Travian Guide

So, your the big fish in a small pond, No one has hit you for weeks and you’ve farmed everyone with in a half hour march out of the game. Or worse, no one has hit you for months, and there isn’t a farming target with in 2 hours march. When you open your map screen there is nothing but huge blocks of blue allied villages all around.

Some players will find this to be a good experience because they can happily simcity for weeks or months uninterrupted by using their army. However, for a true raider bent on taking a top spot in the alliance or even in the game, this is a depressing place to be. So, I have included some Travian tips on how to make your farms last longer.

The first step to more successful long term farming is to think long term. Realize that you don’t want to crush your enemy, just set them back enough to outgrow them. You don’t want your farms to be destroyed or worse to delete on their own! This means you’re often willing to use diplomacy to keep your allies from catapulting your farms. Remind all your close allies that your farms are a community resource pool, and catapulting good farms slows down the growth of the alliance and that is bad for business. It also means you have to be civil to your farms, making them cry just makes them delete faster. When they ask you to stop ignore them, or remind them that their losses are minimal. When they become irrationally abusive, remind them that Travian is a game and that games are for fun. If one of them mounts a good defense, complement them and admit that you’ll have to be a lot more careful in the future.

In order to keep farms from deleting it is important to keep the farm’s spirits up. This means don’t raid active players 10 times a day hoping to crush them under your boot. Instead a good farmer will “milk” the farm along by hitting them less often. You must give the farm a chance to “stay in the game”. This means a good farmer lets his farms found new villages. If you see settlers, don’t kill them! Let the farm expand to a second village and make you another farm. Refrain from farming a good farm more than several times a week unless he goes idle. Check his activity using a Travian activity checker, as long as hes playing his account cut him some slack. Only drop the hammer on him if he goes seriously idle for more than a day or two, that way when he comes back he is likely blame his own idleness for his losses, and not give up because as soon as he starts playing actively again hes able to “back you off”

This strategy is not without risks. Some farms can be quite skilled players, although this is a very very rare occurrence. A handful of your farms may manage to form formidable defense under lax farming. If this happens you should consider recruiting this player as he obviously has some Travian Chops. If the personality isn’t something you want in your alliance because hes obnoxious or rude, your gruesome offense can always level his village and your hero at the same time. On EXTREME rare occasions a farm may amass such a huge defense that its no longer worth farming him. Simply move on to better farms and one of your allies will surely destroy him in short order. His huge defenses will certainly prevent him from ever amassing an offense that can do any real damage to you. Its nearly impossible for a farm to form a serious cata threat, or even manage to build a senator for conquering. If you ever do scout a senator in one of your farms, its time to bring out the cata. However, even here you should show restraint. Set him back, but leave him in the game.

Nothing can be more frustrating than when a weak ally levels your best farms. If this happens to you as it has to me so many times, send them to this guide, or better still write your own mini version and send it to their IGM.

An important note: When attacking a larger player, Crush him without mercy as quickly as possible and conquer as many villages as fast as you can. A larger player is a serious threat and could easily delete before you manage to conquer anything once you beat his army he is almost certain to delete.