Talk:Advice to Travian newbies

My first message to the owner of a brand-new village that popped up beside mine
You must be new here! Welcome. Because you are so close, I will offer you a personal non-aggression pact if you reply to this message within a week. No guarantee that my allies will respect it though.

I hope your cranny is big enough to hold everything, so that attackers go away empty-handed and are less likely to come back.

Some private tips for newbies, which I posted first on a Travian s4 alliance forum but which I want to preserve in my mailbox so that nobody can delete my work.

If (as I can see you have not) you have not yet built a cranny, plan carefully so that you build it soon after coming online, because you get a free delivery of 125 units of each resource then and 6 hours later and 12 hours later, and you will want to be online soon after those deliveries so as to use the resources. Before building the cranny, ensure that none of your resource amounts are much over 600, or you may waste some of the first delivery as they take your amounts over the warehouse or granary size.

An example of how you might start: in my first 7 hours on the new server s6, I built like this: 0610 wood 1, 0614 clay 1, 0620 cranny 1, 0633 crop 1, 0638 crop 1, 0641 crop 1, 0644 clay 2, 0653 wood 2, 0710 warehouse 1 (possibly too early), 0920 clay 1, 1124 clay 2, 1233 iron 1 then cranny 2, 1833 wood 3.

Your warehouse size should be related to how long you may be offline and how much production you will have in that time (and - after you build a marketplace, the numbers have to include any trading deals not yet delivered). Work out, before you go offline, whether any of your resources will be over the limit before you expect to be online again. If any will, then warehouse upgrade should be top priority so as to avoid needless waste.

The same goes for your granary size.

Cranny expansion should similarly keep pace with the amount of each resource you expect to have when you come online. In my first-ever attack (on server 5), 77 attackers went home with nothing because my cranny was enough. (They did destroy most of my traps, but if I had had more traps I would have got them all and been able to negotiate with their owner.) That was over 3 weeks ago and that attacker has not come back to me. Cranny should be 50% bigger than the maximum amount of any resource, in case a Teuton raids you. When one cranny reaches level 10 you can start others.

Apart from cranny and possibly warehouse and granary extensions, your early work should all be on your resource areas.

Crop extension is best "value for money" (compared with the other resources) at any particular level, but you needn't wait if you can't do a crop area but can do another. Extend all crop to level 1 before extending any to level 2, and so on.

Extending the resource fields other than cropland is probably NOT best done evenly (ie, all to level 1 then all to level 2 and so on). Because of the ongoing variable food cost, the "value for money" varies. For wood, clay, and iron, it is better value to extend 1/2 and 2/3 than to extend a new 0-level area up to level 1 (especially with iron, where your 3-iron gain is wiped out by your 3-food cost). Then iron has another little irregularity: once all your iron mines are up to level 3, extend them one at a time up to level 6.

Don't ask me about troops. As a Gaul I concentrate on traps, which are much cheaper and more effective once one has enough of them.

Kind regards.


 * Pensioner in Plimmerton
 * http://newzealand.wikia.com/wiki/Plimmerton

Robin Patterson 12:43, 12 November 2007 (UTC)