How to farm
Table of Contents
1) Intro
2) Organization
3) Know your targets
4) Raiding
5) Bonus Villages
6) Quantity vs. Quality
7) Activity
8) Choice of units
9) Protecting your farms
10) Quickbar and Bookmarks
11) When to stop
12) Distance
13) Opponents defeated
14) Catapults
15) Some basic start up info for farming and a couple efficiency issues
16) World data
17) Rap up
1) Intro
This guide seeks to be appropriate for all audiences. That said it is implied that you know very basic game terminology and game mechanics. I mean by this, you know how to attack and support, you know what the different buildings you can have are…not too much.
Before getting into the details, first I'd like to explain what farming is and why you should do it, even if it seems obvious to most people. Farming is when you attack with your troops with the specific purpose of obtaining resources. The reason you should do it, simply enough, is that if you do it, even poorly it will pay off with high certainty. The better you farm the faster you can grow at the beginning stages of the game, and even later farming still has benefits.
2) Organization
Immediately some people will think something like, “Awww, organization that sounds like work and this is a game!” Well yeah it is work, but in this game like many other things you will do in life organization can pay off with big dividends for you time-wise in the long run. This isn’t all there is to organization related to farming, I plan to revisit it later this topic later, but it’s good to keep in mind when reading the sections after. I’ve split it into non-premium and premium methods, but premium users can use all the non-premium techniques, however they aren’t as good.
Non-premium Techniques
If you’re a non-premium user you can take advantage of bb codes and mail yourself a list of your farms where each farm is a link to that village, then just open as many links as you want at once and send. Alternatively you can just keep links in a txt document and type in the coordinates into the rally point each time. The advantages to the separate document is that it doesn’t get displaced depending on mail other people send, it is much more convenient to update, and you can leave a tick to keep track of where you are on your farm list. Disadvantages are you need a separate document and it can be a burden moving around if you play from several locations
Premium Techniques
This is where premium really shines; its truest advantage comes in the organizational power it gives to the user. Rather than a separate document, you have a convenient notebook built into you world account, easy to access and is bb-code compatible. Forget the annoyances with mailing yourself a list you can just insert right into there and you can keep track with a tick mark. However, it gets significantly better. You can archive a report (simply move it to any other category then “new reports” and it will last until you manually delete it. This means you can just copy that “attack again with same troops” link into your notebook right next to the village coordinates and resending scouts or the same troops for hauls becomes simple. You also have the option of the dynamic quickbar for organization, but I’ll cover that later.
3) Knowing your targets
I’ve found that any farm can be grouped into one of five categories. To be explicit I will go over each one, how they differ from the others and how to spot them.
a) The powerless
By powerless I mean as powerless as possible, so much so they cannot generate their own troops. This is the case in two conditions. First and most obvious is when villages are abandoned and the second is villages that have not yet gained 20 points. No matter when you start your hq is level 1. In order to make troops you need at the very least either a statue or a barracks. A statue is 24 points and to make barracks you need hq 3 which comes out to 20 points, thus a village must gain 20 points to make its own troops. Now these villages might be spiked (discussed later) but this does not occur often, especially the further you are from the core (starting area of a world).
b) The extremely weak
The next group of farms comes from players that are barely active and grow far slower then you. These are easy to pick out, because they have so few points. If you have scouts, any village that has not gained 134 points yet will not have scouts and so sending 1 scout to all these villages can show you people without troops that you can add to your farming roster. Note that 134 points is the minimum for the core of the world, to be more accurate a village that has not yet gained 106 points cannot have scouts. Players with fewer than 200 points with scouts are very rare and so as a rule of thumb I assume anyone below this point level has no scouts. These are the ideal farms because most people will avoid these slow growers due to fear of their tribes or hitting any form of active player, or simply fear of retaliation.
c) Fairly weak
Fairly weak players refers to clearly active players that although grow steadily grow at what feels to be a very slow pace. They differ from the extremely weak in that they won’t be nearly as apathetic to getting attacked. Also, unlike the extremely weak these players can make farming them non-worthwhile. As far as defense is concerned you can obliterate theirs with ease, but random troops a wall and morale can make these a pain. So with the fairly weak you need to remember that farming is about financial gain and just because a player is weak doesn’t mean it’s worth farming them.
d) Inactive
At first glance this seems like “the powerless” but there is a key difference. That is inactive villages can have troops, and if they have yet to be raided often enough they will if they are beyond a couple hundred points. It is not that they can’t generate troops, but that the players aren’t around to do it. Inactive players can also suddenly reappear and cause trouble immediately, that’s not a possibility for “the powerless”.
e) Big farms :O
These farms are the most risky targets but in exchange can have the highest payoffs. You’ll need to clear troops to get at the resources and ideally you scout and clear them while they are inactive, look at the section on “Active times” to get ideas on how to do that. Make sure though to keep some choice villages as future noble targets if possible.
Now tribalwars is a multiplayer game, so you most likely won’t be the only one farming so of course there is the issue of shared farms. The initial thought might be that they form a category of their own, but they really don’t warrant it. You’re going for gain when farming, and you are competing with your neighbors after all, therefore you don’t normally care that someone else got there first. Some players will make threats to scare people from farming certain villages, but they have no way to enforce them, so you can just ignore them.
4) Raiding
This builds on the advantages to categorizing farms, and the ordering of categories is the same as in the “Knowing your target” section. I’ve chosen to describe raiding in a cautious manner, because I find that to be the ideal situation.
a) If your village is in category a, this is straightforward, simply attack it with enough troops to empty. In other words you can find the amount of resources they make per an hour by scouting them and then can come up with the number of needed troops to clear it every X hours. Ideally you make X around 2-3 hours so that other people get about 2-3 hours of resources tops for their efforts. Most people can’t be around 24/7 so logically you can either come up with another number for longer breaks or simply scout if it has been awhile.
b) If your village is in category b, then you can do effectively the same thing you did for category A. The key difference though is to be aware of sudden point increases thus making it more worthwhile to scout first each time for these to make sure they are safe.
c) If your village is in category c, definitely scout every time, if there are troops just make sure to send appropriately to remove them. If the wall keeps going up and the hiding place goes up, make sure that it is worth continuing to deal with them, it’s not a horrible issue if this type of village remains in you vicinity for a long time, they aren’t going to threaten you offensively, so you can ignore them.
d) If your village is in category d, if the account has been inactive for a couple days, scout them. If the warehouse has so many resources and the player so few troops, that you can clear it with very few losses (will revisit this in the troop conservation section) and immediate resource gains then consider it. If you don’t like the losses scout it regularly if someone else clears it or the resources become worth it then go ahead and start farming it. Scouting these villages before raids after clearing isn’t that necessary just send the appropriate amount to clear. Foolishly enough most returning players will mail the people farming them to stop now that they are back, which will tell you that you ought to start scouting them for a bit before raids.
e) If your village is in category e, then always scout at the start of the day, with these villages it quickly becomes the case that it is no longer worth farming them or alternatively takes some time to make them a reliable farm. There are several methods of discouraging continued play and I will address them later. It is vital that initial gains be good when you want to farm a big village.
After a certain point if you are farming well it’s going to start driving you mad. After all, farming in an optimal manner is incredibly boring for the majority of players, at least the ones I have met. When you no longer have the will to bother with scouting, it is time to switch to the regular method described for inactive targets. Just check to see when a report is yellow or red and adjust appropriately.
5) Bonus villages
Well they’re in most worlds now, so I feel the need to mention them. There are two plausible options for adjusting to these:
a) Scout everyday or more if you are really cautious, take down the wall when it goes up and send the needed troops to take the resources there.
b) If you just want to send troops on a regular basis, then whenever you see a yellow report just send rams needed to take down a level 3 wall with some axes accompanying them. It shouldn’t affect the overall power of your army much, so it isn’t really that big of deal to send out those troops. Additionally, at least once a week you’ll want to recalculate the troops need to empty regularly since resource buildings will go up
6) Quantity vs. Quality
This section is concerned with the issue of which is more important; the quantity (how many) of your farms or the quality (how fast you gain from one), obviously quantity of quality would be great. However, often enough when your farm is of higher quality it takes more attention and effort to keep it flowing, in exchange if you had 4 other no-problem farms where you just sent troops without thinking each time, you will come to prefer those other 4 for sure. So in general to start go for the easy farms nearest to you, then expand outwards, forget your 13*13 keep scouting further away for easy farm because they don’t resist the negative aspects to long distance farming are minimized. Controlling a farm that is a few hours away by rams/cats means you will normally send way more troops then needed to clear and your other farms will build up more and more resources, which other people could snatch! Therefore, make sure to prioritize quantity over quality.
7) Activity
The amount of accounts watched 24/7 are few in respect to the other accounts, so I feel the need to stress how activity should effect farming habits. Pick your next targets based on the approximate length of time you will be gone. You do not want to come back and see you’ve lost the majority of your raiders because you simply can’t watch the account all the time. Organizing targets by distance can be helpful when doing this. For example, if you are going to sleep and won’t be seeing your account again for 8 hours, pick targets that are roughly four hours away. Even if someone does hit you, they will only gain resources you make naturally and you’ll find when farming starts to really take off those resources are less and less significant.
8) Choice of units
To this point I believe this guide has implied that good farming means focusing on mainly offensive units. For the sake of being explicit I will explain the two main reasons for that. First of all, the most efficient haulers are lc. Yet they take roughly 1.5 times as many trips as spears to make up for their cost, however, they move more than 1.5 times as fast as spears. Second of all, the more offensive units you have the fewer losses you suffer when clearing villages therefore when expanding the amount of farms you’ll want more and more offensive units. However, this does not mean all offense is necessary for good farming.
The issue with defense is that if you have X hours to build a defense and another player has X hours to build an offense and your villages are exactly the same you will lose when the other player attacks. Now this can be made up for by stacking and other strategies which deserve their own guide, so I won’t go into specifics with that. However, what you need to realize is that defense early on is mostly good for stopping small random attacks and helping desperate allies. Not just that, but swords are slow raiders that can’t carry much and spears die too easily. So, if you have defense just be careful about how you make them raid. Certainly when you have multiple villages you should have some farming from your defensive villages, which I find the most appealing reason to get HC early on.
This whole section is brief because it should really go in an all-offense start guide; suffice it to say it is on my to-do list.
9) Protecting your farms
Now of course you realize, especially since raiding the farms of other players was mentioned, that people can and will attack your farms. Therefore there is an incentive to find ways to minimize other people attacking your farms. I’ll discuss the three main ways of doing this.
a) the active option
This is as straightforward and simple as it sounds. Just think about it, when you keep getting horrible hauls from a village, especially one that isn’t close to you, haven’t you just thought “bah not worth it”? I certainly have, not that it makes me stop, but it has made me consider it. So of course the more often you haul the less other people will want to, and that is in my opinion not just the most straightforward solution, but the most successful one too.
b) spiking
Another option is to "spike" your farms, which means support villages with your troops. There are multiple spiking methods, however note that w19 does not allow spiking, because you can only support people in your tribe. Now you can spike a tribe mate’s village, but I really hope you weren’t farming someone in your tribe.
i.) Entire defense
This is straight forward and usually fairly stupid. If your entire defense is in a village, and people attack with large armies, well then that defense won’t be there for when your village needs it. Also in the case of farms with low walls or that are abandoned, you give attackers an easy way to remove your defense. The only times this really becomes plausible are around the really small villages that have yet to go abandoned and have at least a couple levels of wall. Even then when you aren’t there or right after something goes splat against your support don’t keep your defense there, you don’t want it hit by a big army, which people may send if their raiding party dies.
ii.) A few troops
This is basically leaving like 30 spears in random smaller farms. People use light cavalry to farm these villages usually, so 30 spears is an annoyance which will easily make them suffer losses that outweigh the amount of resources they will get I am against this spiking because you will lose your troops for sure and simply farming frequently will make their gains little. However, if you want to discourage people from farming then doing this a few times completely at random might make people who travel far distances for random smaller farms look elsewhere.
iii. ) A scout
This is done for farms that could produce troops themselves. Since these people are easily capable of producing troops without gaining points, leaving a few scouts in support can cause a headache for other players, simply withdraw for a while after you get a support hit report, and the other player will waste time either scouting with a larger party or sending way more troops then necessary to the village slowing their growth. Still this is troublesome since you have to keep track of where your scouts are.
c) Getting clever
This is a pretty vague category, the idea is to try to find ways to trick your neighbors into not farming things they otherwise would. I know that explanation doesn’t really help much, so I’ll give three examples. One thing you can do is put the names of farms on your profile, only putting on villages that other people are already raiding, and then add in after a little while "turtle" villages or villages of smaller players you communicate with. In this way, non-cautious people who are using your farms may attack and suffer losses without you losing troops. The second trick is that you can develop a friendly relationship with what would otherwise be an appealing farming target and have the player supply names of people who scouts him or otherwise attack him in order to get a general idea of the aggressive neighbors in your area (Side note, make sure they forward you a report before acting on it). A third possible trick I’ve seen is putting down clearing reports on a profile and then adding underneath that the person was farming their farms. I’m not too fond of that one since a lot of people don’t bother looking at profiles, and if they do you’re giving out information about your troops that you really don’t want other people to know. Keep in mind that other people might try some of these things to stop you from farming too. In general you can ignore them, however if you fall for something similar to the second trick, then I suggest trying to smooth it over with the other player. That is because unless you want a player’s village for nobling or farming, then there is simply nothing to gain from starting a conflict with them.
10) Quickbar and Bookmarks
Earlier I mentioned that, with premium, you could use the notebook to store links to the “attack again with the same troops” link on reports. Then you could just go to the notebook and open the links to do your farming, all you’d have to do is hit the confirm button on all of the links you just opened. The links you keep are either for scouting or raiding. For scouting whenever you get a new report you simply send enough troops to empty the resources there. Scouting tends to be more efficient, but simply raiding takes much less effort, so when you no longer have the patience you can use that method for more and more farms. Now I used the notebook in the section in organization because that’s the best parallel to a txt document. In reality you’ll most likely want to use either the quickbar or your browsers built in bookmark function.
a) Quickbar (premium only)
If you’ve never edited the quickbar before, don’t worry it is self explanatory just by looking at the quickbar section under the settings. You can put the links right into your quickbar then you no longer ever have to bother going to your notebook to farm. However, you ought to edit the link you copied from the reports. What you need to do is look for where the link says “?village=”. Replace everything before that in the link with “{game}” (there won’t be quotes around game in the link and you don’t put quotes with the replacement phrase, they are just there to be explicit about the modification to the link). Now the reason that you want to do that is because then a sitter will be able to use those links. The normal copy of the link requires the player ID to belong to the account owner, so that when a sitter tries that link it sees a conflict between the sitter ID and the account owner’s id and will give you a screen that says “not authorized.” The quickbar is at present the only known way to allow a sitter to use quick farming on an account they sit. This is really the biggest motivator for using the quickbar for farming. Unfortunately there are a couple issues with the quickbar, first every link takes up more space on your screen, which gets annoying, and second it’s a pain to add more links in an organized fashion.
Regardless of whether you choose to use the quickbar for farming, I’d still go to that section remove the links for stables and workshop, then go to the one for barracks, change the name to Recruit, and then change the end of the link after the “=” to train. It’s much more convenient then going to village overview to get to the combined recruitment screen.
b)bookmarks
The reason I bring this up is because the bookmarking capabilities in modern browsers can be used to organize farms in a straightforward manner. All you need to do is find out how to organize bookmarks on your browser. From there you make a tw folder and inside that folder you put bookmarks for different farm categories. For my organization I like to have a folder for each village I own and from there place my different farms labeled with coordinates. This makes updating easy since you can search for a link by coordinates of the village and then take appropriate action from there. Also you can simply open up a new window go to bookmarks and open up all bookmarks in a certain folder for easy farming deployment. There is however one annoying flaw to this method. That is you need to have a copy of your bookmarks folder on each computer you might farm from, and so must your co-player if you have one.
11) When to stop
The short answer is never. As long as there are farms within a few hours to one of your villages, then the extra income can help. It’s really up to the player when to stop farming, if it is too much of a pain to, then don’t do it anymore after all tw is a game and theoretically you are supposed to enjoy your games.
12) Distance
Don't stick to just villages you can see, go hours away from your villages, especially if there is a very high point player in one direction, since there is a good chance they have farms to steal. This goes double for people with ridiculous attacker's ratings around you, more so if they aren't too high on points. The not being high on points indicates that they aren't farming what they could efficiently so you could probably gain a lot of decent farms from scouting villages in their area.
If you can keep all your farms empty, keep making more. 100 farms is what I'd think is a minimum a couple weeks in. There is no such thing as farming too much if you can keep them all empty ;). Just don't take out villages you might want to noble.
13) Opponents defeated
I've noticed since coming back to tw a popular pass time I call suiciding troops. Being at the top of the opponents defeated for attacker is not something to strive for. Don't clear villages if you don't have enough troops to keep hauling from inactive ones less than 1 hour away by lc. It's just plain stupid.
Don't clear villages with large amounts of defense assuming the player will do nothing about it. It's not that difficult to make a village have hiding place higher than warehouse, ruining a farm you lost a lot to clear. If clearing that village means you can't farm the rest of your villages effectively for a day then you are being somewhat inefficient and should generally consider clearing something else if you really want to attack something.
14) Catapults
Although I don't use them too much myself, I thought I'd bring them up. If your farm is resisting you, you can use them to try and convince them to quit. General idea normally is to hit the hq first so they can't demolish, then the farms and barracks to stop troops from coming. Another option with Catapults is to demolish one of their resource mines so that they overflow with the other two making it easier to get a gain from that village. Since I'm somewhat conservative in my aggression, I don't feel the need to bother too much with villages that really want to fight it out. There's always something else to farm. So unless you feel they really are a threat, or really want them to restart cats aren't that useful (with respect to farming needs). With a lvl 1 workshop if you don't bother with cats, you'll be able to produce plenty of rams to take out all the walls you will want to.
15) Some basic start up info for farming and a couple efficiency issues
-World settings changes things. If you are in a paladin world, you'll want to get a paladin if you have an abandoned village within 2 units right after getting 1-1-1 resources. They'll never die unless someone spikes, and can easily make up their cost if you are first to empty a village.
In a world like w19 where you can't support non-tribemates, you'll want way more spears due to less risk to lose them; after all they are the most efficient haulers cost-wise.
In settings without paladins, if you don't have an abandon within 3 units, DON'T MAKE A BARRACKS WITH 1-1-1 resources, it's shooting yourself in the foot. Generally, I wait till 5-3-1 at the very least if closest is about 3 units away.
If you can't keep your barracks/stables and hq queued constantly then don't upgrade them. I use lvl 5 barracks and lvl 3 stables till around 1k points, and yet I find my army to be equivalent to the majority of the players with much higher ones.
Be aware about building order. It you can afford anything at any point then it's a waste to upgrade a smithy level or two and then some resource levels. If you do it the other way around you effectively just gain resources ;). Don't make something you aren't going to use. A wall the first few days of protection is a waste of resources.
16) World data
Three pieces of information allow you to do something helpful.
a) With a new village upgrades are short enough that the point increases from them happen soon after you queue them.
b) Points are updated once an hour every hour.
c) World information at any given hour is available for download
So, download the world data each hour at the start of the world and look at the points of your chosen village and you can gain a highly accurate idea of when that player sleeps/works/learns.
If you collect world data constantly, you can also check villages that you think have lost points or you think have become inactive and make an almost certain conclusion from that data.
If you know nothing at all about scripting don’t let that stop you. You can still download the data regularly, maybe just every 6-8 hours and still be able to see general trends. Sites like twtamer and twstats collect and use this data too. However, they won’t keep accurate old information, where as you can.
I have made multiple short scripts for going through self downloaded world data, and reorganizing it for some convenience to players. I will try to make them user friendly and release them. Until then, this is a simple perl script that will collect village data once an hour, you need your computer to be running for the script to keep working and I advise terminating the script regularly and changing the file, I’ll explain below:
(note anything after a “#” can be ignored, including the “#” these are comments to give a brief explanation, you need know knowledge of Perl to use this script, you just need a Perl interpreter which you can get free if you don’t already have one, google search about that I am in no way qualified to explain it)
Quote:
| #!usr/bin/perl use LWP::Simple; #ignore this while (true) { #ignore this $url = 'http://en26.tribalwars.net/map/village.txt'; #change 26 to the world you want data for open OUTYOU, ">>thefile.txt"; #the >> is needed after that is the name of the file $content = get $url; #ignore this print OUTYOU $content; #ignore this close OUTYOU; #ignore this sleep 3600; #tells it to wait an hour, it is in seconds change to whatever you want if you want }; |
This was just a brief introduction to world data, I eventually plan to write more extensively on this.
17) Rap up
-I do not take credit for all ideas presented here, I simply take credit for the way they are portrayed.
-Although this guide is mostly in a walk-through form, the idea is more to give you tips and should not necessarily be followed completely.
-If this had no new information for you, I apologize
-If you have any questions or want me to elaborate on something post and I'll get to it.
- farming is very dynamic to write a complete guide would be insane :(. If I missed something big tell me so I can add it in.
