Common Timezone

One of the simplest, yet most frequent mishaps during alliance offense and defense involve goof ups with timezones. Its impossible to plan any meaningful offense or defense unless a common timezone is used.

Travian has done a terrible job to add to the confusion by introducing local timezones, followed by UTC times. Most players are familiar with GMT, but players from Asia and other continents may not have heard of UTC, yet alone daylight savings time.

It should be enforced that all players set their timezones to UTC, military format time. This should be made compulsory and all times quoted should follow this standard.

Using GMT+1 or UTC+1 is a bad idea, or should I say terrible idea because of daylight savings. Players from Asia do not have daylight savings, and much confusion has arisen between GMT+1 and UTC+1.

It is best to set a standard of UTC, military time format. For example, 4pm would be expressed as 16:00:00 hrs. There is no ambiguity here.

Common Village Names

A common strategy is for players within the same alliance to use a common village name. This is especially useful when organizing alliance attacks. It costs nothing, is very simple to do, and it adds to the confusion for the defender.

It is very difficult for the defender to see who is attacking when all the village names are the same. Using a common village definitely adds to the effectives of faking and it is a “must have” in planning any large scale alliance attacks.

After the attacks have passed, they may rename their village back to their original names. But keeping them permanently named is a good idea because it confuses the enemy on the geography of your villages.