Welcome to our third Travian: Tides of Conquest alliance spotlight! If you are not familiar with the concept, every Friday in August we are interviewing a key member of a well-known alliance that is planning to join one of our upcoming Annual Special‘s gameworlds.
Let me introduce this week’s guest: Pozitiv from the [A.S] team.
Hello and welcome to our third Alliance Spotlight, Pozitiv. First of all, tell us something about yourself and your Travian: Legends career.
I’m known as Pozitiv and I have been part of the [A.S] team for 3 years. I’ve been playing Travian since 2008 and more regularly since 2015. I’m a big fan of special servers with the regions feature. I find those much more dynamic and interesting than Wonder of the World server,s where I tend to get bored mid-server.
In the last Shadow Empires server, some also met me as Nizzy, as I was tasked to play undercover. I mostly play on 1x servers, as it fits well with family and job.
Besides Travian, I’m married with a young daughter and work in Finance managing a 40-people team. As a hobby, I also play golf and tennis on top of playing Playmobil with my daughter!
How many Annual Specials have you played? What was your favorite so far and why?
I’ve played most 1x Annual Specials since 2015 and won all those with the regions feature. I’m convinced that the regions feature brings in much more strategy in the game as you need to use all your villages to gain victory points and ancient powers – not only the capital and a few hammer villages.
My favorite was undoubtedly Shadow Empires. Although the faction feature was quite clumsy, this server was competitive until the last days.
To achieve our objective to end up as 1st alliance of our faction, we had to throw daily operations for 30 days. The team play within the alliance was impressive!
Up to 10 players have been planning the operations to ensure we were attacking every day. Offensive players were able to make themselves available to send their large hammers, and nearly all defensive players had built a small hammer to contribute!
And we reached our objectives a few days before the server ended. This was thrilling!
By reading the Travian: Tides of Conquest feature set, what is the most interesting feature, in your opinion? Why?
The most interesting feature is by far the way victory points (VP) are stored, allowing them to be stolen or destroyed.
This will bring some new strategic options in managing the path to victory as offensive play will now be able to offset much more quickly a VP difference between alliances. Support villages accumulating VP for weeks or months will now become strategic targets to attack and defend.
This is exactly the type of feature that improves gameplay. Congrats to the Game Design team.
How does your alliance normally recruit for an occasion such as the Annual Special? Do you have any special tools you use?
This year we’re building a new team, as [A.S] will not play this round.
Recruitment is mainly based on recommendations. To join us, one needs to know someone from our team that is ready to recommend you. One of our leaders has a discussion with each new member to get to know them and get to feel the mindset of the player “behind the account”. We use a short set of questions for this that are both game-related and none-game related. If we can make a vocal chat, we do it. The team is mostly composed of French speakers and French is our first language.
Besides recruitments, we use several customized tools. We have our own defense tool, kindly shared by [A.S], a lot of guides, including starting guides. We also have our own region analysis spreadsheet tool (nerd alert!) to monitor control of regions.
Without revealing your strategy, how do you come up with your “winning strategy”? Guide us through the process.
It’s close to impossible to design a winning strategy from the start. You obviously need to decide what you want to achieve: winning? Having fun? Training for future servers? Then this is a step-by-step process throughout the game.
The first step is to build the team and ensure everyone has a role. Then you decide how you start: will you join the early rushers or relax and wait for regions to unlock? Will you start packed or spread? And then you start to adapt: how many enemies? How strong are they? How close are they? Is there a diplomatic approach to try? Some players to recruit? Which powers do we want to have? Do we have the resources to get them?
Prepare. Think ahead. Plan. Adapt your plans. Analyze your results. Think ahead again. Plan again. Adapt again and so on. The main prerequisite of a good strategy is probably to know what you’re trying to achieve at each step, work on it and assess progress.
It’s also important that all the players are aware of the objective. A good Travian team is not a team of good soldiers. It’s a team of generals each commanding their armies to achieve a common goal.
One last question: what is your biggest wish for this Annual Special? Apart from winning, of course! Anything new you want to try out with your alliance?
I wish to have a competitive server where victory is at risk until the last days! Strong opponents are the key to having a good game. Our alliance will play to win. Can you outplay us?
I’ll make a second wish: that more and more Wonder of the World classic players come and play the Annual Special with the region feature. This is THE gameplay to try!
Thank you for your time Positiv! See you next Friday with another Alliance Spotlight!
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