The Travian Romans Are Attacking! Part III

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It is now on my 13th day of playing Romans in Travian v.3.6 hosted at com10, and I was surprised that no attack was waged against my Village while I was fast asleep. It had been in my experience that most Travian players do not sleep during the start of the server to gain advantage. As I have written time and again, Travian is only a game for me, plus a blog post, but it does not rule my Real Life: a father and surrogate mother to a three-year old son.

This post continues detailing my experience on the Test Server as well as my analysis of the change in my Travian playing strategy. Of course, several factors had change the way I played Travian in this test server, but one cannot gain experience by just talking and complaining, as the big Travian players at the forum initially predicted, about it—even days prior to the official start of the server. I have read each of the posts in that Forum, and nobody predicted that the Romans will initially rule the server.

Most of the players, especially those heavy Travian Gold and Plus who vowed never to sign-up, may have really stayed away from playing this version. For me, it’s their loss. Although I have no actual statistics on the number of Travian Gold and Plus playing Teutons, it is but safe to assume that with all the hype in the forum that the new version would diminish the Teutonic farming instinct, these players really stayed away from playing because either they believe the hype or even though they already had the advantage of Gold and Plus, they are also playing Teutons.

For me, any game should be challenging. To sustain the business, an online game should challenge the player. Otherwise, why play chess if your opponent is not allowed to keep a Queen during the start? There is no fun in playing if you have the initial overall advantage, unless one is a sadist. Like for instance, a Teuton with a 1000+ troops attacking an opponent with only meager defense just because they have seemingly similar non-copyrighted quote in their respective player profiles? Or an Alliance leader after being criticized of a lack-luster defense strategy called his friends in another Alliance, or most probably he owns another account as a member of that other Alliance, to attack the critic’s Village to a point of ending the latter’s existence on that server. To this day, the attacks continued on my Philippine Server 3 account.

In the Travian v.3.6 on com10 account, my Village was a recipient of a solitary attack from the faraway place I described yesterday. Prior to this attack, my Hero was waiting for his first kill. The attack logs shown that even with only a Hero standing all by itself, the ten [10] Legionaires the attacker usually sent were cut down to seven and the latter carried no loot. So much for attack effectiveness (casualty) and efficiency (loot)! Maybe the attacker learned his lesson and never come back! Yet, back on my mind, maybe a tinge of paranoia, I stayed up till early in the morning upgrading buildings and preparing for his retaliation, which fortunately never came.

Meanwhile, the constraints of not upgrading the resource fields above level 2 while all the Crannies have yet to reach level 10 have shown that my Village was struggling in the upgrades. With only 42 resources each being produced in an hour, it took longer waiting to build the necessary military installations. Even my other two Crannies have yet to reach level 10. Furthermore, I could not even create more powerful troops because of this self-imposed constraints. The good thing though the attacks on my Village was not as numerous as I have seen in my other accounts in various Philippine servers. More often than not, the attackers only took some meager resources and the excess (crops) as loot! This might prove another theory of mine that in most international Travian servers, diplomacy is more prevalent in the latter than in the former.

In the Philippine servers, some players are either simply dumb or notoriously cutthroat believing that diplomacy is not a word in their own vocabulary. Most of these type of players only see Travian as a war game, equivocally shouting: “This is WAR!” . . . that everything in their path is to be trampled upon, and every single small player is to be vanquished. I even saw some players urging newbies to delete one’s account. If newbies are not coming in where would the sustainability of the game be headed to? These players forget one thing: Travian is only fun when you can attack one Village and subsequently farm them. There is no fun if you are only building and upgrading, otherwise you would be better off playing FarmTown or FarmVille.

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Notes:

All resource icons taken from Travian help files.

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