If a player is having trouble saving resources early on in Travian, it is usually because they are being farmed early on by other aggressive players. Below are some tips on saving resources and making your village less likely to be attacked. There are also some tips on how to make as much resources as possible to speed up village growth.
- Crannies are cheap to build and work by hiding away a certain number of resources from enemy raids. these resources cannot be stolen. By quickly upgrading a cranny to level ten, raiders are going to quickly find themselves frustrated when they can no longer take steal anymore resources. After obtaining a level 10 cranny it is more efficient to build multiple level 1 crannies rather than upgrading the next cranny to level ten. This however takes up space in your village and limits how many buildings you can have. (Demolishing a selected building can be started from the main building.)
Attacking troops, or raiding troops are cheap to make and can be used to farm players for resources. In the early game the best players will grow the fastest based on how often they raid and how many resources they steal in order to afford a level 10 palace or residence and settle a new village.
Joining an alliance is perhaps one of the simplest and cheapest ways to avoid attacks. After building an embassy, PM players of large alliances near your area to see if you can join. Once offered an invite, you may join that alliance. Players under attack in alliances should contact their leader or defense coordinator to ask for reinforcements to defend against attacks. An individual attacker will find it very difficult to overcome the reinforcements of an entire alliance. Just by being in an alliance may also deter raids.
Initially troops are expensive and more often than not the attacker will have a large enough force to deal with any defensive troops. A better idea is to use the saved up resources from crannies to build a wall and upgrade it to a decent level. Once this is done creating troops and reinforcing a city with a hero become much more efficient and give the defender much better odds. The wall can also kill enemy troops even when there are no troops stationed at the defending city.
Gauls have the unique ability to build trappers. With each level, the trapper gains more traps and can hold more troops. Trappers are much cheaper than building troops and a wall to have killed the same amount of attacking players. Early in the game, trappers will deter Teutons and other aggressive players from attacking your village.
Occasionally sending your attacker a nice message asking to please stop raiding you might work. The attacker has every right to ignore that message and keep on raiding you but in several cases I've been able to convince raiders to stop attacking me for a long enough time to build up a high level cranny or research and create defensive troops.
- A high level market place can also be used like a cranny. Each tribe's merchants can carry different amounts of resources. If you have 1000 of each resource in your warehouse and you have no cranny, it may be best to make an offer on the market if you see an incoming attack. offering to trade 1000 lumber (for say 1000 clay) will deduct 1000 lumber from the warehouse and place it in the market. Most offers tend not to be accepted right away so by the time the attacker arrives to raid the village there is no lumber in the warehouse. In this case a level 4 marketplace could be used to make 4 different offers (1000 of lumber, clay, iron and crop) to hide the same amount that a level 10 cranny would hide. Offers can be used to gain resources as well. An offer with a greater ratio than 1 ensures that when the resources are traded you end up making a net profit. Using this tactic resources can be both hidden away and also traded for profit using a marketplace.
Lastly if all else fails, send your resources to an alliance member or someone you trust. That way the enemy doesn't get the resouces they would have got, and the alliance you are in can still grow. Players can then PM the player they sent the resources and ask for them back or make some sort of deal. These tips are especially useful to prevent a loss of resources and also gain more resources on top of the hourly production fields. The best players will gain far more resources than their hourly production rate and will use this to feed new villages or produce massive armies.
Tips by Jayden Tan.