Alex Rowe

Take your everyday knights & swords RTS and play it through a browser Travian is essentially a Farmville for gamers who enjoy medieval based theme RTS’s. It’s a perfect example of an RTS turned casual. You build your small village from the ground up and turn into an empire, later consisting of many industrial cities, small villages that provide the empire resources, and military camps. Coordinate military attacks with your allies while constantly making and breaking alliances. The goal is for you and your allies to destroy your enemies and rule the world.

All standard RTS mechanics apply. Your empire produces a certain amount of required resources. However at a much slower pace than a normal RTS. Numerous buildings require resources to be built, again like all RTS’s. As you can see to the right, once the required materials are gathered for the structure, there is a required time that the building takes to be constructed. For simple buildings and military units, the time is shorter, but for more complex units, it is much longer.

What makes Travian a casual success It takes less than a minute to get started. The game is entirely browser- based. There’s never a need to install anything. After your first few sit-downs with the game, you’ll only be able to work on your empire once or twice a day due to long time constraints. But throughout the entire day, your empire is constantly at work producing resources. It’s easy to start your village near your friends and the message system is easy to learn, making it simple to coordinate attacks and trade resources with your allies. It has the casual-and-hardcore trait (think Pacman). A casual game should also be able to turn hardcore for gamers wanting to push their talent with the game further. It’s completely free, you can try it and not worry if you’ll enjoy it or not. The common tactic “pay real money for fake money” system is used. Players that feel that the game is important can invest in game money to enhance their empire that’s otherwise not available.