So, I shall start my 1st guide ever. So please forgive me for any mistakes. Moreover, some part of this guide is also taken from lust alliance forum last com2. Anyway I shall cover the defence parts in the following section:

• 1. DEFENCE BASICS
• 2. Different ways to defend
• 3. General Advice
• 4.Tips

1. DEFENCE BASICS

Attackers typically want one of four things:

• to steal resources,
• to destroy your troops for hero experience and attack points,
• to chief your village for population growth, or
• to destroy you because you are too close to their villages, a threat to their raiding income, or a threat to their alliance.

A. Getting Farmed

You get attacked regularly for resources? Build a cranny, get a sitter and even make higher levels of Wall. End of advice. The raiders deter off when they see that you are not productive and are causing troops to die.

B: Really getting attacked

Step 1: Seeing the Attack:

• Things to do when you see the attack: Note the exact time you saw the attack for the first time, and the exact time the attack still needs to reach you at that point. Remember the word exact, be it the exact village name, or the exact coordinates, or the exact name of a player or alliance. We are trying to do some math so be exact. That means: Attack seen at 16:03:12 o'clock, attack still needs 02:37:55 hours.
• Things NOT to do when you see the attack: spam the skype chat or the forum or anything else with messages.

Step 2: Information gathering:

Things you NEED to know when you are being attacked:

• Is it a real attack or a raid? Raids don't do damage. Catapults, rams and chiefs don't work in raids. If you see a raid coming, just dodge it. Please do not ever ask for def for a raid. Please take out ALL the troops (except maybe the hero if you want to piss the attacker off and don't mind losing the hero), also take out ALL the resources not protected by your cranny.
• See if the attacks are just fakes. If someone sends an attack with fewer troops than your rally point has levels you will see the KIND (but not the number) of troops coming. If so then worrying about such fakes is not viable.
• Who is the attacker, which alliance is he in, is he a potential threat??? (Attack points are an issue here, size is an issue here, and medals are an issue here. The fact that he has a mean name is NOT an issue here)
• What kind of units are attacking me? Please familiarize yourself with the Advanced Path-Speed-TS Calculator for Travian that can be found in the getter tools (under Travian calculators - Path-Speed-TS). Insert the times you have noted in Step 1 and magically receive a better understanding of the attack. If there is no chance that the attack contains Rams, Catapults or Chiefs, DODGE!!!

If by now you have realized that you are being attacked by catapults, rams or chiefs (possibly even with several waves) it is now time to create a valid defence. There are several ways to do that.

The first way to defend is by sheer mass of defence. Pretty much self-explanatory I hope, see the attack, get def from your other villages, friends, alliance members and hopefully your deity of choice and let the attacker crash against a chinese wall. A couple of things that are very important here though:- Only do it if you are reasonably SURE you can take the attacker. If you KNOW the attacker has 10.000 Clubswingers and you can only get 800 Phalanxes it’s a huge waste of Phalanxes, don't even try in that case.

Build a WALL!!!. Make sure no defender starves. STAY ONLINE when you defend, and make sure there is sufficient crop.

Note: How landing times work:

Basically when there are more than one troops movement (raids, attacks, reins etc.) within same second then there is always a priority for the troops to land, it’s not that the troops land randomly. The basic concept is that the first one to send the attack/raids or reins to the village at that time lands 1st

Example: There are 1 attacks and 2 reins landing at 14:00:00 UTC to an village. Let’s say “Target” is the target village, “Attacker” is the attacker village and “Reins1” and “Reins2” are the reinforcers village

Say: Attacker is 12 hrs far from Target , Reins1 is 13 hrs and Reins2 is 6 hrs far

So to time the attacks/reins to land at 14:00:00 UTC; Attacker sent attack at 02 UTC, Reins1 sends reinforcement at 01 UTC and Reins2 send at 8 UTC :)

This means the time of sending attacks are 1st Reins1 then Attacker and then Reins2 thus at the landing time (14:00:00 UTC) Reins1 land 1st (since they sent the troops first) then the attacker and finally Reins2 (since the troops was sent last).

The second (and best, and cheapest) way is to defend in between the waves: After dodging, it is possible to do what is called sniping or intercepting. This means if multiple attacks are coming, you withdraw some troops that are reinforcing nearby to return immediately after one or multiple attack waves have hit so that you defend against the remaining waves. If the attack waves are within a few seconds of one another, this requires very good timing.

Introduction

From time to time you read these words but why are they so important? What is their purpose in a war game when all that matter is power? How do they can be done effectively? Is there only one way to insert? In this section we answer these questions with reports and reasons behind every action that include inserting.

Inserting in Travian means when you land your troops in an exact order to kill the opponents’ troop off guard. In defence usually an attack consist of some waves, the first wave consist of most of the troops which is called cleaner and the following waves have some escort (usually 200-500) with mostly cata which is called cata waves. Defending the cleaner is hard and it requires a lot of defensive troops, communication and participation from a lot of players but defending the cata waves is easy since they do most of the damage but they are not as powerful as the first wave since there is less troops. So a situation when there is a gap between cleaner and cata waves to the Target villages which gives the opportunity to the defender to land some defensive troops as reinforcement in the village to defend against the cata waves called Inserting opportunity and when you do that you are inserting the waves or sniping them.

Why are they so Important? Like I mentioned you need a lot of factors for a good def wall but an inserts need only one thing: your experience, which is a very affordable target for any player. You need practice and you can insert a 100K hammer with 3K def troops and kill more of his army than he is damaging your village. Any war game need strategy and inserting is one of the best techniques you can acquire when you are in defensive mode. You can insert 30 targets and definitely kill a lot of troops rather than defending a single target and there is always a possibility of fake so logically inserting even when you have troops make sense because the attacker cleaner may pass through your def wall even when you have a good defence.

How do they can be done effectively? Is there only one way to insert?

Intercepting can be done by sending troops from another village or by sending the troops of that village reinforce another village/oasis and then pulling them back just in time to land between the waves, like I said already in the previous posts about landing time you know what to do :)

There are a lot of ways to do an inserting, but first you need to send your defensive troops to land exactly between the waves and it requires a lot of practice so you can familiar with your internet speed and how much it lags. There are also a lot of techniques to do it. Start with the slowest troops like sending defensive troops with one cata, if you made it then good and if you missed the chance then recall and do it with one ram and so on so you get more times and chance to insert a certain attack from a certain village. You can train defence in two or three village so basically you get more travel time and therefore more inserting chance. You even can insert with sending your troops to a raid so they arrive at a gap or sending as reinforcement and withdraw them to land at the gap, these last two is a bit tricky and needs a lot of practice but it can be done. For now stick to the basic and work your way up to the hard one when you got no other option. Inserting with offensive troops also worth considering when you have high level cropland.

Sniping can save millions of res worth of fields, not counting the gold... and can kill precious enemy catas if they are a) sending bad waves, or b) sending 8 waves with no/small second clear.

For example: you have 5 attacks coming in and you know they contain catas. Chances are the first wave also contains a whole bunch of offense to crush any potential def, while the 4 later waves only contain a very small number of troops and catas to deal maximum damage to your buildings. Now if there is even a one second gap somewhere in these 5 waves you can simply time some defence (and hopefully your hero) in there to dodge the cleaner wave and take out a whole bunch of catas at minimal costs to your defensive troops. Yes, you will take some damage to your village from the waves before the gap, but trust me, the attacker will take a whole lot more. That is especially true if the waves contain not only catas but chiefs. If you have ever lost 4 chiefs to a defender who merely had 50 Phalanxes you will curse this day for eternity. Again, with reference to the landing time. If 2 of the waves are landing at 00:00:00 UTC , and 3 waves at 00:00:01 UTC then to successfully intercept and kill waves you should land the defence at 00:00:00 UTC not 00:00:01 UTC (because you would have sent the troops later so if you land them at 00:00:01 UTC they won’t meet the troops.

Counter Attacking 

The third way to defend is by taking the damage, and then catching the attacker’s army at home-COUNTER-ATTACKING.

A useful tactic for defeating the attacker who has good offensive troops but poor defensive troops is to counter-attack. You probably want to scout first as they may have personal defenders who defend their village, but depending on the attack length you may not have time. If you know the troop type, e.g. catapults, and see the attack time shortly around when the attack occurs, you can also look up their hero in the rankings through the statistics to see what their equipment is.

You can then use a Travian distance time calculator to calculate when their attack will hit, such as the following. You will want to know the slowest troop type they are using, what your slowest troops are using, what both sets of coordinates are (you can click the name of the attacking village in your rally point to see its coordinates), what equipment they have which alters travel time (boots of the mercenary or map for example), and what their tournament square level is (assuming distance is over 20 squares). You will have to guess at the tournament square level based on what you know of their travel time.

It is a little known fact that the gold club auto evade does not work if own troops are returning within 10 seconds of an attack. So if you time it so your troops attack 10 seconds or less after their troops have returned their troops will not be able to evade.

Teuton clubswingers are horribly weak to cavalry attack with just 5 cavalry defence, so if your hero has a mount, a hero with 5000 attack can kill 1000 Teuton clubswingers. With clubswingers, the best defence is always a good counter-attack.

By now you should be familiar with the getter tools, especially with the calculators. The interception calc. helps you finding out when exactly the attackers army will be back in his home village, and then you simply time your own offense to attack at exactly that second. The theory behind this being that every offense army is far weaker when defending. Couple of things here:

• EXACT times are very important, since even one level TS can screw the whole thing up for you if you don't pay attention to EXACT times.
• Scouting the attacker helps, if he has 50k defence in the village this course of action might not be a smart one- It's kind of an advanced tactic... Don't screw up!!

General Advice

1. BUILD WALLS, CRANNIES AND TRAPPERS

Build them BEFORE you are actually attacked, they help a lot.

2. EXTEND YOUR GRANARY

If you do need to feed a bunch of defence a higher level granary makes it easier. A lot easier.

3. DO NOT PANIC

Keeping calm helps you analyse and grasp the situation. Also, spreading panic makes you look pathetic and weak.

4. LISTEN TO ADVICE

Yes, your alliance leaders are smarter than you. Yes, there are smarter and more experienced players in the alliance than you. Listen to them when they tell you something. And later on in the game, when they tell you that your village is not a priority because the defence is needed elsewhere to defend a capital, or hammer village, or artifact, DEAL WITH IT. Don't cry about it.

5. TAKE THE DAMAGE

During the course of the server you WILL take damage. I can pretty much promise you that. If you do, don't make a big deal out of it. We will all have to take it. Just move on.

6. PRIORITIZE

If the leadership doesn't do it for you, use some logic and common sense. Make sure you defend the right village. Capitals are more important than other villages, hammer villages are most important of all, you take the cata damage if it means you can save another village from being chiefed. And that does not only mean your own villages. You WILL take the cata damage if you can save someone elses village from being chiefed. Don't be selfish.

4. Tips

1. Protect Settlers: If you have settlers you need to protect, and know a strong Gaul friend who doesn't get attacked much, you could ask them if it's okay, and have the settlers attack one of their villages with traps. The settlers will then be trapped and your friend can release them when you are ready to settle.

2. Hero defence: If an attacker is sending less than 200 troops, it may be useful to defend with your hero even if you don't have other troops to defend with, by changing the profile settings for the hero to defend the village. If they are attacking with more however, this is not advisable as your hero will take hours and thousands of resources to revive, assuming you are not a gold user who buys bucket.