Defense guide

Defense guide, aka Kamalot's 11 rule to defend yourself from mass incoming attacks. Follow the rule when you have mass incoming & mass noble trains. Follow these rules, starting with rule #1 to prioritize yourself to decide what to do when you are under attack. The first rule is more important than the 2nd one, and the 2nd more than the 3rd and so on.

Rule #1 - Incoming Ram Speed or Scout Speed

Never let them scout you. Attacks at scout speed, you need to stack with as many scouts as possible while still being able to defend all of the villages.

Attacks at greater than scout speed and less than noble speed, you need to defend with as many scouts as you can afford to let die, and a few swords, 100 or so.

If you do not have many troops "based" in that village (that were built there), or if the village is relatively new, it is okay to let them scout you in this situation. It will be obvious that you will not have many troops from there so letting them scout it will not reveal any "new" information.

All of the other rules are for noble speed attacks only.

Rule #2 - Incoming Nobles: Villages that house 1 or more Nobles

If you have an incoming on a village that houses nobles, you must defend that village at all cost. Especially if you use trains. When you have a large number of villages, 4 nobles will cost you more resources than losing a couple of defensive villages defending it, defending it with 4 defensive villages. Because of this rule, this is why it is ever so more important to house nobles in as few villages as possible, while still maximizing offensive power in your trains. 2-4 nobles is ideal to have been built for each of these types of villages.

Rule #3 - Incoming Nobles: Villages that house Churches

Well, this rule only really applies if there is another village in the church radius that is under attack.

Rule #4 - Incoming Nobles: Try to Snipe

If the incoming noble train is snipe-able, then you must first try this. You can either set up a "support train" from a nearby defensive village and send support at the village, like you would a noble train, only split up your defensive units into 5 or 7 groups. Send them all at ram speed, cancel the ones that miss, then send them all at Heavy Cavalry (HC) speed, then scout speed, then sword, then spear. Note - This is good only if the incoming noble train is from the same village. If it is multiple villages it is likely that it is multiple nukes. Do not trust a sitter with this. If you are unable to be online to perform this action, move on with these rules and do not trust someone to do it as a sitter. You can try, but do not count on it working at all. Plan ahead instead.

Rule #5 - Incoming Nobles: The Pre and Re Noble

If your village has inc nobles and several nukes proceeding it AND that village has only like half a nuke in it or a couple thousand defensive troops, or if those nobles are from different villages then it is likely they are several nukes with the nobles so it will be better to not defend it and you will not be able to snipe. Instead, you should dump the nuke you have on a village before the noble lands, or try to let those defensive troops die somewhere else, or try to snipe anyway with those defensive troops. Once you have done this, then you need to land 3 nobles before the noble train lands, preferably 4 at the right time such that the loyalty is below 20 before the attacking players 4 nobles land. If you do this, you should destroy 4 nobles 1 or more nukes at the cost of half a nuke + 1 noble, or half a defensive village + 1 noble, or whatever you have stationed in that village.

Rule #6 - Incoming Nobles: Already Supported Villages

If the village already has support, it is likely that the player who sent them has already counted on losing these troops. You should defend these villages first. Look around and see if you will be able to stack enough troops to defend these. A good rule of thumb is to defend the villages with at least 4 full defensive villages. If you do not have enough support OR the smithy levels of spear/sword/archer/hc are too low, ie - less than 9 or 10. Then you will need to contact the owner of the support and ask if he can recall the troops(at different speeds for his own benefit) and re-send some more support to another village(which you will determine farther down this list), if it can be done in time. If you can not juggle the support around to a different village then you should either send the support home and try to snipe with whatever defensive troops you have built there and hope for the best or send the troops home and try to snipe and hope for the best.

Rule #7 - Incoming Nobles: Smithy Levels: Spear/Sword/Archer/HC = Max Level, Wall = 20

These villages are the more profitable to support and defend. Ideally it is best if these villages do not have nukes proceeding the noble train. Stack these villages with 4 defensive villages. If you play on a server where there is no tech system, just skip this rule.

Rule #8 - Incoming Nobles: Villages housing full Defensive troops

If you are unable to use these defensive troops to snipe other noble trains that are incoming to them, use it to snipe the noble train coming to this one. If not, then you must try to stack this village. Once again, it is worth 4 full defensive villages. If you are unable, either send this support somewhere where it can die before the noble train lands, or leave it home and hope for the best.

Rule #9 - Incoming Nobles: Villages housing full nukes

Stack these villages if possible. If you are unable to stack this then use this nuke where you can before the noble train lands.

Rule #10 - Incoming Nobles: Villages with incoming nobles that have the nobles land well after other villages that have incoming nobles.

These villages you must defend last. Sometimes you will be able to defend 2 or more villages with the same defensive troops simply by juggling the support arround to different villages.

Rule #11 - Incoming Nobles: Too bad, you lose this one.

Build as many D troops as possible in that village, utilizing the barracks, stables, and workshop and try to snipe or hope for the best. There is nothing else that can be done here.

Source:

Karmalot, 2008. Tribal Wars Forum. [Online] 

Available at: https://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php?threads/guide-from-hq1-500-villages.137637/

[Accessed 04 01 2017].

Back to The Guide

Targeting

Most of the players occupy barbaric or bonus villages. This is the worst way to spend your nobles. If you do so, you just slow down your progress by a new, small village. Basically, you would need to do the whole guide on the new village. Fortunately, Kamalot has an amazing prioritize-scheme. He ordered numbers to the buildings:

This is how you should prioritize your noble targets:
-Average level of resources [(sum of the resource structures' levels)/3]
-Count academy as 30
-Level of smithy*3/2
-(Level of barracks + stable)*3/4;

Whichever is higher out of the four, you should noble that target first. As I have already mentioned in this guide: you should noble these villages at or near the edge of your farming area from your main village.

Your first noble target should be at least 10 tiles away from your main. The farther outside of your farming radius the better. Nobling inside your farming radius does not increase your income. That is why it is important to noble far away from your main so that you can effectively double (or almost double) your farming radius. The same should be for your 3rd and maybe your 4th village.

After that simply just noble the most threatening players within 10-20 tiles of any of your villages. If there are more than 2 villages within 10 times of yours that are a threat, you should be cat(apul)ting down their smithy so you can keep expanding elsewhere, unless they are the best target in the nearest 20.

Continue with that strategy until you have a large area, and simply cat down players within your region that you do not want to be growing or you do not want to noble yet. Only when you control a massive area, something like 20% of the entire that is covered by your villages should you be starting to fill in the gaps.

A good way to decide which direction you want to expand first would be to send out a few scouts. Look for villages that are clearly farmable by your standards, and if the warehouses are full it means you hit the jackpot. The players in that area are not farming, so when you noble in that area you will have free reign of the resources there.

If the village is being farmed, and you are left with no alternative direction to noble then you should figure out which player in that area is doing the most farming and noble him instead (to find the player use: Ranking->In a day->Resources plundered).

You need to decide on the type of every new village. If you need help, click here.

Source:

Karmalot, 2008. Tribal Wars Forum. [Online] 

Available at: https://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php?threads/guide-from-hq1-500-villages.137637/

[Accessed 04 01 2017].

Back to The Guide

Techtree

I find a picture on the Hungarian tribal wars' help-page. I found it quite useful - especially for new players - to see the requirements of all buildings on one picture, so I decided to translate it. Do not mix it up with the Tech system, of what you can read more here.

Premium

As usual, this game provides "extra services" as well, for what you need to pay with premium points. You can activate them for between the range of 3 and 30 days. These services make your game much easier. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the game is growing with the age of the server. Managing your villages becomes more and more time-consuming with time. I am going to detail the three major types of these services, which highly contributes to your success (of course, you can play without it if you expend time on the game.

Standard premium account

This is a basic premium facility, and is created to help improve your game play. Activating the premium account will turn on several number of new features and interface improvements. The most useful ones:

• Increased building queue
• Larger map size (up to 30x30), which is useful if you follow our guide
• More detailed village overview
• You can mark tribes, other players and their villages on the map with unique colour
• A  quick bar, that also allows you to quickly run scripts
• Adds a number of overviews, allowing you to quickly view and manage all your villages
• Easier switch between your villages
• More information shown on the map (troop speed, your last attack's details etc.)
• Allows to mark your incoming attacks
• Coat of Arms (unique profile picture)

Account manager

It is a sort of "secondary premium account", which is really useful to players with hundreds of villages (read more here). It helps you to production in your villages (both construction and recruiting). Unfortunately, the account manager requires a standard premium account to be activated. Take note: it is not available on all servers.

The account manager currently includes these features:

• Village manager: Allows you to enter fixed building levels that your village will automatically queue and upgrade to
• Automatic trade routes between villages, allowing you to keep your resources balanced
• Automatic recruitment of units
• Customized attack notifications

Farm assistant

You can add farm assistant to your standard premium account, but it is not a requirement to activate it. The assistant enables you to manage your plundering and looting of barbarian villages to gather resources. It is also included in the Account manager package, so you do not need to activate both of them. I highly recommend this service to activate if you follow our guide.

The farm assistant includes the following features:

• Quickly send attacks to barbarian villages directly from the map screen
• Allows you to create your own templates to choose which troops to send in your farming raids
• Calculate and send the correct number of troops to haul all of a village's resources, based on the last scout attack for that village

Production boost

I recommend to activate it if you are quite busy and cannot farm that much. It is quite simple: speed your production with 20% if you cannot spend too much time farming or your neighbors overfarm you.

Source:

InnoGames, 2013. TribalWars help. [Online] 

Available at: https://help.tribalwars.net/wiki/Premium

[Accessed 16 01 2017].

Your Empire of Villages - concept

By the end of the previous stage you trained your first nobles. The last stage provide information, which - I hope - will help you to manage the mass of your villages.

Ideally, you want all of your villages to have the same amount of points, which includes defensive villages, offensive villages etc. Having similar building structures will help you achieve this and will also allow you to easily change an offensive village to a defensive one if needed in the future.

Obviously, your various types of villages will require different structure levels to be efficient. So you will have to tweak the structure levels slightly based on what type of village it is. The less points in your villages the better. This is to leave the most farm space possible per village for troops. The more troops you have in your offensive village, the more damage you will deal and the less losses you will take when attacking. People usually say "a few hundreds extra troops do not matter", but when you have hundreds of villages, it does count. Another important factor to remember here is production time. The higher your barracks/stables/workshop in these villages, the faster you can produce full nukes, and the faster you will be able to clear players around you, expanding your map control. So for this purpose, all of the villages discussed here will achieve a total of 9714 points (of course, it is differs from words where churches are available, . 

Your first village should be an offensive village with minimal defensive troops in it. How many really depends on how active you are and what quality of players are around you. Ideally you want no more defense than you build pre-LC`s. Actually you can disarm your spears if you control your 15x15 area.

All of your villages should be offensive until you need to produce defensive units to defend against a neighbor that is producing nobles. If you noble quickly enough and produce enough offensive troops, controlling your area, you will be able to eliminate those players by taking their village before they become a threat to you. This is why you should really only be nobling villages that have academies. Another factor in how many offensive villages you should build prior to building defensive ones is the remaining quality of your first village`s nuke.

These offensive villages should all be outside of your current farming area. This way the units you produce to farm (LC`s and axes) will not be farming the same farms that you are currently farming. A good way to search for a direction to noble is to scout various villages in different directions and see where most often the warehouses are fullest. That is where you should noble because less people are farming there. If you do it well, you will double your farming area as well. Now you can see, the activity is the key point of the game. Now you will able to farm two times more.

You can really get away with making 4 or 5 offensive villages before dedicating a defensive one. But again, this depends on how active you are. You also need to put in calculation you tribe mates' and enemies' location. If you end up nobling a village for some reason inside your farming radius, might as well make that one your first defensive village.

First things first, you will need to choose your target that you want to occupy.

Source:

Karmalot, 2008. Tribal Wars Forum. [Online] 

Available at: https://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php?threads/guide-from-hq1-500-villages.137637/

[Accessed 04 01 2017].

Back to The Guide

Types of villages

This part of the guide is going to help you how to build your offensive, defensive and other, more special types of villages. All of them, regardless to their types, your villages need to have the same points, to confuse your enemies. Each village posted here will have 9714 points. The troop ratio's of the Axes and LC's are based on the available farm space from the other units and the ratio of their build times. As you will see, Kamalot calculated with worlds where archers are available. If you play on a server where they are not recruit-able, just add the Mounted Archers to the Light Cavalries, and add the Archers to Spear fighters and Swordsmen equally. Take note: all the calculations are based on the conjecture: your opponents trained their offensive and defensive units equally (e.g. not just Axemen, or Spear fighters)

First Village - Offensive (Church Worlds)

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,770 | Limit: 1

Troops:

6229 Axemen, 200 Scouts, 2200 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

6229 Axemen, 50 Scouts, 2275 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

5998 Axemen, 200 Scouts, 3195 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

5998 Axemen, 50 Scouts, 3270 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 7)

First Church (Level 1)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 19)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

First Village - Offensive (Non-Church Worlds)

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: 1

Troops:

6217 Axemen, 200 Scouts, 2193 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

6216 Axemen, 50 Scouts, 2193 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

5986 Axemen, 200 Scouts, 3189 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

5986 Axemen, 50 Scouts, 3264 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 1 Paladin, 4 Nobles

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 2)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

General Offensive Village

Points: 9714| Available Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: ~2:3

Troops:

6345 Axemen, 100 Scouts, 2314 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults

6345 Axemen, 25 Scouts, 2351 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults

6114 Axemen, 100 Scouts, 3309 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults

6114 Axemen, 25 Scouts, 3347 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 2)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

General Noble Train Village - Offensive

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: 1 or 2

Troops:

6204 Axemen, 100 Scouts, 2236 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 4 Nobles

6204 Axemen, 25 Scouts, 2274 Light Cavalry, 750 Mounted Archers, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 4 Nobles

5973 Axemen, 100 Scouts, 3232 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 4 Nobles

5973 Axemen, 25 Scouts, 3269 Light Cavalry, 220 Rams, 10 Catapults, 4 Nobles

Building levels:

Village Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 2)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

Defensive Village (Non-Church Worlds)

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,730| Limit: ~1/3

Note: Through Kamalot's own simulations he determined that a 1:2:2 ratio is the best ratio in every situation except vs large cavalry villages, which are rare and expensive for an opponent to build, as such, you too should only build HC's when you are pressed for time when trying to raise your defence troop levels. Barracks units are far superior in terms of farm space and cost, constructing HC's just maximizes your defence per time. But if you are not getting attacked, you do not need to waste your population and resources on them.

Troops:

5700 Spear fighters, 2850 Archers, 25 Scouts, 2000 Heavy Cavalry, 10 Rams, 10 Catapults

4110 Spear fighters, 8220 Swordsmen, 8220 Archers, 25 Scouts, 10 Rams, 10 Catapults

4110 Spear fighters, 8220 Swordsmen, 8220 Archers, 25 Scouts, 10 Rams, 10 Catapults

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 2)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

Defensive Village (Church Worlds)

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 8,762 | Limit: Dependent Upon Village Distribution

Troops:

1716 Spear fighters, 3433 Swordsmen, 3433 Archers, 25 Scouts, 10 Rams, 10 Catapults

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 5)

Church (Level 3)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 19)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Hiding place (Level 8)

Wall (Level 20)

---

Scout Village

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,730| Limit: ~1/20

Note: These villages will house pure scouts, both for scouting your opponents and defending your villages.

Troops:

10315 Scouts, 20 Rams

Building levels:

Village Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 20)

Workshop (Level 2)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Wall (Level 20)

---

Catapult Village - Offensive

Points: 9714 | Available Farm Space: 20,730 | Limit: ~1/100

Note: Eventually these will become redundant as it becomes easier to build nobles. But before that happens, these villages will be very useful in keeping players you do not want to waste nobles on from rebuilding too quickly.

Troops:

2384 Axemen, 25 Scouts, 1298 Light Cavalry 220 Rams, 1500 Catapults

Building levels:

Headquarters (Level 20)

Barracks (Level 25)

Stable (Level 18)

Workshop (Level 13)

Academy (Level 1)

Smithy (Level 20)

Rally point (Level 1)

Statue (Level 1)

Market (Level 20)

Timber camp (Level 30)

Clay pit (Level 30)

Iron mine (Level 30)

Farm (Level 30)

Warehouse (Level 30)

Hiding place (Level 5)

Wall (Level 20)

Source:

Karmalot, 2008. Tribal Wars Forum. [Online] 

Available at: https://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php?threads/guide-from-hq1-500-villages.137637/

[Accessed 04 01 2017].

Back to The Guide

Welcome Paladin!

The aim of this guide is to make your game much easier and entertaining by making you one of the best players in the famous real.time strategy game, in the Tribal Wars. It will provide information how to build your villages and armies, how to rule continents and how to plan your strategy wisely.

The  goal of this  game is to develop your village and expand your Kingdom in a PvP (player versus player) environment. Manage your village by upgrading your buildings and assembling an army for offensive and defensive military maneuvers. Attacking other players and looting their resources will fuel your progress. Although military strength is a vital component, forging political alliances and pacts to fight side by side with other players is also important in TW.

You can play the free online strategy game directly in your browser in a real-time PvP environment. Additionally, the application of the game expands the playing experience of TW to smartphones and tablets.

To join the game, you simply need to register on the website (EN, DE, PL, FR) or with the help of mobile application. Once in the game a tutorial will explain the medieval war game basics, features and mechanics. To be more than an ordinary player, or a "noob", you will need to follow all the guidelines you find on this page.

Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2013, Tribal Wars has reached over 50 million registered users - resulting in a very large, dynamic and active community. I am going to write this guide in English in order to reach a huge crowd, but you can choose from a wide range of servers to play on (such as English, German, Polish and French servers just to mention the biggest ones).

Let's start it!