Renegade Slayer’s Travian Guide for Beginners: Being Farmed

Travian is an massively multi-player online browser war game. MMOBWG? Whatever. This guide is for new players that whine about being attacked. Follow this guide, and you won’t be attacked, and you will easily grow.

Beginners often whine about being attacked in the game. Larger players steal their resources and kill their troops. Well, if you’re one of those whiners, you need to continue reading. If you are a farm, and you follow the advice below, you will be able to get out of being farmed.

Farmer Motivation

Farmers are only motivated by profit. They don’t care about “attacking” as much as they care about getting your resources. Now, for a farmer, there are 3 basic kinds of attacks:

1. Raiding for resources
2. Clearing a new farm
3. Punishing a farm

Raiding is very simple. The farmer is only raiding you to get your resources. They’re not looking to kill troops, but if you have troops in your village, well, that’s unfortunate.

Clearing farms is important for farmers. (Clearing is killing all the troops in a village.) They don’t want to send their whole army out to farm just you. There are other farms out there, and they need their troops to farm them as well as you. But every now and then, if you have lots of resources, and lots of troops, a farmer will decide that it’s going to be profitable long term to kill all your troops and then farm you.

Punishing farms is also important for farmers. Farms that decide to get brave can become a problem, so every now and then a farmer may decide to make an example of a farm by catapulting it. The degree of punishment varies widely from a simple attack on your barracks, to crop lock, or zero popping your village. Sometimes it’s just a personal grudge.

Farmers prefer those in order. i.e. Farming is most profitable, so it’s #1. Clearing leads to profit, so it’s #2. Punishing a farm isn’t very profitable, so it’s dead last.

So what does that mean to you if you’re a farm? 3 things:

1. Don’t give up resources. Ever.
2. Don’t keep troops in your village. Ever.
3. Don’t piss off the guy trying to farm you. Ever.

I’m not saying “be a wimp”. I’m saying:

If you are much weaker than an opponent, your winning strategy is to not fight him.

It’s stupid to fight when you can’t win. So don’t.

Now, regarding those 3 points:

Don’t Give Up Resources. Ever.

If I’m farming you, and you give up resources, then I will be back again and again and again. I won’t stop until it’s no longer profitable. So, in order to avoid giving up resources:

1. Build crannies. Plural.
2. Keep your cranny level above your warehouse and granary level.
3. If you are being attacked, and have resources above your cranny level, SPEND or SEND!

You should have at least enough cranny capacity to store 2000 resources, and depending upon how aggressive your farmer is, maybe 10,000 or more. If you need to build 10 crannies, then build 10 crannies!

As long as you are in danger of being farmed, keep your warehouse and granary capacity below your cranny capacity. Then, even if they fill up, farmers can’t get any resources. (Remember the Teuton cranny-dipping bonus though.)

If you have resources above your cranny capacity, then before you go to bed, or before you go to work, or whenever you’re not going to be playing, or whenever you are being attacked… SPEND or  SEND! Spend all the resources you can first. Build a new building or resource field. If you can’t spend it all, then send any extra above your cranny level to a friend or a fellow alliance member.

Here’s an example report with the names redacted:

Will I be back to raid that player more? You bet! There’s a profit of 3,089 resources there. (Minus 250 for the clubswinger that died.)

Whatever you do… DO NOT GIVE UP RESOURCES. EVER!

Don’t Keep Troops in Your Village. Ever.

If you are being farmed, never keep troops in your village. Farmers can easily send large armies to kill them all. The cost to the farmer is nothing. Probably about a day to recover. However, it will likely take you a week or more to recover.

For example, if you have a total production capacity of 1,000 resources per hour (250 each), and you need to rebuild 100 Phalanxes, then that will take you 31.5 hours of resource production. If you aren’t raiding, then you’ve just lost a day and a half of production. A farmer on the other hand will probably be raiding enough to make up that amount very quickly. So, you fall behind even worse than you were before. Not good. You just got weaker in comparison to your previous position.

Here’s another report, again with names redacted:

The farm lost 10 troops for no reason. And they lost resources. Bad. Very bad. I’ll be back raiding that player again. And probably killing more troops.

So how do you not keep troops in your village? Easy. You raid. Across LOOOONNNNGGGG distances.

If you are only available to play, for example, at 8 AM and 8 PM, then find a tiny village that is 6 hours away from you and raid it. Aim for players with only 1 village, and only at villages with a population of less than 30. The safest are villages with populations under 10. Remember, the object is to keep your troops alive until you have a LARGE number of troops. You should have at least as many troops as the player that is farming you, and preferably twice as large. So, if they have an army of 500 troops, then you want to have at least 500.

However, remember that different troops are worth different attack/defense values, so  if they have 500 Teutonic Knights, then you’ll need to have at least 1,500 Phalanxes. It’s all just simple math. You can find the troop strengths in the Travian FAQ.

If you slowly build your troops, and don’t needlessly lose them, you’ll become much more powerful than you would otherwise.

So, remember… DO NOT KEEP TROOPS IN YOUR VILLAGE. EVER!

Don’t Piss off the Guy Trying to Farm You. Ever.

I have single-handedly destroyed entire alliances. And I’m not the only one to have done that. But why would I do that? Well… somebody pissed me off. So, what are some things you should not do to piss off farmers?

1. Don’t be rude. Be polite.
2. Don’t keep troops at home.
3. Write intelligently.
4. Don’t beg.

If you are constitutionally incapable of shutting your loud mouth, and find that you MUST communicate with farmers or your head will explode, then for god’s sake… be polite! If they are rude, then stop talking to them. You’re not going to get anywhere by being a smart ass. Larger players will catapult smaller players into dust just for fun sometimes, and they target the rude ones first.

Sometimes it pays off to talk to a farmer, but most often, it doesn’t. It’s all just case-by-case and there’s no way to predict how a farmer will react to you except by reading their profile. Some players only raid inactive players. Others raid everyone. If someone posts in their profile that they don’t raid active players, then feel free to contact them, but be polite.

Next, don’t try to kill their troops. If they are a large player, you’re only going to piss them off, and then they’ll be back with catapults. Keep your troops out of your villages until you are strong enough to truly fight back.

Next, write intelligently. Use a spell checker. Use a grammar checker. There’s nothing worse than reading complete garbage. If English isn’t your native tongue, then tell the farmer. They are more likely to forgive you for not writing well.

Finally, don’t beg. It’s pathetic. Be polite. Treat other players like human beings with a level of respect. You’ll likely get the same respect back.

Here’s some typical begging from a farm of mine. While he can’t write to save his life, at least he’s relatively polite. Still, it’s pathetic. He needs to read this guide!

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FARM wrote:

hi, can you just dont atack me please? im new in travian and i want to learn how to play and receiving atacks is harder to learn :s
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FARMER wrote:

Don’t worry. There are no catapults.
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FARM wrote:

ok, but dont farm me please i beg you, im trying to build my second vilage and is hard when i get atacks from a strong guy like you :s
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FARM wrote:

nice now my hero is dead and i dont got resources to resurect him :'(
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FARMER wrote:

Yeah, and you spent resources that I was counting on using to pay for the troops that I lost there because you should have dodged them, but you didn’t. So now I’ve lost troops and it’s all your fault.

Hahaha~! (Just joking.)

But at least you dodged your settlers. That was a good thing for you.

Go read the travian forums and look for information about farming. That will help you more than anything. The key to farming is that it needs to be profitable. Read on that.
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FARM wrote:
yeah i know and i think you lost resources in the troops you lost and the resources you take from me, and yeah i send my setlers away :b

But, he didn’t piss me off there. Instead, he left troops at home, caused losses for me, and as such, I’ll continue to farm him to make sure that I make up those losses.

Summary

If you want to stop being farmed, build crannies and don’t keep troops at home. Those are the 2 most important things when facing much larger opponents that are farming you.

Good luck!

Renegade Slayer