields), but the investment costs are about 120k resources in total. This may be too much at this stage, although you do get over 35% higher return
on investment.

To keep this guide simple to understand, I refer those interested in the maths to my post about the subject in this thread: http://forum.travian.com/viewtopic.php?t=2843

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!