Diplomacy

Diplomacy begins to play an increasingly important role towards the mid game and especially during the end game.

Diplomacy in the Early Game

The early game is your expansion stage. Focus on growing an alliance of strong active players. In order to attract strong players into your alliance, you must be a strong player yourself, otherwise they will doubt the benefit of joining your alliance.

Remember the saying “Birds of a feather flock together”. Strong players will find each other and naturally cluster together.

Don’t form NAPs and confederations with other alliances in the early game. Strong players view it as a form of weakness because it means that your alliance is not able to stand on its own and needs to hide behind the protection of numbers.

Additionally, NAPs and confederations limits their farming (and conquering) opportunities. Remember that the best Travian players are the ones who raid and conquer the most. You want to attract these type of players and you will not attract them into your alliance if you had a NAP with everybody.

Diplomacy in the Mid Game

By mid game however, you will need to change your diplomacy stance and begin to form up with other alliances to form even bigger, stronger alliances. There is no other way except to merge and form meta alliances if you want to become a major power who can successfully compete during the end game.

By the thick of mid game, you should already have many wings under your alliance. If you’re a single one winged alliance in a hot zone, then other alliances will offer you to join them. If you do not, they will probably destroy your alliance. So there is no other way except to join up through diplomacy before you are threatened to join them by force.

Diplomacy in the Late Game

I characterize the late game as the part before end game begins. It is the part where you need to prepare for the end game. By the time end game begins, all diplomacies and alliances would have already been firmed up, so there is not diplomacy to do at end game.

As you approach the late game, I would suggest to avoid NAPs altogether. A NAP simply means that you are unable to dominate the rival alliance. In such an event, offer a confederation instead of NAP – this brings together two equally strong alliances to form an even stronger alliance.

Also by this stage, you will need to make end game preparations. Having formed a strong meta alliance, you will now want to offer confederations with the weaker alliances – even those whom you are actively farming.

The reason is because you will need support wings for your WW village. Having five or six wings is just not enough and the key is to have as many wings as possible – twenty or thirty if possible. Also at this stage of the game, farming is less profitable as most farms would have disappeared and you begin to rely on your villages for production.

Try to recruit the whole quadrant, form new wings and offer confeds with remaining alliances in your quadrant. This is the time where you recruit everyone, farm or not.

If you don’t do this, then I guarantee you that your rivals will recruit them and it is better to have more players on your side, sending resources to your WW instead of to the enemy WW.

Of course not all alliances will join you. Some will hate you so much that they rather fight to the bitter end. That is where tact and skill comes in. A lesson on how to sweet talk is not within the scope of this guide, but avoid threatening those whom you want to recruit. Saying join us or we will destroy you is generally in bad taste – they only end up joining the enemy.

At the same time, you can increase your odds of winning the server by offering confederations with other dominant metas from other quadrants so you form a multi quadrant confederation. This will reduce the number of WWs you have to attack and declaring a common victory for both alliances should either side reach level 100.

One last word of caution though. Don’t spoil the game by being confederated with everybody to the point that you have no one to attack.