OL Games: Travian

Travian is an online real-time browser game set in ancient Roman times. The basic premise of the game is that each player chooses one of three races and begins with a single village. From there each player must improve their village, expand to new ones, go to war with their neighbors and conquer them. It's a war game, pure and simple as anyone attempting to "simcity" their way through the game will quickly be turned into a resource farm for everyone else.

There are multiple servers for dozens of countries, so I joined the US speed server where everything happens three times faster than the normal servers. I severely doubt I'd play a normal server, as waiting a full day to build a single field is simply a bit too slow for me. I ended up joining with a few people from the Diabloii.net forums, simply to test out the game. The server we were on had been running for about three months up to that point, so we were at quite a disadvantage.

Thankfully I ended up on the fringe of civilization so for the most part and was left alone to discover how the game worked. I was able to build up my first village, found a new one and conquer a pair of oasis squares. Along with this I build a decent sized army, practices raiding several inactive players and even destroyed three of them. All in all the game was fun, but I definitely shouldn't play more than one server at a time or I won't get any work done. I do have to be careful with this game, it is very similar to Archmage and Space: Glory Thru Conquest of which I became very addicted to. Thankfully we can assign sitters to watch over the account while I am away doing things in real life, so I can actually have a life.

Now that the US speed server ended earlier this week our group has moved to the COM speed server which has been running for only a single month. This means we won't be at quite as much of a disadvantage and we can take everything we learned in the US server with us. Should be interesting the second time around.