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From Travian v2 Wiki (S2-S6), the encyclopedia anybody can edit

Contents 1 Overview 2 Economy 3 Efficiency 4 Excel

The Economist Starter Guide (Power-play Strategies for the Generic Defender) version 0.1.2
by Jhoric
Currently, this entire guide is my original work. If there are significant contributions by other parties in the future, I will acknowledge the contributions within.

version history
0.1.2, [2005 Oct 28]
0.1.1, first release. [2005 Oct 12]
0.1, first draft. [2005 Oct 11]

change log
0.1.2
- minor changes/corrections
- Added "Use Bookmark" section

0.1.1
- Corrected some language errors.
- Minor reformatting
0.1
- added first draft.

Overview

This guide suggests general strategies for the player who wants to start defensively. The strategies are applicable to all tribes and are meant for early game, but some aspects/suggestions may be useful up to mid or even late game. In addition to the tips regarding game mechanic, there are also efficiency tips for the player to do more with less real-life effort.

Some parts of this guide involves computations which may be too tedious for some people. If you find such tasks troublesome, just read to get the general idea and ignore the computations. Those "tedious" parts are meant for the power-players, who are willing to do all the tedious stuff just to squeeze out that tiny additional advantage.

Three words encompasses the central idea to this guide : Economy, Efficiency and Excel.

Economy

Central to this strategy is the emphasis on the economy development over all other things, especially in the early stages, where main building, barracks, walls or any other non-essential buildings are temporarily ignored in favor of resource fields. We will at most build crannies and the marketplace in the early stages. You won't need a lv 10 cranny either if you follow the guidelines in the other parts of this guide.

Why be an Economist?
As some people have pointed out, Travian is not sim city. So why would anybody want to choose the economist way? First of way, this is just a starter strategy. The fact that you are not militaristic now doesn't mean you can't be later. There is a saying that the true war is a contest between economic powers, not just the armies in the field, which are just a manifestation of the economic powers behind them. This is very true. With a larger ecnomy, you can win a fight in the long run against somebody who has a larger army but weaker economy. A real example I've been through in the game is when another player attacked my village (my pop should be around 120, his pop around 60) with a large army that outnumbers mine (should be ard 80 vs 10), killed off all my soldiers while he suffers only a few casualties. But with my better economy, I managed to research, fortfy and build enough defensive troops such that the second time he attacked after a day, my defences wiped out his army, although I lost almost all my troops again. But even if he wins the second time, he will suffer more casualties and I am still the one who can recover faster, and it was a certainty that I will win, just sooner or later.

For most of the starting period, especially if the server provides 7-day protection, you should concentrate on resource fields.
At first, the priority should be, in this order, Clay, Wood, Iron, Crop. Crops are of lower priority because at the start, most of the buildings uses less of them and the amount of resource you start with will last a short while. But crops are still needed to increase population capacity and should be built when crop production gets too low.

After the amount of crops drop, you should change the priority to Clay-Wood-Crop-Iron which should stay that way for a while.

When do I start to build the cranny?
The only early defence we have is crannies. You should build one immediately if you start in a mature neighborhood with players significantly bigger than yours, unless the server has a 7-day protection, in which case you can delay the crannies until the 5th or 6th day. But don't go happily building your cranny all the way to level 10. With greater efficiency (more in Efficiency section later), you can avoid having too many of one resource so a small cranny will be sufficient. One simple guide is to look at the average highest amount of resource of a each type that you are currently building : e.g. if you are building all the level 2 fields where the highest amount of resource of a particular type needed is 165, a level 1 or 2 cranny is sufficient.

The Gauls, with their 2x cranny size, is particularly effective at this and either build less crannies or carry the defensive strategy later into the game.

To market, to market
The first building you shoud aim for after the cranny, is the market. The primary motivation is the ability for you to "balance" your resources by trading those resources you have surplus of for those that you need more urgently. To get the market, you will need main building level 3. One suggestion is that you should build main building lv 2, main building lv 3, market lv 1 one after the one without building anything else in-between. This is because main building upgrades are not really useful to us at this point and our investments will only get useful after we get the market. So do not start towards getting the market unless you are ready the dedicate yourself to building all three buildings. I would suggest that you get all your resource fields to at least level 2 before considering.

How to use the market?
The Open Market. This refers to the direct method of going to the "Buy" page under the market and look for deals that you want, or putting up your own bids through the "Sell" page. One advice is : Always limit the maximum distance, unless you don't really need the resource urgently is willing to commit your merchants to trades which may take a loooooooong time to complete, or you're just participating in the Travian Merchant Marathon.

The Private Market. This is not an actual market in the game, but means arranging private deals with your neighbors or allies. Often, you can find people who are closeby and willing to trade with you although they do not place bids in the open market. To trade, just get one party to put up the bid, and if you are allies, you may want to check the "allies only" option so that only allies will be able to accept that bid. You may also want to limit the maximum distance of the trade to prevent people who are further away from accepting the bid. If you are in an alliance, getting all your members into a forum/irc/instant messaging system is also very good way to arrange ad-hoc deals.

You should only expand your market in the early game if you find that you have lots of surplus in one resource type, though that might mean that you are not efficient enough.

When do I build troops?
First ask yourself: what do I want troops for?

If they are for defence, make sure there are enough troops to make a difference. What use is it if you keep building troops but it took so long that those who raid you killed off the few units you have built before you have enough units to significantly hurt them? As such, you will not want to start builidng troops for defence until you are capable of building enough troops at one go to seriously hurt any raiders. Another reason is that troops consumes crops, so the later you build them, the more crops you will gather overall.

There are exceptions to the above, when a raider is on its way to you and you do not want them to get your resources. Then, you should try spending your resources rather than let them be taken. Usually, fields and buildings (especially cranny) is preferable. But if your builders are all busy or the available buildings are too costly to upgrade, try buidling troops. They are going to get raided anyway, so you might as well try to make it less profitable to the raiders in terms of resources, and more costly in terms of troop casualties if you cannot save your troops.

If you want troops for raiding, I am assuming that you'll only be raiding defenceless or inactive villages. (Otherwise, this have been an Offensive Strategy Guide). This is because raids against small armed villages are usually not profitable. You will usually hardly get enough to cover the casualties that you suffer.

When you build troops for raiding purposes, there are serveral key things to take note of: What is the minimum number of troops you must build before you can raid? Even villages with no defending troops have an intrinsic defence that increases with its size. There is a minimum number of troops of a particular type/tribe that you have to send to avoid casualties against such an 'undefended' village. Different troops may have different numbers concerning this so you might want to find out from the forums or from using the plus-account warsim.

How much troops do you really need? Too few units and you may not get enough from raids to make it worth the trouble, but too many units will choke your crop production if they cannot bring in enough bounty (especially when you have competing raiders near you). Choose a comfortable level suitable to your playing style but don't drain all the resources from building new fields. Raids are often unreliable and requires active playing and suits players who play very often. Fields ALWAYS generate resource whether you are online or not and suits players who play less frequently.

What happen after this?
The starter strategy cannot lasts forever. There will be a time when you must make a stand and build a defensive force strong enough to deter the average raider. Deciding when this time is is a gamble. The later you decide to do this will mean the more resource you can invest into your resource-production economy and will make it easier for you to build up your army when the time comes. Yet, the longer you delay, the higher the chance that you will get raided. My suggestion is the point when the cost of upgrading a cranny becomes too costly relative to maximum amount of resource of any type you need to build fields. Of course, the extreme strategy will be building cranny all the way to lv 10 and forgo military units altogether until your fields reach around level 6 for the total pacifist.

Efficiency

Refers to many areas, both in and out of game.
In-game guidelines:

Minimize resources on hand
Reduce the amount of resources you have on your hand. The more resources you have currently, it means more resources are sitting around doing nothing. In other words, you are not being efficient. You should invest as much resources as you can into fields. Couple with a small cranny, this also have the additional benefit of reducing your raid appeal to raiders.

Build lower level fields before their higher level counterparts
In general, lower level fields are more efficient in terms of increment in production over building cost. The only possible exception is the fact that lv 1 fields consumes more crops than lv 2 fields.

The following is a simple table (no gaurantees on correctness) that gives the example of woodchoppers, which compares the efficiency of each level based on resource cost (ignore building time):

Field	Lvl	total_cost	prod_inc	Eff1	Eff2
WOOD	1	250	3	83.33	250
WOOD	2	415	4	103.75	138.33
WOOD	3	695	6	115.83	139
WOOD	4	1165	7	166.43	194.17
WOOD	5	1945	11	176.82	194.5
WOOD	6	3250	17	191.18	216.67
WOOD	7	5425	20	271.25	301.39
WOOD	8	9060	30	302	323.57
WOOD	9	15125	45	336.11	351.74
WOOD	10	25255	55	459.18	476.51

key:
Field : the resource type
Lvl : level of upgrade
total_cost : sum of all resource required
prod_inc : improvement in resource production
Eff1 : efficiency index 1, which is the cost in resource per improvement in resource production. Lower value better.
Eff2 : efficiency index 2, similar to Eff1 but takes into consideration crop consumption by field

Reduce effects of Bottlenecks
One of the most important task in increasing efficiency is to identify and overcome bottlenecks. In general, there are basically two types of bottleneck:

Resource-bottleneck
If you are currently not constructing any field/building, but lacks the resource to build what you plan to build next and have to wait, you have a resource bottleneck.

Builder-bottleneck
If you have the resource to build what you want, but your builders are occupied with building something, you have a builder-bottleneck.

Initially, when you start off with a small stockpile of resource, you will have the builder-bottleneck. But you will use them up very quickly and will then have the Resource-bottleneck.

Overcoming Resource-bottleneck
Resource-bottlenecks is impossible to avoid for the new player, but with some carefuly planning, you can reduce their negative impact on your efficiency.

To reduce the effects of resource-bottlenecks, one way is to forecast what you want to build and rearrange them so as to reduce the total waiting time. To be more efficient, you should identify which type of resource {wood|clay|iron|crop} is causing the bottleneck. To do this, you should calculate the waiting time for all the resource types. The resource with the longest waiting time is the bottleneck.

waiting time for resource of type =
0, if you have more resource of this type than required.
OR
(amt_you_need - amt_of_type) / hourly_prod_type, otherwise

The result is in hours.

Example:
Your resource is 100 Wood, 100 Clay, 100 Iron and 100 Crop.
Your hourly production is 10 Wood 10 Clay 10 Iron and 2 Crop.
You want to build Barracks which costs 210 Wood, 140 Clay, 260 Iron, 120 Crop.

wood_waiting_time = (210 - 100)/10 = 11
clay_waiting_time = (140 - 100)/10 = 4
iron_waiting_time = (260 - 100)/10 = 16
crop_waiting_time = (120 - 100)/2 = 10

The bottleneck here is caused by iron. Ignoring other factors, you need to wait 16 hours before you can build the Barracks.

In such a situation, you may want to consider planning an iron field before the Barracks. And you should then check out the bottleneck for the iron field to see if you can make it more efficient by building something else before it. (In this example, probably a crop field)

Overcoming Builder-bottleneck
Although the new player will encounter resource-bottleneck almost all the time, there are some instances where builder-bottleneck occurs. For example, when you start out with a small stockpile of resources, for a very short period of time, you will have more resources than you can spend. Another common situation when this occurs is when a player builds a new village with settlers and supports it with the resources of his old villages. If his old villages are large enough, the new village may not encounter any resource-bottlenecks at all until the buildings reach very high-level.

There is only one way to deal with builder-bottleneck : main building. If resources are sufficient, you should upgrade your main building continuously for several levels before building other things as the earlier you upgrade you main building, the more things you can build in the long run. In addition, the Romans, because of their separate resource field building and village center building queues, can potentially build twice as much since they can build a resource field and village building at the same time. However, in this strategy, do not overspend on village center especially in the initial stages to get more resource fields earlier, which translates to more resources in the long run.

However, the player using the strategy in this guide should forgo main building until you are ready to build the marketplace.

Plan your build queue
I know there isn't a real building queue in the game. (the closest is the ability to build one more building in the game if you have plus account, but that also requires that you *pay* for the building early). The queue here refers to what you intend to build in sequence. Different building have different costs. You should try to schedule the queue such you start building as fast as possible. An easy way to see which resource field to choose is to identify the resource for which you have the least, and you will almost always be able to build this building the fastest. This is because a field will always requires the least amount of the type of resource it produces. But this may not be optimal in all cases. A more careful but tedious way to so "try out" each possible res type to see which one can be built earlier. Another hint is to note what is the bottleneck resource when you are considering each building. For e.g. if you find that for most of the fields you try, crops is the bottleneck, you should probably try building a crops field, which should be faster. This also gives you the advantage of predicting when you can afford certain buildings, if you do not have the plus account which helps you to do the same automatically.

Use an Alarm
This deals with efficiency in real life. Travian isn't like a usual client-side game where there's always something to do. Most of the time, it involves waiting. Yet, when you go and do something else (work, study, read a book, surf) you might forget to come back in time to start off the next building. One suggestion I have is to have some sort of alarm, be it physical or some small alarm program on your operating system. Using the building time forecast you get from point 3 above, you can set the alarm to the next time your attention is needed and then you can go do something else.

Use Bookmark

• disclaimer* note that these links are accurate at the time of writing of this version of the guide. The exact links may be changed due to updates from the developer's side.
  

There are several travian pages that cannot be directly accessed in one click and often requires navigation through several pages. To cut the hassle, bookmark direct-links to commonly used pages. This also have the small advantage of relieving the server load slightly as you request less pages in total. For plus account users, you can create these links directly into your travian account under Player Profile>Configuration. These links will then appear conveniently on the right side of your page. For others, you will have to live with browser bookmarks. These may include:

1. map links to your own villages or your allies/enemies villages
These links are those you get when you click on "Map" and then click on the village in question. Using these links, you can get to the send army or send merchant screen with the village in question as the target with just another click. An example of these links on server 1 looks like

http://s1.travian.com/karte.php?id=xxxxxxx

where xxxxxxx is the village id. (server 2 starts with "http://s2.travian.com")

2. link to common buildings
These includes buildings with special functions like Market, Barracks, Rally point etc.
The link is in this form:

http://s1.travian.com/build.php?id=nn

where nn is the lot number in the village

Note that this link is dependent on the LOT and NOT the building type. E.g. if you build a market on lot 1 in Village 1 and a barracks on lot 1 in Village 2, when Village 1 is active, clicking on the link http://s1.travian.com/build.php?id=1 will bring you to the market in Vilage 1. But if Village 2 is active, the same link brings you to Village 2's barracks.

Thus, it is recommended that you build buildings in the SAME lots for all your villages, so that the same link will always bring you to the building of the same type no matter which village you are in.

But what if I want a special link that goes to a particular building in a particular village? E.g. "Village1's barracks" or "Village2's marketplace"?
You can specify a different village from the active one (and make THAT village the next active one) by adding "newdid=xxxxxxx&" to the above link, where xxxxxxx is the village id, which you can find out by looking at the URL when you click on your village from the map. The combine link is:

http://s1.travian.com/build.php?newdid=xxxxxxx&id=nn

where nn is the lot number in the village
and xxxxxxx is the village id

3. Links to alliance overview, alliance forum. Alliance overview is especially useful as it gives you a directory to all your allies' villages, making it convenient to send resources or reinforcements. An enemy alliance's overview functions similarly as a list of possible targets.

Excel

I actually wanted to use the word "SpreadSheet" instead of "Excel", but thought it would make be rhetorically more appealing if I use all words starting with 'E'. To be honest, I use OpenOffice

This is a boring portion that is optional to the player who is not interested. But for the power player who wants to squeeze every bit of advantage out of your village, a spreadsheet is one of the most powerful tool you can have. By creating a simple spreadsheet similar to the marketplace calculator (for those who do not know what this is, go search the forums), you can quickly compute the earliest time you can afford certain building, unit or research. To do more, you can create a a spreadsheet that allows you to plan several buildings one after another and displays the time that you can build each building. The advanced spreadsheet can even take into consideration the changes in resource production caused by building fields, or crop consumption.

Possible advantages of spreadsheets:

1. Predict building times. Improves overall efficiency (both in-game and real-life)
2. try out different build order. You can swap the order of the thigns you plan to build to observe the changes and decide which is better for you.
3. Storage full warning. Can predict when your storage will be full based on your current production to prevent losses through accidentally letting your storage becomes full. Let you plan when to upgrade storage easily.
4. predictive trade. By predicting waiting times for all resource type, you can easily see which resources are bottlenecks and which has surpluses. You can then find the best way to trade your resources to build something earlier.

At this point, I can't really say more in this section other than to point out this possibility to the power-players. The spreadsheets I've created myself is a little too embarassing to show due to the messiness so I will kiv them for possible future updates. Of course, I CAN make a nice application that does everything automatically, but I'm not inclined to making this so easy such that anybody can just use it and defeats the challenge in the game. I believe that the players who are really skilled and dedicated will find their own way after being shown the general direction, and they deserve all the advantages that they put their efforts into.