Travian ()

I should note that at this point in time, the alliance I was had recently dissolved for specific reasons not stated here. Needless to say it is not good, and being without an alliance in Travian basically means you're fodder for others. (And being in an alliance may or may not change that.)

So, I just got attacked by someone at twice my population, so I decided to try out my underdog counterattack strategy to see how it fares. It follows as this: Cranny up and spend, because (nearly) all of your troops are going to die anyway so you might as well minimize losses (potentially to nothing), and then make sure to send your entire army before the attack on you returns to their home.

The advantages are as follows: attacking is MUCH stronger (more on this later), it has the advantage of dividing the force of the enemy versus your entire force, and attacking has the potential to be profitable (or at least mitigate losses) whereas defending is guaranteed to be 100% loss.

The disadvantages are: they're probably not going to be happy at the situation and may be more likely to be aggressive towards you in the future. But then again, they're the aggressors and there's no reason

As an example of how strong attacking v defending is, the force that attacked me was 120 Teutonic Knights (plus a hero, which could be any power), and I had a force of 40 Legionnaires. If I had defended, not counting added defense bonuses, 39 of my force would have died vs. 4 of his. If I attack with the same force, I would have killed 14 of his, and only lost 35 of mine.

So my attack will resolve in 20 min, let's see how it fares.

Follow up:
So he killed all the guys in my attack (meaning his defense is much, much greater than my puny force) and proceeded to destroy my village out of spite. So, this is a failure, unless you consider poking bears to be enjoyable. Luckily, I do, or at least moreso than being oppressed by people bigger than I am for nothing that I've done.

All in all, Travian suffers from the reason why I don't really care for RTS games, in that military might is less about maneuvering and management than it is about sheer volume. Add to that some really weird stratagem (e.g. the best way to defend yourself is to have no army) and trends (e.g. it discourages you from being online with long wait times, but rewards you when you are) and I have yet to find something I really like about Travian.

And this is coming from a person who likes economic growth for the sake of growth (e.g. Civilization) and war games (e.g. A Game of Thrones, Diplomacy). I even play RTSes occasionally, like Warhammer 40k: DoW.

This game really combines everything I hate about PvP, basically making it rewarding to consistently oppress those who are weaker than you (i.e. those with less fortuitous positioning and those who joined at a later date), basically resulting in their stunted growth. In this situation I find it neither fun to be the aggressor nor the oppressed.