Travian

[Blake Seven]

Travian is a browser game with a world full of thousands of users who all begin as the leaders of small villages.

At the start, you have only a small village with a single building.

In Travian there are four types of resources: wood, clay, iron, and wheat.

After you have taken care of your resource production, you can start upgrading your village.

In Travian, you are not alone. You play together with thousands of players in an online world.

Either trade with other player, raid their village for resourse or try to destroy them.

Join an alliance as part of your battle for supremacy.

Gmae servers are regional so visit www.travian.com for details of servers in your country.

[agalvayne]

A friend of mine plays travian and was trying to get me to join, but I just never quite got round to setting up an account. I'm just not sure how immersive a browser based game might be . I'll give it a go though

[Blake Seven]

It takes time to acquire resourses, construct buildings and troops and then raid you neighbours.

It's not a sit down and play it for hours at a time kind of game, you set your workers building or troops raiding and pop back a few hours later to see how they are getting on.

A nice casual but tactical game.

[Dee]

I played it for a while but failed to get hooked and stopped quite soon.
Don't know why i did not like it. Trtavian is well made and all, and should appeal to me as I like base buildling and development etc.

[Shadowmage]

I also played it back some time ago, however, hasn't really become 'mine' through I come from games like Syndicate Wars, Gangwars and KartellWars where attacks don't last for hours, but for very few seconds or minutes. I'm a very active player in such stuff and in Travian I missed the dynamic, it was just silent and after a time a whole guild took me out. So I went back to the more 'dynamic' games where activity is a must

[Jambayze]

I am trying it now, but having a tough time liking it. I want to like it, but you can't really get involved with it. Gameplay goes like this:

I log in, look around if I can make the next upgrade I want or build a new building. I click my mouse to start that function, and any where from several to 30 minutes later, it is done. Then you have to wait several hours to build up enough resources to build something new. There is nothing to do while you wait. You do not really "Play" this game. You are only going to click your mouse 1 or 2 times a day, 3 if you get obsessed by it. I'm going to play it a little longer to see if I get to understanding it better, but, so far it's a big yawn. I've spent a total of maybe 15 minutes of actually playing in a whole week.

[Zar]

Like some of the others that posted, I had a hard time getting into it.

[Blake Seven]

Originally Posted by Zar

Like some of the others that posted, I had a hard time getting into it.

Clearly it's a Marmite game, you either love it or you hate

Currently I "play" it mostly while I am at work, I can pop in and out as time permits and that is probably avoids too much of the waiting for the grass to grow scenario.

If/when you do start make sure you do the quests by clicking on the character to the right of your village, he will help you get things up and running. Yes it does take a day or two to get a useful pile of resources but doing the quests does bring you resources and also free gold which you can use towards 25% increases in your resources (I choose to use all mine on wheat).

Once you are established if you make "the right" choices you can grow your resources and buildings. If you join an alliance they will probably push you on getting as many villagers as possible to keep the alliance rank up and also troops to improve the alliance reputation as aggressive.

You can also play on more than one server at a time allowing you to hone your tactics. I currently have two active villages on UK servers 1 and 2, one in a leading alliance and the other solo, both require a slightly different tactic and that's part of the appeal to me.

I'll try and post some more tips later

[Jambayze]

there's an idea, add another village on another server.

Also, another game that is almost the same but with different graphics, is "Civony".

[Blake Seven]

Originally Posted by Jambayze

there's an idea, add another village on another server.

There are currently 5 servers in the UK group. All started at different times and each runs for around 9-12 months (except Speed). UK1 is the newest and has been running for a little over a month now. There is also a speed server where things have 3 times faster (I've not tried a speed server yet as I suspect they need closer attention).

You can also delete a village on a server, this takes 72 hours but means if you don't like your village location for whatever reason you can delete and get allocated a new location. Not recommended you do to much deleting as each time it's 3 days wasted but if you do get a really bad location i.e. lot of big, established villages very close or you are getting farmed you can at least get the chance to start somewhere else.