Village Planning

This is the first "guide/writeup/FAQ" that I have written. Yacko asked me to put some of my own work in the Tips & Tricks section, so I figured this topic would be as good as any. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, bitches, complaints, general wonderingments, or you want to tell me that I'm flat out wrong please feel free to reply

-Bob

On my first server I spent 3 months building up a single village before expanding. I wasted a lot of resources on unnecessary buildings and researches which hindered me in the long run. As time progressed and I began founding more villages I learned the intricacies of the game enough to be able to effectively plan out my villages. Having a solid build plan can be the difference between being a strong player that opponents fear or being a mediocre player that opponents laugh at. A system that I have found very effective for myself is to give myself overall goals and village specific goals.


Overall Goals

Overall goals are your overall goals as a player. Ask yourself what it is that you want to focus on.

Do you want to be an offensive player, a defensive player, or a sim city player?

Offensive Player
If you've decided that you want to be an offensive player you'll probably want to further break this down into the kind of offense you want to specialize in. The generally accepted offensive specializations would be raider, cleaner, and hammer; most offensive players in Travian actually fall into the cleaner category.

A raider generally has a massive raiding force based out of multiple villages. These players often utilize fast moving units to quickly reach out and touch somebody. Raiders are excellent for keeping a hammered village cleared of troops and for applying pressure to opponents when their reinforcements are housed elsewhere.

A hammer will be in control of a highly bonused 15-crop village. The main focus of a hammer is to kill off as many defensive troops as possible. Hammers will generally consist of a large number of infantry, cavalry, and rams. Catapults aren't necessarily a main focus for a good hammer and the raw attack power per crop of infantry makes them more valuable to a hammer than their mounted counterparts. Hammers will often have multiple 'feeder' villages for their 15-crop village to allow for an even more massive army.

Cleaners are going to encompass the bulk of Travian offensive players. These players have reasonably sized offensive armies spread accross multiple villages and a large number of catapults. The job of a cleaner is to "clean up" the mess made by the hammer using multiple catapult waves designed to reduce a village's population to 0 (or in certain circumstances just reduce crop production to 0). It is relatively easy to build up a cleaner because you only need 100 or so catapults in a village coupled with any offensive troops that you have. Raiding is usually pretty easy with a cleaner because of the large troop quantities available to them.


Defensive Player
Defensive players really come in three flavors: Rapid Response, Backbone, and Lender (I made these names up =p ). For any specialization the defensive player can either base his troops out of one village with multiple feeder villages or based out of multiple villages; there are advantages and disadvantages to both.

A defensive player specializing in Rapid Response will be either a Teuton or a Gaul. The idea is that they will use their cavalry based defense to quickly deploy needed troops to villages in distress. Gaulish players are exceptional at this sort of defense because of the raw defensive power of the Druid Rider and Haeduan paired with the Gaul speed bonus.

A Backbone is going to produce large quantities of one of four troops: Spearmen, Praetorians, Phalanx, and Legionnaires. Spearmen and Praetorians are hands down the best defensive troops for cavalry and infantry defense, respectively. Phalanx and Legionnaires are both solid defenders in Cavalry defense and fall behind slightly in infantry defense to other units, but their main strength is production cost. A backbone's job is to dump as many possible defensive points into a village as possible. These units are all relatively inexpensive resource wise and should be considered expendable.

A lender shouldn't really be considered a specialty, but as the game progresses we'll start to find these players popping up. These are the guys and girls that post in the forums that they have 5000 (any number reallY) extra troops that they want to give away, or have so much resources that they can't spend that they need to build troops they can't support. The idea is that they will give another player a permanent garrison force either free of charge or for some sort of fee. Roman's Praetorians and Teuton's Spearmen are especially good for this purpose due to their strong defense. Again, this isn't necessarily a specialization that players start out aspiring towards, but they do start to appear later in the game.

Sim City Player
A sim city player is one that focuses primarily on city building and population growth. It takes real skill to be a successful sim city player in this game and chances are if this is your goal then this alliance probably isn't for you. I did play with one very successful Sim City player on a former server though. The key to success for a sim city player is to avoid being turned into a farm. Moving resources to dodge attacks is very important for this type of player as is effective use of crannies. Once this player had a dozen or so villages he was able to send resources to other members of the alliance every day - In this way he was actually a benefit to the alliance. I wouldn't recommend being a sim city player and I have 0 experience with this play style, so I won't get too in depth in this.

Combination Player
The vast majority of players in Travian will be combination players to some extent and the possibilities for filling multiple roles increases as a player's village count increases. This happens to most players by both intent and circumstance. Making a consious decision to branch out and fulfill more than one role is probably better than waiting for fate to decide something like this for you.

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Village Goals

By defining your overall goals you can more effectively plan out your villages. The most efficient use of resources is going to be best for most situations, so with your overall goals in mind you can minimize resources that are "wasted" on non-essential items. I haven't included all of the possible village setups in this section, just some of the major ones.

Feeder Villages
Feeder villages are villages that solely exist to support another village through crops and resources. Feeder villages are going to be villages that are geared solely to produce resources with a minimum of infrastructure. Feeder villages will usually pop up around a 15-crop village to support a large defensive or offensive army. Some players will use a feeder village to store troops from another village while others prefer to keep the troops in their home village and just transfer crops.

These villages will want to focus on having all resource fields to level 10, all resource buildings to level 5, and a
high level marketplace; depending on the situation a Hero's Mansion at
some level for Oasis conquering might also be a good idea. A wall is also important. The idea in a feeder village is to keep crop hogging buildings to a minimum, so don't build stuff just to increase your population.

Hammer Village - Base Camp
Hammers will almost always be a 15 crop village with at least a %75 oasis bonus for crops. A hammer village's sole purpose in life is to create troops. On a non-speed server, you can reach around 110,000 crop production with 15 level 19 crop fields, Bakery and Mill at max, %150 bonus from oasis, and %25 bonus from gold. A gold user can actually support a hammer village without any supporting villages through the NPC merchant, but this isn't recommended.

These villages will want to focus on being a capital and having all crop fields to a high a level as possible (19 is the highest attainable level due to lack of warehouse space). Any buildings constructed in this village should be geared towards supporting the military. Bakery and Grain Mill are the only resource buildings that should be constructed, and the Blacksmith/Academy should be demolished once all of their researches have been completed.

Hammer Village - Annex
This is a variation on the Hammer village that requires a player to be available 24 hours a day (sitters can be used for this). The idea of a Hammer Annex is to utilize the increased production capabilities of the Great Barracks and Great Stable in conjunction with the massive crop output of a large cropper. The troops will actually be produced in a village neighboring the 15-crop capital, stored in the 15-crop capital, and fed while traveling by moving crops from the 15-crop capital to the hammer.

This setup actually requires 2 specialty villages. It is best to have the annex itself right next to the 15-crop village for faster crop movement. The 15-crop village should have the absolute bare minimum of buildings to allow for a greater number of troops. A few level 20 granaries, Bakery, Grain Mill, Marketplace, and Trade Office are required and other buildings should only be added as necessary. In the annex village the setup should be similar to a Hammer-Base with the same military infrastructure in place.

Please note that this setup, while extremely powerful, is probably one of the most difficult setups to manage. It requires that crops be moved from one village to the other constantly when troops are away from home. When the troops are not deployed they should be stationed in the 15-crop capital to ease stress for the player and his/her sitters.

Defensive Village - Centralized
When it comes to defensive village setup there are two schools of thought - centralized and decentralized. In the centralized setup one village acts as a production center for all defensive troops while neighboring villages serve as feeders. This setup maximizes resources by reducing the amount of resources spent on academy and armoury upgrades. The drawback to this village setup is that either your troops have to be stored in other village (cuts down on response time) or crops have to be moved constantly to feed all the troops in this village.

Buildings that are desireable in a Centralized Defensive village are the Tournament Square, Stable, and Barracks. Resource fields should also be maxed to facilitate troop production. A large granary and warehouse capacity should also be in place.

Defensive Village - Decentralized
Decentralized defensive villages are so much a single village as they are a group of villages (they don't have to be right next to each other). Decentralized defensive villages won't be as resource efficient as a centralized village, but can be easier for players to manage and allow for quicker response times. Generally, in a decentralized village you will want to focus on just one troop type so as to cut down on wasted resources due to research. By carefully planning which troops you want to produce you can find a location with a resource plan that is similar to your troop's resource needs.

As an example:

Code:
A Phalanx requires the following resources:
Lumber: 100
Clay: 130
Iron: 55
Crop: 30

A 4-5-3-6 Village will produce the following resources at level 10:
Lumber: 1000
Clay: 1250
Iron: 750
Crop: 1800

The result of this would be that you will have a smaller surplus of Iron and a smaller deficit of Clay when compared to a 4-4-4-6 village.
Party Village
This isn't something that I've really heard of being used before, but that doesn't mean that others haven't used it. I actually created my own party village when I relocated my village cluster away from my starting village. My Starting village is really too far away from my main cluster to be of much use for direct support and I have a lot of unspent resources.

The purpose of a party village is to have parties. Parties increase culture points, culture points allow for expansion, expansion increases available resources, and available resources increase available troops. A party village isn't necessarily something that everyone is going to have, but it does help you expand more rapidly.

In a party village you will want to focus on your Town Hall and get this up to as high a level as possible. The higher the level, the more often you can throw parties. At level 20, using Small Celebrations, you should be boosting your culture points by around 1000 24 hours. To further increase the benefits of this village you might want to also focus on buildings with a high culture point value: Academy, Embassy, Trade Office, Workshop, and Marketplace.

Some people might find this as a waste, but if you have a village in a secure area that isn't much good for pushing resources or sending out defenses this might be a viable option for you.

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Closing

There is really no right or wrong answer as to how to setup your village; this is a game and you can build your villages however you like. My hope in writing this is that some people might get ideas of their own about what sort of village setup they would like to have and to point them in the right direction to best maximize their resource efficiency. I'd like people to starting thinking about the 7 P's - Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance - and logically plan out their village progression which will benefit the alliance as a whole by maximizing our resources alliance wide.

I know I missed some points, and hopefully some of our more knowledgeable players will chime in with some information of their own.

How can you build another village, if somebody can please help me, i would appriciate it very mutch

You have to have a Residence or Palace building to level 10 and 2000 culture points (which you can view in either of these buildings). You also need resources to send settlers to the new village. (You can only found 3 villages this way, any additional ones must be conquered and you'll need a Senator to do this properly which is also expensive and must be researched in the academy).
This is just my basic understanding of it as a Roman, it may be slightly different for others and someone may have a better (more detailed answer)
You can also look at New Villages in the help.travian.com guide.

Best of Luck! (I've been sitting at 2000+ culture points for ages, but my Palace is only at level 6, it requires lots of resources to extend it further so I've had to go back to building up my resources)

yes , true . But you should build residend , don't build Palace , Palace just use to change Capital , and put it in plan (15 crop or 9 crop )