Travian: The Finale

The International speed server ended after almost six months of activity, I played for the last five. I ended up ranked around 400th overall, 400th in offense and 1100th in defense with the alliance as a whole ranked 60th. Granted those are extremely impressive numbers but considering it was my first full server with little or no veteran direction not too shabby either.

Travian is a very time consuming and addictive game. The game starts off with a single village that needs to be micro managed in order to gain an advantage over any neighbors. From there the village needs to be micro managed to ensure raiding parties don't run away with resources before they can be used or wipe out your growing army. Once a second village is created the micro management continues as the second village needs to be grown as fast as possible, and so on and so forth. Basically the micro management doesn't really stop

Our group decided to relocated to a distant part of the map away from the central area that was sure to turn into a massive battleground. We wanted time to understand how Travian worked before someone tried to wipe us out. For the most part the plan was successful. We did end up settling near some other players, who harassed us in the beginning until we grew too large for easy raiding.

We eventually joined an established alliance named TRoS (The Ring of Steel) and became their wing. This was as much for our own protection as it made things a bit more interesting. Turns out this didn't help us as much as expected due to the distance the rest of the TRoS folks were from our area and their poor communication skills. The people themselves were very nice and fun, but planning anything with them turned out to be pretty much impossible. As a result we were pretty much on our own for the whole server, which meant we could do whatever we wanted.

We cleared all enemies out from our area one at a time, starting with those that were not part of any large alliances. Slowly but surely we got the hand of coordinating attacks and could wipe out several enemy villages in a single day. The only thing that slowed us down were the several hour travel times to opposing villages, each way. I can't imagine what a normal server would be like with 1-2 day travel times for close opponents.

While the game was fun to play in the end it just became too much to handle. One by one members of our group dropped out due to boredom or simply lack of time so we ended the game with about five active people, out of the twenty-eight or so who started. Myself I simply stopped trying to manage my 31-32 villages and let warehouses overflow with resources and offensive troops remain idle for long periods of time.

In order to play this game successfully one needs to be in front of a computer for long periods of time and not have to worry about being in trouble for playing a game. Logging in 2-3 times a day simply doesn't cut it and won't allow much growth, you'll be left in the dust by all of the other players.

Basically it was fun but too time intensive, so I won't be playing another server round. I enjoyed the round I did play but were I to play another online game it would have to be turn-based as opposed to time-based.