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Ideal assumtions? By no means. Do the math and be astonished about the cost/profit ratios you get when calculating troops vs villages. Even with only 1 successful (!) attack/day raiding is so endlessly superior to fields in early game.
1. Who said it has never been tried or tested? My roommate played exactly that way while I got a second village- it showed that this was a waste of ressources.
Since you, on the contrary, seem to have no idea of the points in the game when certain levels of production/tech are achieved with this way of playing, you utterly fail to get what it's driving at.
You will never, ever reach a production of 700ish clubs und whatnot pallies before conquering becomes viable. Raiding will easily supply all the crop you need if you're using merchants. It is only when you start getting vast killing armies that raiding might fail to provide sufficient crop. Since we're talking about early game your point with crop is nonsense.
2. "Expanding is only another way of getting ressources." It is. The only point of having a second village is to increase raiding efficiency by reducing range. However the point where your raiding efficiency decreases so much that settling becomes viable lies in most cases (unless there are several other "Biggies" around you reducing your farming extremely) way later than the point where conquest is viable. It's funny how you point out the cost of 19->20 barracs and in the next sentence ask what to do with the spare ressources once you use it's capacity to the fullest. Do you have any idea about the amount of ressources you're talking about? You'll have conquered your 5th village before that happens.
I like to remind you, that it was you that was "assuming 24/7 production". With the 19/20 barracs I was merely pointing out that you could never reach real 24/7 production at this stage of the game. Nevertheless just fyi: 2 level 10 barracs- club output/day: 492 - 1 level 17(!) barracs- club output/day: 505 (costs including settlers are 131360 to 170860, CP are 12 to 22).
Yes, the profits of getting another production base will sometime surpass the costs. It will however never surpass the profit of not settling, investing in raiding troops instead, and keeping the slot for a chieftain rather than settlers.
The higher level of your infrastructure will easily make up for the CPs a 2nd village would generate.
3. Conquering: A point that has not been made yet as I thought it was obvious: a successful conquest (and at the stage of the game it is like a 99% percent chance) will gain you several 100.000 ressources in infrastructure as opposed to having to invest in a settled 2nd village. PLUS you will most likely gain 1 chief slot since your victim is certain to delete after losing everything. The advantage of this can not be measured- getting chief first instead of settlers means saving vast amount of ressources (for building palace up to 15/20) and in the end always having 1 chieftain more than you'd have if you had settled.
Last and least- From the start of the discussion I said that plenty of time/management is a precondition for this early game strategy. All other points are based on that. So if you have plenty of time then settling is always inferior to raiding (and conquering). I guess I did not stress that point enough.
I'm sorry Neo that it has come to this. Even though the thread was not that much visited anymore I am sad that I for once am part of fulfilling one of the more disgusting laws of the internet: that you can't have a celebration without someone spoiling it with arguments or flames.
I seem to lack a strength you possess as I could not take shit from someone who had no clue about even the existence of Travian while I was already done with it after hardcore playing it for one and a half season. Even if it's too late now I'll end this here. Congratulations again.
Edit: The 10% reduce rule is new to travian so take away some % of the gains you'll have by conquering.
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is awesome32274 Posts
blasterd 12.03.06
no topic 00:51:25
Fuck You, you little fucker get a god damn life instead of attacking someone fucking 8 times within 24 hours. Go get get a fuck budy or something but what i predict is that you will go fuck your mom and never leave your house again you fucking loser. so fuck you fuck this game and most of all fuck your mom!.... so you have a big army that is like being the smartest kid with down syndrome! get a fucking life you fucking douche.
love,
blasterd.
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bmwz4 wrote:
What are you doing? You are making such a big mistake as the terrorists with their bombing on London!
ROFL
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Just found this thread! Read most of it, nice write up Neo.
Kudos to everyone from TL that stuck around for 10 months with me, you know who you are.
I would suggest that anyone reading this not play this game if they would like a social life. It definitely has it's moments but in the end the time commitment is insane.
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The hatemail was the only thing that keep me going in the last months. Post some more plz 
I kept a particular fine one, it's in german however so no use to most of you.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
Based on how you ignore addressing my points directly, I have to say it seems some of them went over your head. If you bother to point to a specific example of playing this way instead of declaring obvious points that are not even being discussed then maybe I can do a better job of illustrating the flaws of your strategy.
On January 08 2007 05:21 Monsen wrote:
Ideal assumtions? By no means. Do the math and be astonished about the cost/profit ratios you get when calculating troops vs villages. Even with only 1 successful (!) attack/day raiding is so endlessly superior to fields in early game. Obviously, if I did not get this point, I would not be writing here. But I do not get a second village to get fields. For a second village that is founded say 14 days after the game starts, the important objectives are : secure a good location, get 2nd army, get more expansion slots and CP. In another 2 weeks that village would be at the same basic level of infrastructure to be ready to conquer, and I can get a chief from main village too. That's a free village, another raiding center, and more expansion slots compared to someone who conquers in a month. That you even bother to argue that settling is a waste of expansion slot shows that you have not exactly appreciated how a new village means new slots, and that the entire point of conquest over settling is not because it gives more slots but that it is the fastest way to grow.
1. Who said it has never been tried or tested? My roommate played exactly that way while I got a second village- it showed that this was a waste of ressources.
The point is, you have made a point that "settling sucks in general," and the argument you proposed is not sufficient to support this point without huge assumptions. Further, the "ideal state" of the game is one that you seemed to suggest in which tropo production should be maximized before getting a new village, at which point conquest is superior to settling. Since you managed to repudiate that claim in teh very next paragraph I'll let that go.
Since you, on the contrary, seem to have no idea of the points in the game when certain levels of production/tech are achieved with this way of playing, you utterly fail to get what it's driving at. Erm, are you so superior at farming early game to be able to say that to me? Do you know how I play early game?
You will never, ever reach a production of 700ish clubs und whatnot pallies before conquering becomes viable. Raiding will easily supply all the crop you need if you're using merchants. It is only when you start getting vast killing armies that raiding might fail to provide sufficient crop. Since we're talking about early game your point with crop is nonsense. hahhaa, so your framing of the exact instance of the game to which you refer is so unclear that my attempt at clarifying what you are talking about went over your head. Congratulations.
2. "Expanding is only another way of getting ressources." It is. The only point of having a second village is to increase raiding efficiency by reducing range. However the point where your raiding efficiency decreases so much that settling becomes viable lies in most cases (unless there are several other "Biggies" around you reducing your farming extremely) way later than the point where conquest is viable. It's funny how you point out the cost of 19->20 barracs and in the next sentence ask what to do with the spare ressources once you use it's capacity to the fullest. Do you have any idea about the amount of ressources you're talking about? You'll have conquered your 5th village before that happens.
That is only a hypothetical branch consideration made only because you failed to frame your argument cleanly. Thanks for clarifying that now.
I like to remind you, that it was you that was "assuming 24/7 production". With the 19/20 barracs I was merely pointing out that you could never reach real 24/7 production at this stage of the game. Nevertheless just fyi: 2 level 10 barracs- club output/day: 492 - 1 level 17(!) barracs- club output/day: 505 (costs including settlers are 131360 to 170860, CP are 12 to 22).
Yes, the profits of getting another production base will sometime surpass the costs. It will however never surpass the profit of not settling, investing in raiding troops instead, and keeping the slot for a chieftain rather than settlers. So what is the point of saving the slot? Resources? Time? CP? Founding a new village and then getting 2 slots out of that plus a new village is much more profitable from all fronts except end game CP considerations.
When i said building troops 24/7 i of course meant that troop production was not sacrificed for "simcity," it is you who made an argumetn against that and suggested that my 24/7 production was not worthy enough of a good account, the inference being that settling sucks if it prevents higher level pf troop production. That argument has been demolished a numbe of times already from different angles.
The higher level of your infrastructure will easily make up for the CPs a 2nd village would generate.
Imagine your strategy of conquest, it takes time A to successfully conquer. Would it not b ereasonable to expect that someone could found a new village during interval A and still be able to conquer by A? Not to say one village, 2 or 3 villages even! A new village typically does this: build storage/main building lv10, build townhall, party. The 500 cp a day from a 100 pop village is very helpful, and the only cost is resources. Resources that will only go toward overflowing your warehouse or lengthening your troop queue. Or are you still suggesting that we should expand production capacity to maximum before seeking alternative methods of investing resources?
3. Conquering: A point that has not been made yet as I thought it was obvious: a successful conquest (and at the stage of the game it is like a 99% percent chance) will gain you several 100.000 ressources in infrastructure as opposed to having to invest in a settled 2nd village. Doubtful. It is difficult to conquer without losing too much army if the potential target is in an alliance, especially one of the nationalistic clans. You cannot say 99% chance of success for conquest if nearly everyone who played travian for tl has had bad conquest experiences.
PLUS you will most likely gain 1 chief slot since your victim is certain to delete after losing everything. The advantage of this can not be measured- getting chief first instead of settlers means saving vast amount of ressources (for building palace up to 15/20) and in the end always having 1 chieftain more than you'd have if you had settled. Not if the guy who settled has 5 more villages than you. Furthermore, not all people delete immediately. It takes 3 days. CP piles up so fast that waiting for an uncertain deletion when you have only a few slots is a great risk. Trust me, there are people who do not delete immediately when they only have a 20 pop village. it happened to me.
Last and least- From the start of the discussion I said that plenty of time/management is a precondition for this early game strategy. All other points are based on that. So if you have plenty of time then settling is always inferior to raiding (and conquering). I guess I did not stress that point enough. The basic point is that conquering is different from settling not by the instantenous moment of village acquisition but the whole build order. It takes very little marginal investment in settling while conquest is a huge investment. One could found a new village just by careful raiding management. Given the option of conquering a new village or founding one, if you had a chief and 3 settlers ready, of course I will conquer every time, but that is not the issue.
I'm sorry Neo that it has come to this. Even though the thread was not that much visited anymore I am sad that I for once am part of fulfilling one of the more disgusting laws of the internet: that you can't have a celebration without someone spoiling it with arguments or flames.
Sorry that you started the flaming, I only said that there should not be a stigma on founding villages. Why do you feel that your "one and a half season's experience" makes you enough of an authority to call me a retard and noob in travian? I know for a fact that I play better than all but a handful of players on .com servers. On s3 .com because it was the first T3 speed server there were .org players playing, such as the guys who won the .org server, or the WEG people. I can honestly say that I played better than all of them by far. There is another player Hunter (dual account) who made the first conquest on the server when he had 3 villages (by that time I had 5 or 6 and a superior army), but did that profit him very much? Not really. The new village does not have troops in it, and it had only 300 or 400 more CP production than a founded village, plus it was not in a location that is chosen optimally because of the freedom fo having more locations to settle than to conquer. I think overall that account was played by a strategy that is very similar to yours at a very high level, maybe you can ask him about how other players on that server played.
Maybe you think building troops out of one village, maybe two later on, and have 3 or 4 villages fewer than the top pop players is sufficiently powerful an account, but I have seen better. I can honestly tell you that I believed you word for word when I played s5, building army and not caring about villages. But I realized that garandou, who founded villages instead of waited for conquering (no, I did not build chiefs too early, i was overflowing warehouses) did much better than me with a bit more activity. The mechanics of the game is not that complicated, and it is not vey hard to figure out that investing 30k resources to build a 2nd village while keeping troop production relatively high is a worthwhile thing to do.
Anyway, I was only making the point that settling is ok sometimes, something I feel we have learned from actual playing. I don’t exactly remember how thing got out of hand. Sorry for being an idiot again, ^^; I’m sure Monsen has better grasp on the game than 99% of the players, and was instrumental in teaching tl the game.
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On January 07 2007 16:28 oneofthem wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2007 11:39 Monsen wrote:On January 06 2007 18:23 oneofthem wrote:On January 06 2007 16:50 Monsen wrote:Argh- is it really so hard to comprehend what I'm saying?  Is my english that bad or non coherent? Or is it just that ppl read so superficially? Noone is talking about mid or lategame, "maintaining large armies" and crop problems are not the issue. The point is that settling in general -is- -teh- -crap0r- It's ineffective ressourcewise when compared to raiding. PERIOD. And thus (and this is just the second step of the argument, see ?) it is more effective to not fucking settle and even not waste ressources on building up your fields but just build up storage, barrack, and teh lil swingerclubs, clubs, clubs until you can eventually conquer. Ah yeah, it's ok to build crop fields. Barely. You said conquest is the most resource efficient, implying resources are still a concern, and that there are other projects requiring investment. Then, given the fairly high initial investment for chief as a percentage of your account's production, it is fair to say that these resources devoted to chiefs wont be producing anything productive soon. Also, it takes time to build academy and residences, why not build a lv10 townhall during the same time and upgrade market and mb, while at the same time a new village can be built up reasonably quickly. Another concern is that CP will definitely build up very quickly, and if you were to conquer with 2 or 3 villages, there is no way you can avoid wasting CP. I have experienced this first hand. On s5 I think I conquered my third village while having enough CP for 5 or 6 villages, that is totally not acceptable. Yes, conquest is the fastest way to grow when taken as an instantaneous event compared to founding a village, but there are various real game situations that make conquering too early inefficient. At the very least, do not conquer unless you have 3 chiefs. There is no need to conquer just to save some resources when you are wasting serious time doing it. I know what you are saying, and you are wrong. It may be more resource efficient, but not more time efficient and management efficient. On regular server T2, the top players will do this: get 2nd village in 10 or 12 days, get 15 crop, get 3rd village 9 crop in another week, get a village near potential conquest target or get another 9 or 15 crop in another week. On regular server T3, you can get 4 villages in 5 weeks, plus the -10% conquering rule (when you conquer a village, all of its buildings are reduced by 1 level, i know, sucks) and the capital rule, there is no way in hell you can conquer another village during that time. Here is the situation of me village on speed T3 when I had 2 villages (rank top 2) + Show Spoiler +As you can see, I still had major problems with resources, and the fields aren't even built up yet. There is no way I can manage a chief without delaying growth significantly. This is when I started conquering chains on the same account. It was still difficult getting enough resources to queue residences, trust me. Sorry dude, you don't even get the initial point that army/raiding > villages. Please ask Neo to explain it to you, I can't. er, no. I > you in travian. Keep in mind that I am assuming 24/7 production of troops. That you do not even get the initial point of "effective = time effective" makes you unqualified to dispute my opinions on travian. Did you even bother to read?
For one so strict about making 100% exact, elaborated points, I don't think you clarified your points enough. While I thought it was obvious that I was talking about settling being shit in the context of playing extensively/aggressively you never pointed out what you meant by 24/7 production or "investing in villages". I was mislead into thinking you would settle to be able to "invest" in fields. Which led to a misperception of your point. I consider your "I > you" the first flame in the thread.
Also I still think that your estimate of the point where you conquer with this strat is wrong. When the largest sim city players get their 2nd village you only have to check for one with residence rather than palace. Players like that have neither a strong army nor an alliance that poses a threat to someone playing the game aggresively. Plus the way he could get help, so could you.
You will gain a ~500 pop village (the new 10% might make you lose some of the merits I grant you that) whose position will not be as perfect as a settled one, but really- how much does this matter? You'll drain the area dry whereever it is.
Furthermore I doubt that staying with your initial village longer puts you behind on Cp. The fact that you'll be increasing your production facilities further than you would while settling makes up for quite some low lvl buildings in the second village.
Since the point of conquest is way sooner than you calculate, the merit of freeing a slot for a chieftain (rather than settlers) is way bigger than you think, as you practically have to get way less Cp for each following conquest.
Last but not least, from the calculation given in my previous post, you can see that there is a lot of room for expanding your production capactity in your main village at basically the same costs as if you settled and raised new production there. With a third village you might sometime surpass the troop production from one village but a) that takes more time which means it'll be closer to the point of conquest and b) you'll have wasted another slot for settlers.
It all comes down to when you actually conquer. Conquest will pay itself at around 400-450 pop. Loses might be a factor there, however since someone raiding will have such an army advantage over a simcity player plus the point of conquest will be extremely early and thus unexpected I think you can disregard them as insignificant for the big picture.
As raiding range efficiency varies for the different races, this will be most effective for gauls as they'll have least problems with covering a large area with 1 village plus the advantage of faster chieftains comes in handy when conquering with your first.
In the end all of this is just pointless theory and debate- travian is essentially flawed and noone in their right mind would want to play it with an aggressive mindset over a longer period of time anyway. Have a nice day, I rest my case.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
Sorry dude, you don't even get the initial point that army/raiding > villages. Please ask Neo to explain it to you, I can't.
felt very sharp and disrespectful there...I wonder how did i give off the impression of a simcity player if my reputation is a crazy army guy..
It was never my intention to rouse up a fight in a celebratory thread, and I rank this as another painful thing that I did that will become my dark dark suppressed memory.  It would be great if this thread can be moved back. 
Since the point of conquest is way sooner than you calculate, the merit of freeing a slot for a chieftain (rather than settlers) is way bigger than you think, as you practically have to get way less Cp for each following conquest.
From my experience, and I have experience for very high income accounts, by the time conquest targets are ready (simply by the fact that by the time an above average albeit simcity player builds a 2nd vllage you should already have your 3rd or 4th if you follow the CP/income maximization build) you should have time enough to build up small villages to be able to conquer from them.
Furthermore I doubt that staying with your initial village longer puts you behind on Cp. The fact that you'll be increasing your production facilities further than you would while settling makes up for quite some low lvl buildings in the second village. It is relatively easy to build up a small village, and by the time the income level for conquest is ready your settled village should be fairly built up,. Also, the time required to settle is just 10 residence levels, nothing terribly time consuming (this is T3 specific, since you'd want to settle a capital village, but for T2 whether you build a palace first or not is up to debate). It takes relatively little investment to build up the 2nd village, and the time, as already stated, is covered by the amount of time to get conquest tech simultaneously. So it is a free village basically, just raising the CP tier once more, an issue that ultimately will not delay your acquisition of villages, just means that you did not conquer this particular one.
Another consideration is that playing aggressively will make it harder for others around you to grow, and by the time of ocnquest thos ewho have sufficiently big villages will have big villages precisely because they are hard targets to farm, or maybe you left some targets to grow and ply into a false sense of security. But that is a big project, and given how early income is so important it is difficult to stay off of fat farms. This incidentally is why I think gauls are better mid/late game than teutons, because they do not kill too many people early game, and have targets around them to conquer.
In any case, I consider the goal of early game to reach a situation where you can conquer fairly rapidly along a high CP route(basically all villages big parties and giving a fair number of production CP themselves) while also raising army production to as much as you can support by your activity. It is far too risky to allow other players to determine the growth of your account than taking some fairly low cost measures to help yourself along the way.
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Hey hey hey.. somehow I missed this thread over the holidays.
I'm only reading Neo's excellent writeup and report for now. Lots of interesting end-game stuff I didn't know about, or involved with. Which is fine, I had cut my play down to simcity about halfway through the game. Hard to believe I actually broke top 10 pop at one point -- feels a lifetime ago. I'm glad I was able to balance my time on Travian, and still stay around and play a part in seeing things through to ultimate victory.
Great win for everyone, great job by leadership to see things through to the end.
- ROM @ s4
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thedeadhaji
39489 Posts
OMG it's ROM.
I didnt know you even had a real acct here <3
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United States37500 Posts
On January 13 2007 12:29 thedeadhaji wrote:
OMG it's ROM.
I didnt know you even had a real acct here <3
You noop. I listed everyone's TL.net handle in the first post. 
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i play Travian on Cro server and im doing baaaaad.....
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United States37500 Posts
haha, I play on com5. >_>
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Osaka27140 Posts
You are going to send Haji into a seizure by bumping this I think.
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hey ho blast from the past here
hope all my old friends are well and still gaming
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EPT![[image loading]](http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/8818/villagebf4.png)
![[image loading]](http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/9714/e1os6.png)
