Koram have gone crazy, there now a new item (the Earth Seal) the turn a 15 farm field city in a 18 farm field city.

You’ve read it, 18 farm field ! That mean all the field of your city will be for food.

So what a 18 farm field city look like ?

Let’s do some math here :

level 20 farm = 4500/hr

Let compare the 15f vs a 18f (only 3 farmland more):

Base food output
4500 x 15farms = 67500/hr (excluding bonus)
4500 x 18farms = 81000/hr (excluding bonus)

Mill Bonus
67500 x 25%mill bonus = 16875 (15f)
81000 x 25%mill bonus = 20250 (18f)

16875 + 67500 = 84375/hr (15flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)
20250 + 81000 = 101250/hr (18flag city total output excluding oasis and politic)

Oasis
with the 3 50% oasis = 150%
67500 x 150% = 101250 (15f)
81000 x 150% = 121500(18f)

101250 + 84375 =  185625 (w/o politic) (15f)
121500 + 101250 = 222750 food/hr (almost 40k more than the 15 flag city field)

Wow 222750 of standard food output…

If we keep the idea of a old post from the art of war, with some gold you can have some thing real nice
(original post here : http://forum.koramgame.com/viewthread.php?tid=6839&extra=)

With emperor’s order (treasure bowl or token of rain), Cao cao, metal alchemy scroll and the level 10 league resource bonus you can boost you food output even more.
– emperor order provide 25% food bonus.
– Cao cao could provide another 30% food bonus because of his max 150 politic (base = 100 + 30 pol bonus generalissimo + 20 pol history of han) 
– Cao cao have a skill that increase food output by 25%
– league level 10 provide 10% bonus food output
– Metal Alchemy scroll give 5%

So  25% + 30% + 25% + 10% + 5% = 95% food bonus
222750 /hr x 95% = 211612.5/hr
222750 + 211612.5= 434362/hr

Note : that I don’t know if heroes can stack skill book with mid skill, if they can Cao Cao could have a farm skill to increase the food output even more.

Almost 450k of food per hours, with that and let say you go in the red by -150k you have a army of 600k soldier

Official news here

Note : you need to have like 10 three star epic hero to win the Earth Seal, so that mean a lot of gold …

Edit : Like Bazzz pointed out the bonus mid skill don’t stack so I modified the gold section.

Edit : Fixed the math wiht Morenzuul comment that the % bonus are always applied to your base output

Today I’ve decided to review a game that I played about a year ago on server 12 and 13 and started a new game on server 51.

Game description

Tribal war is a slow spaced strategy browser game, where you’re the leader of your village and your goal are to grow your village and build troop to attack and take control of other village.

Gameplay

Managing your city

First there is the ?"Sim city" part of this game that is typical to all these game.
You building have a pre-selected place were you can build them and upgrade them.

There no building placement like some other game of the genre have (tko, travain, Lord of ultima)
Another interesting thing is that there only 3 resources instead of 4, food is replaced with a farm which limits the number of troop you can build (like in warcraft or barrack in lord of ultima)

Building your army

All armies are the same for every player, you have the infantry and the mounted troop.
One really nice feature of the game is that depending on your server setting the type of you unit and upgrade you have changed, so be sure to check what your server is about before choosing one.

Unit description

Infantry
Spearman : good vs cavalry, good for harvesting barbarian village, cost more wood, weak attack
Swordman : good vs infantry, slow, small carry load
Axeman : offensive infantry unit, very low on defense
Archer : More balanced vs cavalry and infantry than the sword man and spear man
(available only on some server)
Cavalry Unit
Are more mobile than infantry unit but usually have a high cost vs stats ratio compare to infantry
Scout : Give you intel on your enemies when you attack with them
Light cavalry : offensive cavalry with low defense
Heavy cavalry: mobile defensive cavalry,
Mounter Archer: mobile offence cavalry, strong vs archer (available only on some server)

Paladin

In addition to your main army you can recruit a powerful paladin, the paladin can find item when attacking other village which can increase certain unit attack and defense when fighting the paladin.

Map

The map system is more efficient that some other game, it let you see who near you, and the right map give you a bigger picture of what around you.
By default the villages are colored by your alliance with them (your tribes/allies/enemies)
With the premium account you get a larger map and you can set specific colors to other players and tribes.

Expanding

While in other game you can either grab someone else city or build a new one in TW there only one way to expand,
It’s by grabbing other player or barbarian village with a nobleman.
When attacking with a nobleman, the enemy village slowly lose loyalty (around 20-30%  each attack) and when the loyalty hit 0 the village is your.
The village regains loyalty every hours.

End Game

The server closes to new players when the rim (see rim in the unique section) is filled.
After that any player whipped out is out of the server.
The server end when all other tribe is either removed, merged or whipped out.
The game seen to take awhile before we can see any kind of end game.
I dropped server 12 like 2 year ago and the server is still running.

What make tribal war unique

The RIM

One of the unique feature about TW is that the server start in the middle of the map and
when new players arrive they are placed around that main cluster.
This section around the main cluster is called the rim and
when a player lose all is village he gets a second chance by starting back on the rim which is far from the middle.

Moral

The moral system is a neat protection for new player or player with less point than other
It gets calculated from the points of attacker and defender. A player usually attacks with 100% morale, but if you attack a player that is much smaller than you, you will get a penalty. In an attack with 45% your troops only attack with 45% of they usual attack strength.
If a smaller player attacks a much bigger player, there is no bonus on the attack. The maximum morale is 100%.
It give small player a chance to survive or inflict more damage to biggers players making them think twice before attacking them (or send more nuke :P)

Forum

The main strength of this game compare to other game is it forum.
It’s interface is really smooth, it’s integrated with the game and it’s easy to add in game links like a player, a village coordinate or a tribe.
The tribe forum can be shared with other tribe, which make it easy to communicate with your ally and sisters tribes. A feature that other game don’t have.

The Community

The TW community is huge and there a lot of help site that can help you understand the game when you start.
They’re the tribal war forum where you can see what is going on with your world (http://forum.tribalwars.net/index.php) They’re the TW wiki where you can find a lot of useful information and tactic.
And one of my favorite it the tribal war stats site (http://www.twstats.com/) where you can find all sort of interesting information there. Like the point progression of a certain player, which tribe he was before, an attack planer to plan your attack from different to arrive at a specific time to enemy village. There a map tool to check the size of your new ally or to see which tribes should be scaring you.

That’s it for today
In my next post I’ll talk about what I hate and love about this game.
And some tips and strategy post are coming to.

At some point you will want to maintain a larger army even have a negative output to have a army larger that you can hold.

1- Granary

Granary are essential to keep your extra food, specially when you plunder a lot those extra grain must go somewhere.

2- Satellite city  

Satellite cities are a great way to store you extra troop near you city specially those 9 and 15 food field. Store your troop there while your maxing your granary and get them back with you have to attack or defend your self.

3- County, state capital or Luo Yang

If you have a county, state capital or a member of your league has one, it can be a good place to store your unit and food, since they have a large food output and a lot of food storage space.

Plus your help your league by defending it.

4- Hide troop in other city

At some point in the game, those small city around you won’t be plundered at all, since you know their food output you can put that exact amount of troop in it.

For your information, Starting village usually have : 12 of food /hr (18/hr if you kill there starting hero)

5- Rank

Your rank increase your granary storage capacity, so do a lot of duel and scrimmage to get the items for the court quest.

Other tips for managing food from the koram forum

The Art of war – How to build a large army and support it.

How to build a main city on a 15 food field.

By the way, keep your gift voucher to upgrade high level ressource field (specialy if your shu or wu)

Managing your food supply is probably the most important thing you have to do in most war game.

These apply mostly to Three kingdom online since it’s the game I played the most but can probably be applied to travian to since both games are almost the same.

They two main thing to think about to manage your troop food

1- Maintaining a high food output

2- Storing your surplus & reducing your consumption without reducing your troop.

Today article is about what are the primaries source of food.

1- Farmland

Farmland are the primary source of food in the game so it’s very important to upgrade them.

Later in the game you can try to switch you main to spot that have more farmland that the average six farmland spot.

You can increase your output through oasis too, three +50% oasis double your farmland output (and almost triple it if you have a decent hero with the farm skill.)

More of that in my city placement guide and in one entry from the koram forum on how to build a great city.

2- Plunder

Aggressive player (called wolf) heavily depend on farming other city, this his essential to keep a healthy amount of food in your storage when your cities have a negative output.

At the end of beginner protection, your output is probably somewhere between 400 and 800 per hours, plundering completely a 0 pop population give you 800 of each resources in about 15 minute for a city besides you. That mean plundering a city give you 1 hours ahead of someone who don’t so those who plunder quickly get ahead of those who don’t.

At some point plundering will be your primary source of food (specially if your shu)

3- Trading

Since player usually get more food than the other resource from farming and that unit and building cost more of the other resources than food, food than to sell at 1.5 for 1 on the market. Than mean you can get 15000 food for the price of 10000 of the other resources. (note that note always the case, on server 14 most user I was farming were wei and I tend to get more iron than other resources so sometime I had hard time selling my iron for food, probably because the players on our server were in the same situations.)

When you’re not trading between your cities it can be a good idea to trade on the market your excess resources for food.

4- Heroes

Governor with high politic can increase significantly your resources output. You can add the farm skill to your heroes and increase you food output.

Epic heroes can have special unique skill that give them a better food output, like Pang Tong 25% food bonus, note that these bonus stack.

Finally they are items that can be equipped to your the heroes to increase your food output.

5- Other sources:  Item, tax, quest

There more way to get food most of them are already in my checklist

There are other item that worth mentioning that are not in the checklist :

• The tax license (uptained in the King of the hill event)
  Good old emperor order and dragon bowl (a extra 25%)
• Rotation order (Actually reduce your food consumption and is very expensive)
• Alchemy table (expensive, don’t increase food that much but last forever and you get your gold back)

More in part 2 – Storing your food and way to reduce your consumption

Link on this page :

The three kingdoms online checklist

I wrote awhile ago an article about oasis but I didn’t wrote about how to grab an oasis from another player because I never got the chance to try it.

I seem that it takes awhile before you can grab an oasis from another player not like they say in the forum thread.

When you attack an occupied oasis each time the loyalty of the oasis is reduced by somewhere between 0% and 35 % not 35% like they say in the forum thread.

It seems to depend on how many troops you’re using and if you have a hero or not.

My last wave had two heroes in it and they took the oasis, but I don’t think it’s really matter the just attack constantly and the oasis will be yours, after a while.

Note that the oasis does regain loyalty each hours so be swift with your attack.

Here some link for more info on oasis:

My oasis guide 

The oasis information in the beginner thread

And another thread with more info on the oasis

In my previous post I’ve wrote about how to create a lobbyist train.
But some of my leaguemate seem to have problems with how to build them and how to use them.

First if your completely new to lobbyists you can check koramgame TKO forum thread about them here.
I’ll summarize it for you and add some of my trick in the process.

1- How to build them

That part is easy, you need Mansion or Annexe Level 10, Drill Ground Level 20 and Command Center Level 10 to research a lobbyist. Like the pioneer you con recruit a lobbyist when the Mansion at level 10, 15 and 20, for the annexe it’s on level 10 and 20 only. Once your have all the requirement, you have to research the lobbyist in the drill ground. From my experience, if you decided that your city will recruit lobbyist it better to dedicate your city to lobbyist, so you will have to research it only once to recruit two (or 3 if it’s a mansion) lobbyist.

Note that your first cities should probably be built with pioneer instead of lobbying someone else city. Why ? Because it’s take a boatload of resources to get you city to recruit them and it takes much more time that the simple three pioneer, on top of that it’s easier to create subs that are near your main and you can chose the arrangement of your resource fields if you want to specialized your city.

2- How they work

The lobbyist reduces the loyalty of the attacking city only if it’s not the main and there no annexe in it. They typically reduce the loyalty by 20% (25% for wei), you can increase their effectiveness with a hero that have a scroll of rumors.

Note that you can only lobby a sub city and the annex must be destroyed in order to reduce the loyalty of the city.

3- How attack a city with them

Lobbying a city is three step process, first you need to clear the city from its troops, after you need to destroy the annexe (see using demo with lobbyist) and then you can send your lobbyist. Like explained in my previous article on how to create a lobbyist train it’s better to have more than one to save you from many roundtrip to the city you want to lobby.
Be careful when you attack an active player, he might rebuild troop and hide them just to kill your lobbyist. They can use the curfew command or just rebuild an annexe to prevent the lost of loyalty too.

For more tip on attack tactic here more info from my previous article :
The anatomy of a attack and other offense tactic
Using demo with lobbyist

I started to play Lord of Ultima.

If you want to check how it work here a quick video from playscope that explain the basic pretty well.

My first impression is that the game have a nice finish that other similar game don’t have, and the concept of having to place you build in other to optimize there production is nice.

It’s seem that a lot of player are extremely aggressive when it comes to farming. Sometime they do hit abusively and attack poor souls that are actually playing. While plundering is at the essence of the game they’re usually way to plunder and still not ruin everybody fun.

Here a few tips to plunder like a gentlemen

1. First send a message to the guy you want to plunder just to check if the’re still active
2. if there is no response after 3 day or 1 week you can now plunder him
3. If the user haven’t grow for a while (one week at least) you might start earlier but it’s always better to send a message before
4. if the player come back and send you a mail, stop and even offer him some support.
5. If there have a population lower than 50 the previous point doesn’t apply. Its really easy to have at least 150-200 of population within the end of beginner protection, so if they come complain about your attacks, tell them to go play another server.

Someone have attacked a weaker league member and you want to strike back or someone have taxed your league and you want them to pay.

The first mistake new league leader make is usually to throw the name of the attacker in a league message. What happen its that people usually don’t do anything about it or attack in an unplanned, disorganized way making it easy for the defender to dodge most of the blow.

Planning a attack on one player.

If he’s stronger than most of your player but smaller than your league and he league don’t care about him you can probably taking out in 2 wave.

1-List the cities of the player

Post the list of the player you want to strike on the league forum if you have one or by sending a league message.

Each player pick a city and , if you league is small and many player attack one city a leader for the attack should be name and he will coordinate the attack with other players assign to this city.

It could be a good idea to use the legion system to coordinate an attack, assigning the leader of an attack has a legion leader and put all the members that are helping him in his legion.

2-Pick a time for the clearing wave and the second wave

This we give an idea for the league member to plan how and when they are going to deploy there troop.

Note that players that are to far should focus on sending only troop with high movement rate.

Why ? because if the members are to far, it will give a hint to the player that you are attacking and will give him enough time to message his league mate to send support and maybe to attack the attacker before the actual attack hit, stealing if food which may kill some troop if its food consumption is negative.

3-the actual attack

1st the clearing wave

Like explained in a previous article, separating your strike in wave can help to increase the efficiency of your troop.

This wave consist mostly of inf/cav with some ram and maybe demo

The goal is to take is troop and resources out and do some damage so he wont be able to have support

2nd the demo/loby wave

Still Consist mostly of inf/cav with some ram but with a lot of demo

The goal is to paralyze him by destroying all is granary, warehouse and farmland.

Without any of these his city food will be in the red he will have to destroy his building in order to rebuild farmland. More info on how to use your demolisher here.

If you’re planning to attack him with lobbyist be sure to strike a sub city and that the annexe is destroy. You can always try to steal the city in one sweep with the help of your league mate using this tactic.

Planning an attack on many player

Probably the best way is the list all the player you want to  attack and there city.

Then you proceed like we discuss for attacking one player, Your member could pick many enemies member to strike if he’s really strong or your member may regroup in team to strike a specific player and each sub team take care of an enemy.

From what I saw taking the county is a good tactic because they are easier to pick than normal city since once you kill all the troop you get the city and all troop from your league mate will become support troop.

Another tactic that seems to work well, focus on the strong player of the league, it usually demoralized the other player of the league and they might quit too.

Tell me about your tactic you’ve used to take down other player or league. Did I forgot some other strategy that worked well with your league ?

"In battles, as verbal communication cannot be heard clearly, cymbals and drums are used as commands" As visual communication and eye contact are hampered, banners and flags are used as signals. Now the purpose of using cymbals, drums, flags and banners is to draw attention of the troops and focus them for combat under the direction of the commander. Once the troops are united as one body, the courageous ones will not advance forward by themselves and the cowardly ones will not retreat by themselves. This is the art of directing larges forces in battles. – Chapter Seven, Sun Tzu Art of War

In war good, communication with your troops, allies and even enemies his the key.

In most games MMO browser-based strategy game (like Three kingdom online, tribal war and travian) they have these feature built in.

If your a veteran player you can probably skips that part for other the advantage and disadvantage of each method will be explained.

In game feature

In game message

All these game have in game message, the quickest way to got a player whatever he his online or the next time he login.

It help you to find out if the user is still active, if he doesn’t answer after a few days or week you can presume he’s out.

The main advantage of this is that it’s quick and you’re almost sure the other player will read it next time he play.

The disadvantage is that entrusted player may read your message.

League message

Same thing has above but use by leadership and elite members of a league or tribes to send a message to the mass.

While it’s great to reach all your members, if there a spy in your league he might be able to read it and like normal message entrusted member can read it to.

Chat

Some of these game have in game chat, it’s great to talk directly to your peer, but you must be aware of the issues each room have.

From TKO chat here are the different room and how to use them.

World

Everybody on the server see it, so don’t tell sensitive info or information about what time it is or if it’s day or night, because other player might use this to attack you when your asleep or working.

League

Like the league message all your league member see this, beware of spy.

Private

Standard – One on one chat, note that you might be speaking to an entrust not the real player.

Internal forum

They work differently depending on the game, but like the league message, all league member see it (accept officer sub-forum). That some of them (like tribal war tribe forum) someone with an entrust can see it.

External to the game communication that might be useful.

External forum

The external forum solves most of the issues player with an entrust, only the player who registered can access it.

It can be useful to coordinate with ally too, an ally can have is own section of a forum and each tribes/leagues can share a section forum.

The main disadvantage is that you lose most of the feature of the in game forum, like writing the coordinate wills create a link directly to the in game location, this don’t work with an external forum.

IRC

You can always set up a IRC channel for you league. The advantage is that user can access it even if they’re not logged to the game and you can have control over who can be in the channel with a bot.

IM

Instant massaging can be useful specially the conference or group chat, you can talk to your buddy evens if they are not online (which can be annoying too if they are always poking you when the see you online).

Collaboration systems

like google wave, wiziq

I honestly haven’t planned anything with google wave but I did with wiziq and it really cool, you can have a draw  board and put the map on it and plan the attack and have a visual representation of the situation. It takes some effort to setup though but it might worth it.

Does any of you have use other method of communication to plan an attack or to plot something with your allies ?