How To Raid Like A Top Robber

I’ve won the Top Robber of the Week every week since it was introduced. As of writing this, that’s six straight weeks in a row with the top spot being the Silver Robber of the Week (Rank 2).

Raiding is an important part of the game and I’m going to assume you already understand that. I’m also going to assume that you’re a Teuton, but the concepts explained here will apply to all tribes.

So what kind of numbers do you shoot for in raiding? I’m less than five months into the server life. At this point, I have 12 villages with a combined daily production of 2,251,728 resources. And daily average raid is around 1 million resources, so raiding alone increases my daily income by almost 50 percent.

I’m not saying this to sing my own praises, but to give you an idea of the income from raiding versus production. Your raiding numbers will vary depending on which stage of the game you’re at. By mid game (month seven), my raiding income is around 2 million resources per day. Along with it, your raiding techniques too will vary.

Raiding Basics

Raiding Dos :-

• Keep the higher goal in mind. Raiding is for profit. Not all players make good farms, so don’t try to farm players who continually cause you losses.
• Send a minimum of 2 troops. Sending a single unit will always die.
• Use the correct troop type to farm. For Teutons, it’s the clubswinger and paladin. Later in the game you can also use axeman and TKs. Gauls are swordsman and TTs. Romans are legionnaire, imperians and EIs.
• Separate your farming army from your offense army. For Teutons, you should maintain at minimum 1000 clubswingers for farming. And use axemen as your offensive army. So when your offense army is away cata’ing some player, your farming continues uninterrupted.
• Raid your every player in your 21 x 21 and beyond. Raid up to 4 hours plus by paladin. Later by mid game, raid up to 14 hours away.
• The richest farms are villages in the 500 to 600 population.
• Use the farm finder to search for farms. Any idle players can be added to your farm list, but scout them first.
  
  http://www.traviantoolbox.com/en/farms_search_on_server_571
  
  http://businesssoftcreations.com/travian/default.aspx
  
  http://www.traviandope.com/closest.php?change_sid=1
  
  http://www.yourgamingsite.org/Travian.do

Due to the frequency of links getting outdated, if the links above don’t work, please contact me and I’ll provide the urls for them.

Raiding Don’ts :-

• Don’t raid nature for its resources. Its simply not worth it.
• Do not judge players by their population size. Don’t be afraid of high population players because most of them don’t have any troops.
• Do not be afraid to scout any village below 250 population. Most players don’t have any scouts.
• Do not be afraid of their alliance. Alliance members almost never help their teammates.

Early Game Raiding

I characterize the Early Game as the stage where you have only one village. This is covered in detail under “Part 2 – The Early Game”. I will however extract the substance of raiding in the early game.

The main challenge in the early game is a shortage of raiders to collect all the resources out there. There are plenty of farms and due to a shortage of troops, you need to raid as efficiently as possible while building a strong raiding force.

The first important goal at this stage is to research the scout. Before all else, you must get a scout, because it will increase your raiding efficiency many times over.

The most common mistake newbies make is they research the spearman, the paladin and what not, but they ignore the scout. So let this be known, that the second unit type you build must always be the scout – and the sooner, the better.

Teutons have an advantage because the Teuton scout is trained in the barracks. Other tribes are not so lucky because their scout is trained in the stable.

Begin by creating an Excel spreadsheet to record your farms :-

Here’s what the columns mean :-

	Player	– Player name
	Village	– Village name
	Coords	– Village Coords
	Race	– Roman, Gaul, Teuton
	Cranny	– The cranny size. Leave as blank if unknown.
	Trapper	– Yes or no. Leave as blank if unknown.
	Remarks	– Any notations. Use this to indicate number of raiders to send    and whether it is a rich farm.
	Protection Expires	– The most important column. Record down the date and time    the player’s protection is expiring.
	Link	– The url link to the village.

Raid as soon as you can. That means within hours of registering your account. At this stage, a lot of players around you are still under beginner’s protection. You need to record them into your Farm spreadsheet.

Start with your 7 x 7 grid. Go to your map and record every village in your 7 x 7 grid.

Right click on the village and select “Open Link in New Window”.

Click on “Send Troops”.

Select “Raid”. If a player is under beginner’s protection, it will show when the protection is expiring.

Record the player’s information into your Farm spreadsheet.

When you’ve finished recording your 7 x7, expand your coverage and record every village in your 21 x 21 map grid.

An illustration of your 21 x 21 grid is shown on the left. In the center, the red square is your immediate 7 x 7 grid. Each black square surrounding the red square is another 7 x 7 grid. Collectively, all nine squares make up your 21 x 21 grid.

How far should you raid? Start with those closest to you. For starters, there are plenty of farms near you, but never hesitate to raid someone in your 21 x 21 radius. Later when you have multiple villages, raid anywhere up to a distance of 4 hours plus with Paladins.

Avoid Gauls at this moment until you have at least 100 clubs to free your trapped troops.

Raid the closest Teuton or Roman. Do not worry about retaliation and do not worry about their village size. Also do not worry about any alliance status. Chances are at this stage, none of them have any troops.

A clubswinger has a raiding capacity of 60 resources. If they return full, resend your attack until it there is nothing else to collect. A word of caution is that you will receive all kinds of messages asking you to stop. Just hit the delete key and continue to raid as long as its profitable.

The richest raiding farms are players who are just exiting their beginner’s protection. Use your spreadsheet and note when the beginner’s protection is expiring, and attack the moment it expires.

Players with 2 population are also very rich farms. Take note of 2 population players and attack the moment their protection expires. You must be fast and send 54 clubs to collect a full bounty of 3,200 resources.

Build more clubswingers and quickly research scouts. Train as many as you can afford, but 5 is a good number to start and eventually reaching 50 scouts by the time you’re ready to expand to your second village. On average, you will have your second village around the 19th day. Once you have scouts, your raiding strategy will need to be adjusted.

As a guideline, any village below 250 population can be safely scouted. Send only 1 scout at a time. If it dies, then don’t scout that player anymore and don’t raid that player either. If he has scouts at this stage, then he knows what he’s doing. Its better to make friends with such players.

A scout report will tell you how much resources is in the village. Use this info to calculate how many clubs you need to send to collect a full bounty.

Example :-

Assuming there’s a total of 500 resources in the village. So that makes 500 / 60 = 8.33. You need to send 9 clubswingers.

After the raid, resend your scout again. And take note what is the remaining resources left in the village. This will tell you the cranny size.

Example :-

Assuming that there is remaining 66 resources of wood, clay, iron and crop. So now you know the cranny size is 66. Record this down in your spreadsheet. You need to update your spreadsheet along the way by scouting after a raid.

The next time you raid the same village, send a scout first. Then subtract the cranny protection and calculate how many clubs you need to send.

Send in the exact number of clubs needed to do a clean sweep. This will increase your raiding efficiency many times over because the main problem at this stage is a shortage of troops.

Continue to build your army and raid actively. There is no rule in Travian that sets a maximum number of raids. Raid them ten times a day if necessary.

This is how I raid in the early game. This goes on as I continue to expand my clubswinger army up to almost 600 clubs by the time I’m ready to settle my second village (about 19 days later). Even with 600 clubs, there are more farms that I could not possibly raid them all.

Maintain a strict clubswinger army and scouts. Do not train spearmen, axemen or paladins. If you need defenses, ally with a Gaul and buy phalanxes as reinforcements for your village.

When I say “buy”, I mean you need to send them resources to train phalanxes and have them permanently reinforced in your villages. At this stage of the game, they probably do not have resources to train troops for you, so you need to “buy” from them.

When you’ve settled your first village, and once you have your clubswinger army built up in there, its time to move to the next stage.

Mid Game Raiding

Over time, you will begin to notice who are the rich farms, who aren’t and who cannot be farmed. Update your spreadsheet and categorize your farms into four main types:-

• Hot farms – these are rich farms that give you a lot of resources.
• Normal farms – those that give you some resources.
• Poor farms – those that give little resources, usually due to high crannies.
• KIV farms – lousy farms that constantly return zero resources, or worse yet, cause you to lose raiders.

Around this time, you should have around 200 farms in your list. The list will continue to diminish as players delete.

Now that you have your second village, you will need to raid from both villages. Split your farms into two lists – List A and B. List A contains all the farms that you will raid from your first village, and List B are those that you will raid from your second village. They should be split by travel time.

You will find that sending so many raids is a very time consuming task. To ease the workload, you can activate Travian Plus.

The neat thing about Travian Plus is that you can create links.

You will use the Travian Plus link feature to create and organize your farm lists.

Create the links to each of your farms. Place List A at the top, followed by List B. In within each list, place the hot farms at the top, followed by the normal and poor farms. An illustration is provided below:-

Remember the illustration above is only an example. My actual list of links run for many pages up to 200 farms.

If you like, you can even place a short commentary. For example “To Endeavor 100c”. The 100c denotes that you should send 100 clubs to raid.

Additionally, when you raid, send two waves of attacks. The first raid consists of TKs. And the second wave consists of axeman and 1 ram. This forces the troops to travel at different speeds, and hence they will land at different times. Here’s an example :-

• Endeavor 100T 200x 1r ← send 2 waves, 100 TKs, and 200 axes plus 1 ram
• Shuttle 120T 220x 1c ← send 2 waves, 120 TKs, and 220 axes plus 1 cata
• Challenger 100x ← send 1 wave of 100 axes
• Station 100T 200x 1r
• (BM) Richmond 100T 150x ← (BM) in front can be your village name (from where to raid from).
• (BM) Red Villa 100x

This can only be done from mid game onwards due to the large number of troops required.

Notice that in your spreadsheet there is a url link column? Create the direct url link, so once you click on the link, it automatically brings you to the village. From here, you can examine past reports and decide on the number of troops to send. An example of what it should look like:-

Whenever its time to raid, all you need to do is work your way down the list of links.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to activate Plus, then you can send attacks using the url link in the spreadsheet.

Frequency of attacks:-

• Hot farms – gets attacked 3 or more times a day – in the morning, afternoon and night, and whenever I’m free.
• Normal farms – gets attacked twice a day – morning and night.
• Poor farms – gets attacked twice a day – morning and night.
• KIV farms – they are monitored from time to time and from experience, KIV farms can become hot farms later on as some of them give up playing.

From the mid game onwards, more and more players begin to drop out. And your farms disappear along with it. Use the Travian farm finder to look for more farms and expand your reach to 4 hours plus by paladins, and later up to 14 hours.

When you have your second village, you can research and train paladins in both of your villages. But remember to maintain your clubwinger army as your primary raiding force. The reason is because you will begin to lose troops while raiding, and clubswingers are cheap to replace. Paladins however can be sent to long distances and only to safe farms.

By the time I get to the fourth month, farms continually drop off. At this stage, my list drops off to less than 100 farms. This calls for some new drastic measures to keep up my raiding frenzy.

Another Raiding System

Another raiding system is to use continuous raids. With this system, you don’t necessarily raid three times a day. You raid all day long.

This system is suitable for players who have multiple co-players from different timezones, such as a triple or quadruple account.

This system works based on the attack reports. The moment an attack report is opened, another attack is sent immediately to the same village. A few players takes turns, so that whenever someone logs in, he begins to open all unopened attack reports. And resends the attacks.

This way, the raids are continuous, round the clock.

You don’t need as many farms this way. Only a hundred plus farms is enough to get you to the number three spot as Top Robber. Attacks are sent to as far as nine hours (one way). Due to the vast number of troops needed, this is suitable only for mid-game raiding onwards.

Once the list of farms have been built, and once the initial attack has been sent, you can then switch to using continuous raiding system – provided that you have enough active co-players.

I have used both raiding systems with great success and have consistently achieved the Top Robber award for more than 20 times straight. All it takes is the right technique, and the discipline to raid consistently.

Building Farms

Building farms is simply my terminology of creating farms. There are some players who have a decent army whom you’ve avoided farming all this while. If they’re not helping you, then you can cropkill them and turn them into permanent farms.

Use your catapults and destroy all their croplands and granary. You should target players from rival alliances. Seek the help of an ally if necessary and only pick on those whom you can decisively cropkill. Once cropkilled, add them to your farm list.

Use this tactic sparingly though, because some cropkilled players tend to delete soon after. Also, this destroys other players and diminishes your opportunity of future conquer targets.

You don’t want to destroy everybody until there is no one left to conquer. A warning that overuse of this method will result in barren lands all around you, until there are no nearby villages to conquer.

I have also spied on other rival alliances attack reports and stole their farms. If you’re ever privileged enough to spy on their attack reports, don’t hesitate to steal their farms.

This DOES NOT mean that you should spy on your own alliance attack reports and steal from your teammates. I have never done that but stealing from rival alliances is a must do.

Periodically monitor your surroundings by browsing around your map. New villages tend to pop up which can be added to your farm list.

These are the exact raiding strategies I use and it has consistently gotten me the Top Robber of the week for many straight weeks now.