Guide by zenron the great

Hey everyone, welcome to The Tribal Academy, my comprehensive guide to Tribal Wars. I originally wrote this guide for a world 27 tribe, but ended up posting it here on the forums, because I like being helpful, and I may as well post it in a few different places. Now, I'm not exactly a fountain of knowledge when it comes to this game, but I have been playing this game for a long time now, and I would consider myself to be a reasonably good player. Questions as always are appreciated, and anything constructive that you have to add is welcome. However, if you feel like being insulting, please don't post. I know what you guys are like sometimes.

Activity
"the key thing is activity"

If you have read any guides whatsoever, you will have probably heard this over and over again. The key thing in tribal wars isn't necessary skill, although you need it, the key thing is activity. A low skilled active player can overcome a high skilled inactive player. So before you even look through this guide, make sure you can do this. When you actually get down to a real battle, this is something that shows itself. The more active player can send attacks at obscure times to throw his opponent off, dodge or snipe more attacks than the inactive player etc. For example, I remember in world 3, I was surrounded by a tribe called NG, it was my first world, and I certainly wasn't skilled at this point, so you would like to think I would have lost, but I didn't. I won because I have no life and was far more active then they were.

But it's not only with fighting where activity will help you. Plain ol' growth depends on activity as well. If you can't be bothered to send all your troops out to farm, then you're not going to do very well, or if you can't get on for most of the day, your buildings are going to be left doing nothing, which just stunts your growth.

Build guide
"Deal with the player"

Note: I'm not going to walk you through this step by step, there are some things which you need to find out by yourself. If I give you all the information, then you won't be able to learn properly.

The moment that you step foot in a world, be it your first time or the tenth, you have to start building up your resource places. During beginners protection, there isn't much point to you making too many troops, because you aren't going to use them yet. You need to think about your current situation before you decide on what you build. For example, if you have several barbs in your 7x7, then you may want to start making some spearmen early, but if you have 0, then there is no need for troop that early on. You want to be prepared for when the beginners protection ends, but you shouldn't waste your resources which are pretty vital at this point.

Unless you have a coplayer playing your account with you, you won't be able to keep your warehouse from being filled. We all need sleep, and at least a few of us have a life. So of course, while upgrading your resource mines, you should upgrade your warehouse a little as well. Think about it, when your resource mines get a little higher, it won't take long for your warehouse to be completely filled.

A couple of days before the beginner's protection ends, you will need to go for the the barracks and produce a few spearmen. It will mean you can farm, and it will also protect you from the surrounding people once you are able to be attacked. There isn't a set limit to what troops you should have by the end of the protection, but you have to make sure you have enough troops to be safe, and enough so that you can farm effectively. Be aware that if you attack a village with no wall with 6 or below spearment, then they will all die, and at least 1 will die until you can send 33 at once. Note, that if you accompany some swordsmen with your spear, then they won't die, but you will be hampered by the slow speed of the swordsmen. What I normally aim for is to have a stable before the beginners protection end. Some people even have Light Cavalry before it ends, which are by far the best unit for farming with. The two most efficient farmers are the spearmen and the Light Cavalry.

Okay, so once protection finishes, you can start farming everyone around you for resources, but you can’t just dive in attacking everything, you’ll just lose troops that way. Go to www.tribalwarsmap.com and go to the section that corresponds to your world. Enter the co-ordinates of your village into the top, and then, while looking at the villages and the ones around it, and look at their activity. This map will show you when the person last had a point increase and is useful to show if a person is inactive or not. If a person is inactive, then considering it is only 3 days into the world, it is quite obvious that they won't have troops and have an abundance of resources.

What you have to do at this point is to weed out all the inactive and low pointed players in your 7x7(and eventually your 15x15 and then even further), and these people will be your farms. There isn't any point in farming high point active players because it will just be a waste of your troops and it will stunt your growth. Before you attack any village, consider the risks involved in taking it. What troops would you lose, and how much resources have you just wasted? Then think about the actual village, and how long it would take you to take back those resources from the village which is now cleared. You will eventually get to the point where you have to take these people out, but there is no point in wasting resources and the time it took to build them when it isn't needed. Think of it this way, if you can't farm your 15x15 quite easily, then you shouldn't try it. If you can't farm your 15x15, then you aren't going to gain much from clearing a village. It's just another village added to your list which will only make your farming more difficult.

If you happen to discover any pointwhores who have just built up resource buildings and don't have troops you may think you've found the perfect farm. you have, but not yet. a 2k of each haul will last an hour, a big farm with at least 20/20/20 resources will last a lifetime. So what to do in this situation? Wait 12-24 hours to see if they're clever enough to start building troops, scout them again after this time and if they've started to build troops then by all means farm the crap out of them, but if they don't seem to of noticed your scouting attack then you can leave them for a week or more before farming them, at which point they'll have nice big resource buildings.

With buildings, don't build something unless you actually have to. There is no point building up your hiding place or market if you're not using it. It's just a waste of resources. Yes, it will get up your points, but you really need to think of efficiency. If your queues for your barracks are too long, then increase the level of your barracks. If your headquarters isn't building fast enough, increase that. If your warehouse is being filled too easily, then upgrade that. Don't upgrade something just because it will give you points. You should also realise that some of the most important buildings to increase like the barracks and the headquarters also fortunately give you the biggest increase in points in relation to time. I'm actually going to link another guide to help you with this, because it really is quite good: A Humble Players Guide

As for your farming trips, you should start off by sending 7 Light Cavalry and 1 scout, but once you have enough troops, you should up this to 33 Light Cavalry. 33 is the lowest amount of LC you can use to completely clear a 116 point village, which is the base at which villages start at on most worlds. Of course, if your world is not like that, then you should adapt this number accordingly.

If you find that your farms are being farmed by other people. Check the OD of everyone around you(and write them down), then put a single spear in each of your farms(spear is the cheapest unit), and wait for reports coming saying the spear has been attacked. Then recheck the people around you and see which one’s OD has increased, then deal with the player accordingly.

You should just keep building up your village, farming until you eventually get rams. There is no magic number for taking out a wall with rams, but 219 rams is the lowest number that can take out a level 20 wall(that only happens in some situations), so that is what I use. By this point, you should rule your area with an iron fist, any player who is annoying you now, you should just attack them thoroughly with axemen, light cavalry and rams. I left out catapults out of that equation, because you don’t really need them. I tend to only really start properly attacking something if I’m going to noble it, so why destroy some of its buildings if I want it?

So, once you think your ready, and you have an academy, you need to pick a target for nobling. You need to find a village that is near your first village for starters. You should scout them, and see if the buildings are acceptable levels, and whatever you do, just don’t noble a barbarian. Then you will noble the village, which leads me to my next topic.

War Tactics
"The core for victory"

There are many tactics when it comes to war that you will have to use to get by, I will teach you them right now.

Faking:Faking is the act of sending attacks at the enemy, in the attempt of making them look like real attacks, or to conceal those real attacks. Sending attacks at ram speed for example can disguise a nuke. Normally, I send mass fakes at the enemy. I don't care how experienced you are, when you log in and you have 2000 incomings, your instincts tell you to panic. Even though I know a lot about this game, it would still effect me, but you need to make it convincing! Don't send all your attacks from one village, because that isn't scary at all.

I'm going to use the example of something I do often. I'll send mass attacks from a few different villages to a village, containing a few different nukes. I try to time the nukes together so they land within a second of each other, and then time nobles to land just after. I also send other fakes to different villages, as a diversion tactic. Another method that can be used a diversionary tactic is the fake noble train. You send 4 attacks in quick sucession which may look like a noble train, but really it's just a single ram in each attack, maybe some scouts, so you can take the village out later. You see, the thing about the faking is that it is purely psychological. With enough attacks and feints from you, people make mistakes, they may even feel like quiting.

Noble trains: It takes four nobles normally to conquer a village, so its only normal to think that if you send four at once, then its going to be quicker and easier. To do this, just build four nobles in one village and attack using that. Although, you must send at least two villages worth of offensive units at the enemy, so they hit the enemy just before the train, so they Can't snipe the nobles(see below in this section on sniping). A good player can send a train in less than a second, and I’m going to tell you how.

This is just my method, I'm sure other people have different ways, this is just the way I do it. First, download opera(www.opera.com) . If you open up a few tabs in that, you will notice that you should be able to switch tabs. Go backwards to a another tab is 1, going forward is 2. Then get 4 tabs open. Right click over send troops in the village and click “open in background tab”. Do this until you have 4 attacks(or more depending on what your doing). Then get all the tabs so there up to the confirmation screen(where you press OK). Then go to first tab, press ok, type 2 and press ok again, until you've finished sending your attacks. By this method I can send attacks in 0.125 seconds, so it does work. You don't have to just use this for sending noble trains, you can use it for sending mass fakes too(just do this but on a bigger scale).

Dodging: So, you have an attack incoming and you don't want to lose any troops. Then you can dodge. This is just sending your troops out of the village so the attacks don’t destroy your men, although if the person sends rams or catapults, there will be nothing to defend your village. You can also dodge with your resources by just using the market and licking cancel after the attack has landed. Dodging is good for when you're up against a bigger player. There is no need in wasting troops if you're opponent is bigger than you, because you won't win. Unlike some of the others, this technique can be used at any stag in the game. It can stop you from being cleared at the beginning of the game, and the same for later on.

Timing: This is for when you want to know what is attacking you. As you should already know, all troops take different times to travel, we use this to find out what is attacking. If you go to www.twstats.com and go onto your worlds section and go on “distance calculator”, you will be able to put in the co-ordinates of your village and the village that is attacking you. It will then bring up the amount of time it would take every type of troop to get to your village. So by that you can see what the person is sending you. Also, if you have premium, you can just click on an incoming attack and then click on "Show walking duration" to see what speed it is, or simply use scripts.

Sniping: Sniping has two meanings in tribalwars, I may as well tell you both. The first is taking a village while another person has done all the work. However, it is the second that interests you in this guide. That is sending away your troops when you have a train incoming, and have them come back just after the offensive troops have hit and before the nobles hit, so you kill the noble train. To do this, you just send your troops away about 10 seconds before the attacks land, and then cancel the attack so they arrive after the first few attacks. That's one way of doing it, but it's terribly inefficient, and if you make a mistake, you'll may end up losing the village. I normally snipe using troops from another village. You can use troops of different speeds which will allow you to have more than one chance. This is the reason that I build 1 sword and 1 ram in all my defensive villages, because your attack will only go at the speed of your slowest unit.

Prenobling and Renobling: If you have a train incoming, then prenobling is very useful. What you do is take all the troops out of the village, then send 3 nobles(with other troops as well) at the village. Sounds silly, attacking yourself, but, when the attack lands, the person attacking you will take it, but they lose 3 of the nobles as they retake the village again twice as the other attacks land.

Renobling is just as useful, if you have just lost a village, send one noble accompanied by a lot of troops at the village to retake it again, so you don’t really lose it the village properly.

I’ve probably missed something out of this list, if anyone thinks of anything, please tell me and I will add it.

Troop Builds
"You must not mix offensive and defensive troops"

There are defensive units, then there are offensive units, then there are neutral units.

Offensive units: Axemen, Light cavalry, Rams, catapults, heavy cavalry

Defensive units: Spearmen, swordsmen, heavy cavalry

Neutral units: scouts, noblemen

In your first village, it is rather essential that you mix both offensive and defensive troops together. If you don't, you're either left open to be attacked, or your growth is stunted. Although, you should probably focus a lot more on offense, in particular LC because of their farming capabilities. Most people I know only build a couple hundred spear in their first village and the rest is built solely on offense. However, once you gain more villages, you shouldn't mix these units up. It just doesn't work. The reason for this that you want to make your offense and defense as effective per village as possible. You can't combine the troops from villages, so if you don't build all offensive troops, you won't be able to do anything against someone with any degree of skill. You may have noticed that Heavy Cavalry is in both the offensive and defensive categories, because it can be used as both. However, this isn't as awesome as they seem. They cost a lot of iron, they take a long time to build and if you consider the HC's skills per farm space instead of per unit, then you will realise that it is terribly inefficient.

Scouts should really only be build in defensive villages, but you should make sure that you have a village or a few depending on your size that is dedicated to scouts. It makes scouting things so much easier. As for nobles, you can build them in either types of villages, because they can be used effectively in both types. For example, if you build a noble train in a defensive village, you can put a lot of defense in the 4th attack, and those troops will stay in the village after you conquer it, saving you the trouble of supporting it. In an offensive village, you can put a nuke as the first attack along with a noble, and saves you having to time another villages nuke into your attack. Remember, the less mistakes you can possibly make, the better.

Now, as for the builds, I've made a spreadsheet concerning all the different types of builds that I have seen:

Spoiler:

Ok so, I guess that I have to explain some things about this spreadsheet. First of all, the "offensive power" is based on the tribal wars help page figures for each unit. Let it be known that this number is an arbitrary figure which doesn't mean it will actually be any good. The 4 "def" columns show the population loss of the defense against four different types of defense, which are as follows:

Defense 1: 10500 Spearmen, 10500 Swordsmen
Defense 2: 9000 Spearmen, 2000 Heavy Cavalry
Defense 3: 15000 Spearmen, 6000 Swordsmen
Defense 4: 6000 Spearmen, 15000 Swordsmen

I then took an average of against all four of these defenses and created the column, "overall effectiveness". The build time is quite obvious. It shows the amount of hours it will take to complete this nuke if your queue's are running none stop. Here are some things to note about the offense:

The Axe Singularity nuke may be the strongest, but it also takes one of the longest to build, which makes it pretty much useless in most situations. You can create some if you really want to, but while creating an all axe nuke, you could have created nearly 3 of some of the other types. Now, there are some of the types in that spreadsheet which I put in there just to prove a point. The "Death Via Wall" nuke was placed there to show you how important rams are in your attacks. Even though it had the highest offensive power, they still died quite easily without the rams. You must always include rams in your nuke, at least 219, which is the lowest amount that can take out a lvl 20 wall, if the village has no troops in it. That is why most of the builds in that list contain 219 rams instead of any other figure.

Another I would like to point out are the nukes which contain HC. As far as I know, the HC strat was coined by Openeye, and I don't think it suits certain playing styles, and that is the reason I don't use it. If you are a more defensive player than sure, this strategy would help you a great deal, but anyone who is truly aggressive wouldn't be able to grow as well as they should, considering the ineffectiveness of Openeye's nukes. The HC singularity nuke was placed in there because of world 49. On that world, you may have noticed that you cannot support outside the tribe, which means you cannot send support to land right after your noble train. The players solution to this is to create nobles in their defensive villages, but they still wanted their offense to be as effective as possible in these villages, to help deter against sniping and such. I was just using this to show how it kind of sucked and shouldn't really be used. It also shows how inefficient the Heavy Cavalry is.

The final one I wanted to point out as being special is the "wall buster" nuke. This nuke is good against stacked villages. It won't do as much damage in your first attack, but it will lower the wall more, and increase the damage of your next attack by a lot. So you should probably build these things.

But what else can I recommend? The nuke that I am currently using is the "Axe Deficient" nuke because it has quite a low build time and still has the power to destroy a lot. You should also be aware that I normally put 5 cats with my nukes so I am able to take out my opponents rally point. It probably won't have any lasting value in battle, but it is quite annoying to have to rebuild the same building over and over again.

Now onto the defense. You will notice from the spreadsheet that the 15k sword/6k Spear is the most effective, but again you'll see that it really isn't worth the time it takes to build it. Personally I use the 9k Spear/2k HC build because it is extremely quick to be created, and the HC can be moved quickly and easily between villages, which negates its lack of efficiency.

Village Build
"You don't max out a village"

You don’t just max out a village, it takes away a lot of farm space that could be used on troops. This is the build I use:

Village Headquarters (Level 20) -This doesn't need to be any higher than this, if your going to make it higher while building, to save time, then do so, but demolish it to level 20 afterwards. However, some people I know put this higher in villages that are on the frontlines of war, because it helps them rebuild walls/farms etc quickly.
Barracks (Level 25) -Maxed. Needs to be maxed so you can rebuild troops quickly
Stable (Level 20) -Maxed. Needs to be maxed so you can rebuild troops quickly.
Workshop (Level 5) –Doesn’t need to be any higher than this. Even with this level of workshop, you can create a full set of rams faster than the Light Cavalry or axes.
Academy (Level 2) -Its insufficient to put this beyond level 2.
Smithy (Level 20) –Maxed. Needs to be this level for academy.
Rally point (Level 1) -Maxed. This is pretty obvious
Market (Level 16) – You could debate that this number is too low, but I think that market is just a waste of farm space after this point.
Timber camp (Level 30) –Maxed.
Clay pit (Level 30) -Maxed.
Iron mine (Level 30) -Maxed
Farm (Level 30) –Maxed
Warehouse (Level 30) -Maxed
Hiding place (Level 10) –Maxed. This doesn’t really matter, it only takes up 10 farm space either way. So I’d rather have the hiding place.
Wall (Level 20) –Maxed, you need it!

Credits
Justtoner & Cwolffgurl : For teaching me to play Tribalwars
Krono5 : The farming bits on the "build guide", I based it off his guide, because I thought it was good.
Mattcurr, Servy and Masterfire: Helping after the thread was created.