VILLAGE SPECIALIZATION

VILLAGE SPECIALIZATION
We should see specialization on two levels, both alliance-wide and within your own account.

Alliance-wide: The best way to be effective is to split players into two groups, defensive and offensive. End of story.

Defensive players should have multiple villages producing and upgrading defensive troops. Not all of them though should make troops, as some should just feed the others to save resources on all the upgrades, and you can use troops from one village to reinforce other villages and players. Don't even build a barracks in there except to get a trade center going. A good rule of thumb is that 1/3 of your villages should be building troops, using other villages for storage and resource supply. Small groups of offensive troops should be built for raiding purposes, but the blacksmith should be demolished as soon as the required buildings are built from it. At endgame, you may want to ramp up the barracks in every village, but that's only if you're pushing defenders to a WW and have no other focus for your account.

You should NEVER upgrade the weapons of a defensive unit, because it serves no purpose and you will gain nothing from it. The same goes for increasing armor on an offensive unit. And because upgrades are a percentage increase, you should NOT do upgrades on troops you will only have a few of (under 500). It's actually just smarter (and cheaper) to build more troops in that case, unless your wheat fields are all maxed out and you have no place left to store troops.

There are some dual-purpose troops, those that are good for both offense and defense, and those are usually Roman.

Offensive players should have ONLY one to two villages producing nothing but offensive troops and upgrading them. One village will be your main hammer, and this will be the village you feed as much as possible, and supported by a cropper. The second village will be the mini hammer, and is best supported by a cropper but which can be supported by multiple feeders and raiding instead. Any other croppers or villages should be used for troop storage, with one village solely dedicated to defensive troops, so you are not completely unprotected.

The secondary specialization is within your account, and by town. Even if you are an offensive player, you need some defenders, and even if you’re a defender, you may want a small army for raids and such. Be SMART in building these nonessential forces, though.

At no time should you be building both offensive and defensive troops in the same town, with an exception at the start of a server.

After a short time at the beginning, all towns should be divided by offensive and defensive producers, and even further specialization can be done on this.

For example, some defensive players have a Phalanx town and a Druidrider town. Phalanx are the ONLY thing that first village does. Druids are the ONLY thing the other does.

These villages produce nothing but those troops, and reinforce them elsewhere according to need. This allows you to only have to improve either one barracks or one stable to level 20 and only one troop type to upgrade. This will save you a lot of time and resources.

This level of specialization should only be done by players with a significant number of villages (10+ fully-built villages).

This strategy requires teamwork, as the hammer players will be your main point of offense, and they'll depend on the defensive players in case of attack. This has the added benefit, though, of leaving the offensive players free to grow their hammers without needing to sustain a sizable defense in the same village. This means bigger hammers.

Village Purpose:

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FUNDAMENTAL RULE OF SMART TRAVIAN BUILDING:

** EVERY VILLAGE HAS ONE SPECIFIC PURPOSE! **

Every village has one specific purpose. Every village has one specific purpose.

One more time: Every village should have ONLY ONE specific purpose!!

There are three types of villages. Offensive, defensive and supply/support.

That's it. No others. There are some shades of gray, such as scouting villages, but for 99% of players, you make every village one of those three. PERIOD.


Offensive:

If you’re a defensive player, you may want to make one or two raiding parties. For those villages, don’t worry about weapons upgrades until you have at least 500 of the troop type you want to improve. I know very few experienced players who upgrade weapons when they play a defensive role, even for their raiding parties. It’s simply a waste.


The following is for offensive players only:

There can be ONLY one attack village. Maybe two. In fact, you should not even have a barracks in every village, except to build trade centers. Some players build catapults in every village. That’s complete idiocy. A good player only has 1 offensive village, MAYBE two. Why? It's expensive (resource-wise) to support a true offensive village. And terribly ineffective. Recall the previous chapter about building an army. It’s inefficient to have 5 armies of 200 imperians, but 1000 imperians from one place can do some damage.

Do not build an armory here as there's no need. If you need defensive troops, get them from a defensive village.

If you have a 15c, make it your capital, and build troops out of a village right next door. Why? Because you can store more there AND your capital is not tied up holding attackers.

Most large, experienced players have ONE hammer village, and maybe one or two mini hammers, depending on how many villages they have.

My rule for offensive players is this: Have an offensive village for every TEN villages in your account. Period.


Defensive:

I'm talking true defense here. If I had one 15C and one 9C, the 9C would be dedicated to defensive troops. A good ratio on defensive troops is 1/3 horse mounted and 2/3 infantry defensive units. You should use only the armory, and only upgrade armor for the defensive troops. And you can demolish the blacksmith once you get the stable if you want. It's still very good to build a tourney square as you'll need to help your brothers at some point.

Supply/Support:
This will be the majority of my villages. For troops, I'll put 1 or 2K defensive troops and a raiding party. The remainder of my resources goes to building market, trade office, etc. I build a Town hall in each supply village.


The Plan:

Everything revolves around the cropper. It must be your capital. Period. Folks say "yeah, but it's great to have level 15 Iron fields!" Pffft! It’s cheaper to build more villages.

Build two more villages? Why? The answer is important.....

*** TRAVIAN AXIOM #3: Wheat is the limiting military factor in this game.

Here's the thing that gets everyone: The cropper is NOT where you build your troops.

“Huh? It’s NOT?”

Build a standard village RIGHT next door to your cropper, build your troops there and reinforce the cropper. “Why,” you ask?

You can't build a great Barracks/Stable in your capital. This is crucial in late game. You'll absolutely NEED the extra building capacity in big wars and when the Natar come.

So the Cropper is the foundation eh? So you should get like 12 croppers, right?

NO. No. No. One or two will suffice. The cropper/standard duo is a pain to keep fed. Troops are expensive. I knew someone on a different server who had 4 9C's and 3 15C's out of 11 villages. She was scared to death of launching a real offensive because it would take her forever to rebuild due to merchant travel time. Those croppers were all so far from each other that rebuilding any village or army would be terribly limited by the distance to ship resources!

You want to have your cropper as the center and build your supply villages close to it. If you're Gaul, you can get a little farther away since you have quick merchants

Some advanced players make dedicated scouting villages too, and for those villages both defensive and offensive upgrades are important, but DON’T EVEN GO THERE UNTIL YOU HAVE 20+ VILLAGES or your alliance asks you to build a scouting village.

Ideally, your goal is to have your one big offensive army be as large as you can get it. It should be based with a cropper next to it and feeders as needed. If you can (especially if you use gold) you should be building 24/7 non-stop out of your L20 barracks.

The absolute rule that you MUST have a capital 15c is a bit overstated. Before Travian instituted gold and the NPC it was definitely true, but for people for whom money isn't an issue, then you can maintain enormous armies based out of 6c villages. You ship in like mad from feeders and use NPC to feed the 30K or 50K deficit. If you get a 4-4-4-6 village up to L18 on all resource fields, you can feed a LOT of troops, and you can use NPC once a day to convert the other resources to wheat. You’ll need several warehouses and granaries, but it can easily be done. Add in a couple of oasis to that 4-4-4-6 village, and you have a serious production machine for a capital. Remember, the oasis bonus gets LARGER as your fields get higher because it is a percentage.


OASES:

Let’s talk briefly about oases. Most players don’t understand them, and even those who think they do often don’t fully take advantage of their potential.

Read this first:

http://help.travian.com/index.php?type=faq&mod=556

That covers the basic of how to conquer an oasis, but how do you maximize the benefit?

Let’s start with your basic 4-4-4-6 village. Without gold, your maximum for a non-capital village is 1000 resources per hour. But take a 25% clay oasis, and your hourly clay production goes up to 1250. Suppose your wheat production is 1500. Take a 50% wheat oasis, and that goes up to 2250. And it’s cumulative! Two oases can at least double the bonus.

But use the oases wisely! If you take a clay oasis from a village with 3 clay fields, you’re losing the full benefit of the oasis. Take it from a village with FIVE clay fields, and you increase that bonus tremendously. Good planning is key; if you plan to settle an area with many oases, settle villages with field numbers that match up with oasis types. A village with 5 iron fields should take the iron oasis, and a village with 5 wood should take the wood oases, and so on.

“GREAT,” you say, “I want to take 3 oases from my village!”

Nope! Because of the tremendous cost of raising your mansion to 15 (and even worse to 20), there are only 3 situations when you want to take more than one oasis from a village:

1) For your capital – Because you can raise field levels up above 10 in your capital only, the bonus for oases is increased tremendously at higher levels. Remember the example of the clay oasis above? It increased overall clay production for your village by 250 per hour. Now suppose you’ve got your clay fields up to level 15 or 16 in your capital. That’s a base level of 1000 per field (4000 total), multiplied by the bonus of 25%, for a 1000 clay/hour bonus! The oasis will give you 24,000 clay per day! That is worth the heavy price of a level 15 or 20 mansion.

2) For a cropper – The same principle applies. If you have 15 wheat fields up to 10, the bonus of three wheat oases is a lot more than if you had 3 villages with one oasis each. A 15c capital with three 50% oases can hold 80K or more troops.

3) If you are in an area where you cannot build a new village - In that case, upgrade your mansion to 15 or 20 and take another oasis only if you don’t need the resources elsewhere. It’s not terribly efficient, but if you can’t build a new village, that’s the way to go.

So, the bottom line for oases is this:

* One per village, tailored to the fields in your village
* Maximum oases for croppers and capitals
* Never upgrade a mansion when you don’t need to.
I would say that if players follow these instructions for individual development, there is no need for dividing players in alliance into def/off groups since every well developed player will have def and off.
I would also say that regular village should afford 2 oases.