Well I’m in. Dumbarton village at -79 -131
Ah, I see a Doper Alliance member in my Area- Alistair Village!
Greetings and Good Tidings Neighbor!
And two other nobodies near me… I shall crush their Ignorance hopefully in a week or two…
I joined…I’m at 22, -148.
I’m still not sure what’s going on, but I have an embassy and a barracks. Does this mean I can start lulling people into a false sense of security and then smashing them? 
Well you get Newbie Protection: for the first 7 days after you join, nobody can attack you. Because of that, you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you start by focusing on resource production and only look to defense in the last 1-2 days.
3 days protection actually. 7 days is for the normal speed servers.
-12, -156
Started out. its a lot like Tribal Wars, but I just joined this for the fun of it. These games take too long.
dakeeper, I don’t see you on the map. Did you select the 3x speed server? on www.travian.us?
Oooh, awkward… looks at watch
…
…
Alright, so let’s say I had, like, six hours until my protection wore off… what would I want in place?
You’d want as many traps as you can crank out, and you’d want to suck up to your larger neighbors.
A Cranny, high enough level to protect most of your resources (They are cheap to build). This will make raiding your town unprofitable for the attacker.
If you are the Gauls, you can build a Trapper.
Some defensive units: Praetorians for the Romans, Phalanx for the Gauls, Spearmen for the Teutons.
Alrighty… the trapper is the first priority, then some phalanxes, then probably more iron mines.
Oh, Captain_C, apparently your embassy needs to be bigger: it’s telling me that you can only support 9 members right now, and that you need another level to add up to 3 more.
Not to hijack… just agreeing… I am on ikariam with a group of co-workers on the Iota server. My towns are Otherton and Creosote (I don’t know the coordinates off hand) send me a pm if you want to do a treaty or something. I’m already in an alliance with my coworkers.
Gotcha Omi, I’ll do that tomorrow when the resources are high enough.
Alright, thanks! ^^
Out of curiosity, what exactlydo alliances do? Aside from flipping out and raiding people all the time? 
News from Kollerup*
Leaders and Governors of the SDMB Alliance,
We are happy to report that our Barracks is up, producing Legionnaires to send out on raids to neighboring villages. This has resulted in quite the bounty of resources, and no casualties to date. They have identified 4 vulnerable targets within a 16 minute march.
The Embassy is finished, and awaiting the consulate from Didjabringabeeralong. It appears the administration can not manage additional city-states at this point.
We will be constructing a Marketplace soon to distribute aid to other villages within the SDMB alliance. Once we have established a steady supply of resources, we will send Merchants to those who request assistance. Please be patient: it will take my merchant about 8 hours to reach the villages around Captain_C, and 13 hours to get all the way out to Alghar, the furthest ally from Kollerup.
Our protection period is almost expired, so will be concentrating on training defensive troops and building up our Cranny before the day’s end. We are within close range of two very large opponents and several others that are slightly stronger then us. We will report on our condition after this weekend.
[INDENT]Your obedient servant,
Cog, governor of Kollerup
*[/INDENT]
I’m feeling kind of dense here, but could someone please decode the manual’s explanation on Wheat? It specifically refers to the Gross Wheat Usage indicator, but I can’t figure out what each of the two numbers represent: mine is currently at 55/126, and from the fact that my wheat supplies are plunging rapidly I assume that isn’t enough…
Also, the village right next to mine seems to have been abandoned, since the population has stayed at 2 since I got here… I don’t have administrators yet, but someone else in our alliance might want to take advantage of the situation.
The first number is the amount of wheat your village is consuming each hour, and the second number is your TOTAL wheat production per hour. The difference is your net gain, which should be listed in the “Village Overview” under “Production.” So looks like you are producing 71 wheat per hour. Make sure your total wheat production doesn’t fall below the usage. You could run out of wheat and not be able to build another field.
Get some attackers, and start raiding your neighbor. You can pilfer all his resources! Make sure you select “Raid” and not “Attack” when you do.
Ooh, that makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I’m curious though… if my usage was well below my total production, let’s say 56/114, is there any reason why I would be noticing sudden, large drops in wheat? Before I buffed up my fields, I was noticing that despite having a greater total production than total usage, every so often my wheat would drop by 50-60 points. This was during the newbie period, so I know I wasn’t being raided…
I loved Travian. I played about a year ago and had a great time. But, I lost interest when they added the ability to buy gold. Previously, they had a system where you could get an advantage by paying money, but the advantage didn’t buy you resources, just an easier way to set things up and better accounting pieces. I tried out a sever with the gold system and half of the guys I was playing against got better so much faster than me that I had no hopes of keeping up or playing along.
It is a fun game. I just didn’t enjoy it after they added the gold.
pat