Hey all :)

GUIDE FOR DEFENDERS

As a defender at the start of the game you have 2 options. You can either play as a personal defender (PD) or a defender for your alliance. Both have its ups and downs and i have played both when i started off the game very early in my travian career.

Personal Defender (PD)

PDs are defenders for one player and will protect this player all server round with their troops and will become very strong allies and often friends with the player they protect. This player is normally a very strong attacker who will get attacked by other alliances or players because of his strength. As a PD you will produce defense exclusively for him and you will add him as sitter so that he can send troops to himself from your account when ether he wants to defend from attacks. Becoming a PD is ideal for a less active player who may become a farm otherwise, as the player you are protecting will in turn protect you with his status and will also often check your account for you to help you out a bit or some rare cases can even buy you some gold to help you defend him. Often you are also invited to his alliance, which is another large positive of becoming a PD.

However becoming a PD is also sometimes risky as at the start of the game dishonorable players often get onto your account, suicide your troops and then farm you, which will end your server right at the start. To prevent this, you can ask also to be placed as sitter, or take off the "send raid" option on the sitter menu. Also when being a PD, often players find it can become very boring, especially in the period after the start and before artefacts as little is happening and you are there to only protect one player (although he may also ask you to send troops to alliance friends), so action is sometimes limited. However if you find a good player with a good personality to protect, becoming a PD can be a very rewarding experience.

Alliance Defender

Become an alliance defender requires more time and commitment as you have no strong player to help sit your account and if you cannot check every day and stay green, you will find yourself kicked from your alliance very quickly. An alliance defender also has to fight his own at the start of the game as it is unlikely you will be recruited into a top alliance straight away, as due to a lack of raiding normally shown by defenders, population and stats will not be very high. This means that you will probably be attacked and players will try to farm you, however with a good amount of defense attacks will soon stop and an alliance will recruit you once things have settled down a bit and more alliance spaces become available.

Being an alliance defender can be more fun than a PD because you are there to defend the entire alliance, resulting in you being involved in defending a lot of attacks and you will get to see some very nice reports as the fruit of your work :) Becoming an alliance defender also means that you have the option of making a hammer (attacking troops) as no one will stop you :D Having a hammer is always extremely fun when attacking other players and this is not an option PDs often get as they need to produce 24/7 troops for their protector, rather than build a hammer and have a bit of fun for themselves as well. However, your hammer will be very small and will often annoy attacking players as it won't really make a dent on a decent defense and many defenders get carried away with their hammer and stop making defense, leaving them useless in both attack and defense.

1.Start

As defenders are normally people with less time and/or less experience, this can result in having less troops and population at the start of the game. Because of this players often find themselves attacked and can turn into farms. To prevent this there is a simple answer and it is to build troops ;) If you have troops and keep building them, no player will farm you because of the losses and Gauls can build trappers which is enough to put off any attacker and make them rage at their PC at how the trapper is too over-powered :D When chosing what village to settle, inexperienced defenders should probably stick to their spawn village and settle round that, if you have some ambition then go for a 9c (field with 9 croplands), which balances crop and resources perfectly, but make sure the village is not too far away, as that can damage growth massively! 15c (field with 15 croplands) should only be taken by experienced defenders who know what they are doing, or use Gold as due to low resource production of the 15c players with less time or money will not be able to keep up.

2. Troops

Obviously the most important thing with defense is there must be a lot of it! As a defender you need to make sure you are producing defense troops 24/7 and every second of the day. All defenders should be making defense troops in every village around the clock to maximize the defense produced. I would suggest having at least 2,000 defense troops in all villages and as many as possible in your capital (abbreviation: cap). The alliance will always need as much as possible!

This does not only apply to defenders!!! Attacking players too should have defense. I suggest that very attacker dedicates 2-3 villages to defense troops and sends it to his cap so he can store many defense troops that way. Even though I am a very strong attacking player, I normally produce about 15,000 spears and 5000 paladins to help me when I am under attack. If every attacking player in an alliance also made some defense then the amount of hammers being killed by your walls would be much higher.

Upgrading the barracks is again extremely vital as at level 20 building 1 phalanx takes 140 seconds, so in a day you can make 617 of them and if you have 10 villages and make them all week long 24/7 you can create a huge 43,000 troops per week.

2. Villages

Making as many villages as possible is VERY important, even at the end stage in the game. A village with all lv.10 resource tiles will support 2,500 defense troops in it and if you settle a 15c, it can store over 7,500, so settling 9c and 15c are very important to create large reserves of defense even if they produce troops slowly. Not only do villages store and create defense they also produce 8,000 resources an hour (with an oasis or 2 :)), will produce 192,000 resources a day and an incredible 1,344,000 a week. If you now have 10 of these villages then you are looking 13 million resources a week from feeders villages alone :D Villages are important!!!

3. What troops to build?

Each tribe has their own strong point and should be building the strongest unit per crop.

Infantry =
Cavalry =

INFANTRY	CAVALRY
Praetorian 81.1	Spearman 75.4
Druidrider 72.5	Haeduan 69.6
Paladin 63.9	Legionnaire 63.9
Phalanx 52.4	Phalanx 63.9

ROMANS

From this we can see that for each piece of crop consumed the praetorian is the best defender against infantry, so all Romans should be making as much  as possible. We can also see that legionnaires are also very good against the horse units/cavalry, so Romans should also be making some . Preferably we would want 3 for every . Also Romans should NOT be making any cavalry if they are defensive, as they eat WAY too much crop and are not good defenders

GAULS

Gauls are good all round defenders. Phalanx are 4th on both lists, so Gauls should be making LOTS of . Also, druidriders are very good against infantry and also very fast, so are extremely good in defense calls :) All gauls should be making around 4 for every .

TEUTONS

Teuton defenders are much rarer, but very important, so attacking players will most likely be producing these troops. Spearmen are the best defense against cavalry, so all teuton defenders should making them. Paladins are good against infantry, but teutons should be focused on spearmen only really and have few .

4. Upgrading Troops

It is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT that ALL your defensive troops are upgraded to lv.20 in the smithy. If you upgrade your troops there they will get far more defense points.

If we use the praetorian for example.

At lv.0 the praetorian has 65.0 defense points. If we upgrade him to lv.20 he will have 81.1 defense points.

If we take this to a much larger scale we can see that if you have 10,000 lv.0 we will have 650,000 defense points. But if we have 10,000 lv.20 [tid2] we will have 811,000 defense points. SO having lv.20 means that we can have 150,000 defense points MORE from the same number of troops.

*Hero

Upgrades in the smithy are not the only things which increase your troops defensive bonus! Using your hero can increase the defense points of your troops hugely. Your hero can do this in 2 ways by holding the weapon of the troops, or by adding points onto the defensive bonus trait (adding hero strength also helps when defending). The defense bonus allows you to increase your defenseive troops powers by up to 20% so if you have 10,000 defense points, you will now have 12,000 by adding your hero to the party :)

By holding the weapon of the troops he also increases their attack power. The spear of the phalanx increases all phalanx defense points by +3, so 10,000 phalanx at lv.0 will have 400,000 defense points (against infantry) and with the spear of the phalanx they will have 430,000, which can make a huge difference when defending, so make sure to equip your hero and send him too!

5. Gettertools

Once you have joined an alliance you will most likely be asked to join gettertools. From here the alliance leaders will be able to know who has how many troops and how much we can expect to arrive. This helps defense organisation hugely and is very important for all defenders to be on it and updating it! This is not only very important in defending, but attacking also ;)

Gettertools is 100% free it is also incredibly easy to use and set up. It should take less than 5 minutes to set up, it is available in many languages and once you have made an account and joined, updating troops can be done in a matter of seconds really! :)

6. Sending defense

Seems a bit obvious to point out, but probably the most important thing is that people actually send their defense to other people. It is amazing how many players just sit on their own defense all server and wait for an attack that will never come.

In a good "Call For Defense" (CFD) mass message message (MM) the leader should tell you how much to be sending, but over all throughout the server you should be sending every piece of defense you have to other players except for a small reserve of defense used for emergencies or yourself. As a defender you are very unlikely to get hit and if you do have incoming attacks, you can just pull some defense back and minimize losses.

In a good alliance your wings should be organised according to location and that means you are all very close to each other. You should not be sending defense to players 20h+ as that means your defense will be on a 40h journey or more when you could save it and help others, to prevent huge travel times you should build a tournament square. A tournament square is not exclusively an attacking building and in fact is very valuable to defenders! It can increase troop speed up to 300% of the original meaning that your troops will now be about 3x faster than they originally were. This means a 24h journey will now only be 8h :) The tournament square does become extremely expensive in higher levels, which some defensive players will not be able to manage, but building it is a must for defenders, especially ones who have chosen a far out location.

*Advanced Troop Sending

Sometimes when an alliance call is made you will be defending a wave of attacks, which land very close together. These waves will normally consist of only catapults, or sometimes include a sweeper as well. To defend these you can either kill the whole hammer (preferred :D), but if not you need to kill as many waves of catas as possible to minimize damage on the village. This technique is called inserting.

If waves are landing at 12:03:35, 12:03:36,12:03:36, 12:03:36 then you will need to time your defense to land exactly at 12:03:35 as it will land after the main attack and therefore the 3 following same second waves will die. Defenders who do this are very highly valued and very popular, however sometimes can require being up at 4am to send the attack, so it is not always an option.

7. CROP

Crop is the most vital part of keeping any large defense! Troops do not feed themselves and we can not expect the player under to attack to feed his hammer/own defense troops AND the whole alliance troops by himself! Troops do eat a lot, especially cavalry, and without the crop to feed them, they will starve very fast. This is normally what defenders struggle the most with for some reason, but without a large and regular supply of crop to a standing defense, you can not expect to wall any decent sized hammer and your troops will starve. You need to be sending enough crop per hour to cover ALL your defensive troops there.

8. The WW

The WW is the most important part of the game and to win all the strongest players and leaders rely on you, the defenders. Once the WW has been taken, all efforts should be pushed towards that (using your small reserve I mention earlier for any CFD) However, the WW will be running at ridiculous minus crop (can get to sums of minus 5-6 million per hour) and if you can't feed troops there, then they will starve. As we saw the introduction of the half troops consumption at the WW, many players saw this as an excuse to not feed their defense, but every defender needs to supply crop there. Having troops in the WW is again no excuse to not send crop or reply to a CFD. Troops should always be made 24/7, so there should always be at least a few troops at home in the reserve and your WW holder will have an NPC village where you can send excess resources if you have run out of crop to send there.

9. Being Attacked

1. Report the attacks

Really it seems too obvious to point out, but every server there is always someone who forgets to report an incoming attack and then has a go at his leaders. The attacks also need to be reported as soon as possible, as this means that the alliance will have more time to organise and distance defenders can also help you. Please do not wait, or feel embarrassed to ask alliance for help. That is what they are there for. To help each other. An attack cannot be stopped if reported late or not at all!

2.Defensive Buildings and Wall

After asking the alliance for troops you should obviously gather your troops up at home and have your village prepared for the attack. The building needed in a village to prepare for the attack are the stonemason's lodge, trapper, residence/palace, town hall, cranny and the wall.

Wall

Lets start with the most obvious building :) The wall can be built by every tribe and provides a HUGE defensive bonus to all defending troops, so the wall lv.20 when defending is a absolute must. The attacker will try and destroy your wall with rams, but if he does not succeed teuton, gaul and roman walls provide 49%, 64% and 81% respectively. So having a roman wall nearly doubles the defensive powers of your troops at home.

However, the strength of the wall also varies with tribe in a ratio of 5:2:1 with teuts having the strongest wall and romans the weakest. So walls for WWs where heavy rams are expected, it is actually the teuton wall which is the best.

Residence and Town Hall

Both these buildings are here to prevent against chiefing (although the residence does give +800 defense points at lv.20 :)). As long as the residence/palace stands in the village, attackers will be unable to chief you and you are safe from your village being taken away from you.
Town halls should be built as well to prevent from chiefing as not only does the great celebration give nice CP, it also increases your chiefs persuasive powers and lowers the enemies chiefs one. So normally it could take about 5 chiefs to take a village, but with a great celebration it can take 7-8 which means you have far more time to defend and build your residence again :)

Trapper

Without a doubt the most annoying building at the start of the game. The trapper can trap attackers troops and when upgraded can actually hold a large capacity of troops enough to damage any decent attack really until slightly before artis. The trapper provides invaluable protection at the start of the game and should be built by all gauls, however as troop numbers rise its powers become limited as the game goes on and become redundant at end game.

Cranny

Not really a defensive building, however it protects some of your resources and these can be extremely valuable by giving you a chance to build your wall up a bit or rebuild the residence before the next attack. Especially at the start of the game when you can get attacked at night or are being farmed, it ensures that you will always have some emergency resources to help defend yourself with.

3. Feeding

As your alliances troops arrive you will be expected to oversee crop and make sure they do not starve. As I mentioned before, often defenders struggle at sending crop, so often it is down to you to feed a majority of the defense. This will be extremely taxing and can be managed fairly easily through NPC, but for non-gold users and for those who have no dual and are not online at night, it is unrealistic to keep a large defense for more than a few hours, which can make defending very hard against larger attacks.

Thanks,
Ben