Tribal Wars Game Strategy and Tactics Guide

In addition to what I have posted here, I wanted to go into greater detail regarding certain units, builds and strategies. These can be found below.

Scouts

Nobles

Swordsmen

Spearmen

Paladins

There's a lot going on when you first start playing Tribal Wars, and most players quickly get overwhelmed. They get no heads up, or conflicting advice and start trying to do everything at once.

There is a time and place for everything in the game. There are no worthless structures or troops, but you can't build everything at once.

You have to go in stages and be patient.

Tribal Wars is not a game of instant gratification. It takes a looong time to do anything: To build buildings, to build troops, to move troops across the continent. Everything takes time and patience. In the later game you can use this to your advantage, as players will get impatient and do something foolish, and you and your tribe can take advantage of the error.

When you first get started, you want to concentrate on developing your first village with the attitude of impenetrable defense. Anything else will result in you getting wiped out (fringed) and causing you to start over with nothing. Don't worry about attacking units, don't worry about tribes (with some exceptions), don't worry about expanding.

Just concentrate on building your village for the sole purpose of taking an attack.

When you first begin, you need to be able to gather resources to build buildings and troops, and then build the buildings and troops needed to withstand attacks.

When you first start the game, you have 3-7 days to build before other players are allowed to attack you, depending on the world. Assume 3 days.

Without resources, you can't build much, so the first day, you should be building resources. There are three types of resources, Clay, Timber and Iron. At first, Clay and Timber are more important, but build Iron 2-3 levels behind the other two.

The second day, you should build enough to get a barracks so you can build troops, (Swords and Spears) and Wall.

Higher levels of Barracks allow you to build troops faster. Higher levels of Wall make your troops more powerful and defend better. Swords, Spears and Wall are the cornerstone of your defense. Build these relentlessly over the 2nd and 3rd day so that if you become attackable at the end of the third day, you will not be an easy target for hungry conquerors.

Something Else To Consider

You also need to worry about your farms and warehouse, but not too much at this point. Higher level farms allow you to build more buildings and troops, while higher warehouse allows you to store more resources, so you can build bigger buildings.. If your farm capacity is maxed out, you can't build anymore buildings OR troops, so always keep an eye on your farm capacity.

Ok, so you've been building for a few days. You're getting a more steady supply of resources, troops are starting to pile up, and your walls are rising. Good.

At this point, several things will start to happen.

Tribes

Other tribes are going to start noticing you, and want you to join. Tribes are good because you can learn more about the game, have forums to trade thoughts and comments, ask for help from attacks, and generally give you someone other than yourself to rely on. You should always play as if you are the only one who can help you, but having a tribe makes things easier and more fun.

You shouldn't jump at the first opportunity. A powerful tribe may look tempting, but if they are on the other side of the map, they won't be much help. Also, check to see if your tribe has any of your friends in it. If you know others who play (who might have gotten you into the game) or you've made friends since the game started, having them in the tribe is good to help with diplomacy, as well as having a dedicated tribemate who may be more inclined to help you.

One of the most important aspects of choosing a tribe is proximity, how close you are to the rest of your tribmates. Ideally, you should be very close to, even surrounded by, tribemates. This way, if your group starts getting attacked, you won't be the first, but you can also easily aid them because you are close by, and they can easily help you. Help can be supplied either with troops who can guard a village, but not be redirected, or resources which can be spent by the receiving village.

500 Points

Tribal Wars offers a Premium package for a few dollars a month which provides a bunch of cool features that make playing the game easier, including building more than two buildings at a time. This is critical for speedy development. At 500 points, Tribal Wars offers you a free week of Premium play, and when you hit 500 points and activate your free period, you should build like crazy. Try to keep up with troop production (swords and spears) but get 3, 4 or even 5 buildings in the queue if your resources hold out.

Keep building up your resource spots(timber, clay and iron), barracks and walls, start working on your village headquarters, smithy and market. I recommend building as many cheaper buildings as possible, but make them from among the 8 above.

Your headquarters allow you to build buildings faster, your smithy allows you to upgrade troops, and your market allows you trade more resources with other villages. Combined, they allow you to build an Academy, which we will talk about much later.

As your smithy develops, you will be able to upgrade troops. You should upgrade your swords and spears to level 3 as soon as possible. This will make them tougher without raising their individual cost (although you will have to pay for each level of development).

When the trial premium period ends, throw all of your resources back into troop production.

You may get to as much as 1000 points when the period ends. You should have about 1000 of each spears and swords before you concentrate on building past 1000 points.

In general, you should have about 1000 swords and spears each per 1000 points of village up to 5-6k points. It's a lot, but when the attacks start coming, you'll be glad you have them.

As you progress, keep raising the levels of the buildings in the previous section, and keep building troops.

By now, you've probably joined a tribe. See if you can help close by members, and ask for help when you need it.

Things will start to get more expensive, so concentrate a little more on raising the levels of your resources. As the game progresses, you'll need a lot of resources. Continue to build your farms and warehouses to keep up with troop, building and resource production.

Earlier, I mentioned that you can build the headquarters, smithy and market to create an Academy. When those buildings are level 20, 20 and 10 respectively, you can build an academy. Building an academy allows you to create nobles, and nobles are used to take over other villages.

Academies and Nobles

Let's slow down for a moment. Academies are expensive, and you can only raise an academy to level 3. Nobles are VERY expensive, and get more expensive as you build more. Every time a noble attacks and survives, he reduces the defending village's loyalty by 20-30% out of 100%. It usually takes 4-5 nobles to take over a village. This can be 4-5 separate nobles, or 1 noble making 4-5 trips. This process also takes some time, and you need forces that are strong enough to accompany him so he gets through without getting killed off. If a noble dies during an attack, the expense that went into him is lost, including the level of academy you built. When you use a noble, you have to be absolutely sure you can attack without losing.

Stables and Scouts

To help remedy this problem, you'll need to build scouts. Scouts serve several purposes. When sent out to scout a village, they can tell you how many troops that village has, and if you have a level 3 scout (prepared at the smithy), you can even see how much resources the village has, and what level buildings it has, which is important for wall level. Scouts only fight scouts, so if you attack with a bunch of scouts, the defending village can't use its other troops to kill them off, only their own scouts. If you have more than half as many scouts as the defending village, then at least one scout will return to tell you what's in the village.

You can do the same on defense. If you have a bunch of scouts, and you are attacked by scouts, then if you have more than double the attacking scouts, the attacker gets no information about your village. Pretty cool.

Since they are vital for taking over villages and for defense, we'll take the opportunity to build some scouts. You'll need to build a stables, and research scouts. Build as many as you can keeping the 2-1 rule in mind. I like to shoot for 100 scouts for every 1000 points of village. At 1000 points, you should be able to build 100 scouts fairly quickly.

Once you have them, you can start scouting other villages to look for a good first takeover target. Be careful. Most players consider scouting an act of war, and you may get counterattacked. Your best bet is to take over a barbarian village first, just to get started.

There are different strategies for building depending on your play strategy.

In my opinion, it is far easier to defend than to attack. With sufficient build time, you can hold out against superior forces for a long time. Holding out will either force your opponents to band more people together to get you, give you time to counterattack or get others to counterattack for you, or they will give up if they can't get through.

I've found that, with some exceptions, most players and tribes are a little lazy and have poor organization. They may make a lot of noise about coming to get you, but its difficult to coordinate lots of strangers, and most people don't want to attack you first because that player will lose all of their offensive troops. No one wants to do that.

As a defensive player, its important to be untouchable, and yet have some flexibility.

These are my suggested build levels for a defensive player for all villages, including troop development. Note: You don't have to STOP at these levels, but they are good minimums.

Village Headquarters - 20
Barracks - 25
Stable - 20
Workshop - 15
Smithy - 20
Market - 15
Resources - 30
Farm - 30
Warehouse - 24
Hiding Place - 0
Wall - 20

First and foremost, buildings cost Farm to build, and you can only build to so much capacity (like in Warcraft/Starcraft, for example). Troops and buildings take Farm capacity. We'll touch on this more later.

You will want these levels on the barracks, stables and workshop to produce units as quickly as possible, without investing more money than is worth. Notice that the workshop, stables and barracks are maxed out. I'm willing to sacrifice farm for the fastest troop production. You may want more, but slower troops.

Village headquarters and Smithy to 20 is sufficient both for faster development and as a prerequisite to building an Academy. You won't need to go any higher.

Market of 15 is ok because as you go up, you get many more merchants to send resources back and forth. Although its important to be able to move resources back and forth, there's little need to send more than 35,000 resources at a time.

All 3 of your resources lots (timber, clay, iron) should be maxed to 30. This will produce 2400 of each per hour, and this is critical to your production as you continue because you will need ever increasing resources to keep building, build faster and maintain both buildings and troops.

Likewise your farm should be maxed to 30 to allow you to have the most troops possible - more on this later.

Warehouse at 24 allows you to store enough to build any building. Why not higher? Because, you don't need more capacity to build anything, and you won't save up enough to fill a 30 Warehouse unless you go on vacation, and if you do, you'll be nobled when you get back. (Note: Capacity and prices may be different on other worlds, but on the bottom 12 or so this is the rule.

Hiding Place seems like a great idea, but since it doesn't hold that much, even when maxed out, it isn't worth the expense. If your village gets beat such that your opponent can take your resources, having a couple thousand in the hiding place won't save you. He'll just come back and noble you.

Finally, the wall. Max it out to 20 to give your troops the best possible defensive bonus. It's very expensive, but this is a defensive village, so its worth it.

Now, by building to these levels, your village will finish up with around 9,000 points, and cost you about 3000 points of farm. Not bad. The maximum is 12,355 points. Many people like to build this level because its impressive, and it allows more points without having to take over more villages, but there are some problems.

It costs a lot of Farm to build to the max level. This allows you to build less troops, and assuming that the player has some defensive troops, if they send an all out attack to you, and you have your troops optimized, there's no way they can take you over. You'll lose about half of your troops, and the attacker will be left with nothing. Building troops, particularly cavalry, is very expensive. Players will think twice before hitting you again, and threats of coming with buddies are less likely depending on their organization skills, motivation and distance.

The other disadvantage with a full-sized village comes with morale. An attacker's morale is based on their total points against your village's points. The greater the discrepancy, the stronger your defensive troops are. So, if a village with 12,000 points, (or a player with many 12,000 point villages) attacks, your troops will repel more invaders due to higher morale. At very high levels, low morale can gut an attack and leave you with many defenders left over to continue the defense.

So, What Troops Should I Build?

I originally came up with a way to build 10,000 swords, 10,000 spears, 1000 scouts and 20 wall as your defense. Although this is a formidable defense that any scouting force would be foolish to take on and would regret taking on if doing so blindly, it does have its problems.

First, although the troops are cheap, they are built in the same place, the barracks, which means that you have to wait for every other troop to get built. You might have the resources to build 5000 troops, but they will all wait behind the first guy in the queue.

Second, swords and spears are good, but an unbalanced attack (all axes or all cavalry) will bloody them pretty badly. You need a little more variety.

Third, if you did want to go on the offensive, or help a friend/tribemate do so, these troops wouldn't be very helpful except as fodder.

Solution:
3000-6000 Swords
3000-6000 Spears
1000 Scouts
300-600 Light Cavalry
300-600 Heavy Cavalry and/or Mounted Archers (higher worlds)
300 Catapults

This format fills out your 21,000 much better as you can build from 3 buildings instead of 1, have better balance against attacks, and still be able to attack, support and counterattack with a sizable force. You also have a sufficiently massive bulk of spears and cavalry to push back enemies.

Multiply this by multiple villages when you shift troops to single villages being attacked, or gang up on one village with your cavalry and catapults, you become very dangerous and hard to take over, without sacrificing functionality.

A Note About Rams

Since everyone is getting on my case about not using rams, I'll answer it here and now. Note that this section is about defensive villages. Rams aren't going to help you in defensive villages. Why do I promote defensive villages and not talk much if at all about offensive villages?

Most players don't get that far. They build recklessly and get knocked down before they have a chance to really build or expand. This guide is for players who want to get started and have some success. Hunker down, find a good tribe, communicate and cooperate. You want to be number 1 in your world? This guide won't make you happy. Most players who read it won't get that far. They won't have the patience or the good luck and they'll get blown out.

Everything here has allowed me to play for two years without a problem. My tribe knows what I can bring to bear and they call on me for what I have. You want to build to optimum levels, go nuts. The vast majority of players don't have any strategy and disappear after a month. I encourage all of those who know how to play this game better than I do and are #x on their world to write their own guides. I'll be happy to link to you.

That all being said, build 300 rams in reserve for when you go to attack. If you have offensively geared villages, they should come from there. Rams in your defensively themed villages aren't worth squat.

To satisfy the bloodthirsty masses, substitute the word ram anywhere you see the word catapult if you're going on the offensive.

For all the 100 village experts out there, we're also talking about small scale opening game. A village that focuses on offense right out of the gate will be owned by someone else in short order. You can specialize all you want when you have a dozen villages under your belt, but most players don't last that long because they get wiped out before they have enough troops to repel the smallest of assaults.

For those interested in attacking groups, I discuss this more on the Noble Page.

The Rule of 6

Notice that I say 3-6 above. You should strive for at least 3 hundred or thousand of everything except for scouts, and build more if you can before you relax, shooting for 6. Why? Let me show you.

Let's say an attacker maxes out his village at 12355 points and builds nothing but axes. That would be about 20,000. It sounds like a lot, but 6000/6000 Spears/Swords, 600 Light Cav/Heavy Cav/Mounted Archers and 600 Catapults (all at level 3) will repel 20,000 level 3 axes with a level 20 wall. The same is true for 5,000 level 3 light cavalry attacking (the same amount of farm). 6000/6000 spears/swords, 600 LC and 600 cats will do the job. You can build them in one village, or shift from multiple villages until you have the rule of 6 in effect. Note: The standard clearing attack is around 8000 axes, 3000 cavalry and 200-300 rams, which the rule of 6 will also stop.

Before we move on to defending against attacks, I wanted to apply one more number rule - the Rule of 10.

10,000 Swords, 10,000 Spears, 1000 Light Cav and 1000 Catapults cannot be built in one village, but if you contribute from multiple villages, this force cannot be beat by the three main types of "nuke" attacks which are either 20,000 axes, 5,000 light cavalry or the combo attack of 8,000 axes, 3000 light cavalry and 300 rams.

Even with 25% luck going to the attacker, with a level 20 wall the Rule of 10 will prevail (although you'll have to rebuild some walls, and resupply the forces).

Eventually, someone is going to come and attack you. Don't panic. In the beginning, people won't attack you often or with very much. Even building as efficiently as possible, new players just don't have the resources to hit you very hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play efficiently as well.

Types of Attacks

Before I start, I just want to remind you that your wall should be well developed extremely early in the game. Higher wall provides more fighting ability to your existing troops, PLUS additional bonuses for the wall itself. Your defense is huge with a good wall AND lots of troops.

Usually, the first attack that comes is a scouting force. Players want to know exactly what you have so they can send the right troops to wipe you out, then send a nobling force if they can.

Since most players won't commit real troops without seeing what the scouts find first, its critical to be able to win the scout fight.

Scouts only fight other scouts. If you have no scouts in your village, your other troops will ignore them, and they will get through. When a player attacks with scouts, if at least one of them attacks and gets back to the village, the player will have a detailed report of your forces, and if the scouts are trained at the smithy to level 3, the player can also see what levels your buildings are at, including your wall, and how many resources you have.

Defending Against Scouts

As I said, if you can kill all the scouts, the attacked won't receive any information. Generally, it takes 2 scouts to kill every incoming scout. At early levels, 200 scouts is usually sufficient, but I like to build up to 1000 scouts as soon as possible. Luck can effect the outcome of the scout battle, but the 2:1 ratio is pretty good. Some people build tons of scouts, and some don't, but 1000 will turn away the majority of attackers. If it doesn't, take heart in the fact that scouts take up 2 farm each, so if your attacker hits you with 2000 scouts, that's 4000 less farm he has invested in actual attackers.

If you kill all the scouts, great! The attacker probably won't commit forces because he has no idea how tough you really are. Be prepared by building more scouts, because he might come back to scout you again.

If you don't kill all the scouts, the player will get a report of your forces. Based on this report, the player will attack you if he thinks he can take you, and will wait or find another target if you're too well defended.

So let's say that he likes what he sees and decides to attack. There are several kinds of attacks and if you catch the attack as it happens, you can deduce what kind of troops he's sending.

Single Group Attack

Let's say he sends an attack after the scout attack. It's one attack from one village. This attack is not likely to contain a noble, so relax. Incidentally, even if it DID have a noble, he can't take your village with one noble. Still, you can probably tell what's in the group based on the time.

Very fast groups are transparent. For this example, we'll say the attacker is 3 fields away. To determine this, count the fields between you and the attacker, plus the attacker's field. Don't count diagonally. You notice an attack incoming right away and it looks to be about 30 minutes. Divided by 3 fields, that gives you a time of 10 minutes per field. The only offensive unit that fast is light cavalry, so that must be what's in the attack. Since heavy cavalry move at 11 minutes per field, and you might not have caught the attack right away, it might have or entirely consist of heavy cavalry.

Seeing that its a beginning village, maybe 500-1000 points, if he does have heavy cavalry, it probably isn't very much. Of course, the best thing for cavalry is spears, so hopefully you've already built a bunch.

As this attack comes in, you have two choices: You can let your forces take the attack, or pull your forces out, let him hit and then return your troops. If you do the latter, you save your troops and can see what your opponent considers a big attack. If it's more than you could have stopped, you have saved your troops and you can concentrate on building more troops before he returns (which he will if he thinks you have no troops) If you could have taken the attack, return your troops, build some more, and wait for the inevitable weak attack.

In both cases, he might send a noble train next time.

Noble Trains

Noble trains can usually be spotted as 4-5 attacks that will all hit in a short period. Sometimes these attacks are fakes to make you think you're being nobled, when in fact a bigger force is headed elsewhere. For now though, we'll focus on the potential of the noble train.

If nobles reduce your village's loyalty to 0% or below, than the invading player gets control of your village.