3. The Journey Begins: Growth and Farming
Hopefully you are now considering how you will form your army, which is important for not only figuring out what best suits you, but also because you need to start producing troops 24/7 to farm with and boost your production.
The quests already nudge you towards farming, informing you that you can raid barbarian villages to increase the resources your village is able to bring in. Your start up phase, is arguably the most crucial and competitive period in your game, and for that reason is possible one of the more exciting parts to experience.
The more you are able to farm, the more resources you are able to put back into your growth and when you are saving up for your first noble you want to be able to pull in 1000s of resources as effortlessly as possible.
In tribal wars 2, there is a setting that limits you to 50 attacks per village, so it is worth keeping that in mind, though it has personally impacted me it may impact the more avid farmers.
I mention this, because I am going to suggest you set up some farming presets, you should have already created a preset as part of your quest tree directly from the rally point. It is also possible to create a preset when you are looking to send attacks from the map view in both the preset menu and the attack menu.
Presets you create are added to your global list, but need to be activated for any village you wish to add them in (we will cover that later), when you click on another village to send an attack, you have the option to manually enter troops, or use a preset. The preset option is at 3 o'clock on the radial menu, with the manual option above it.
As your army grows, you will start to drain villages of their resources more quickly, to combat this issue, you will need to group your army to different targets to farm more and more villages. Which is why we will be using presets, and keeping in mind our attack limit. From the attack screen you can choose to save the attack you are about to send as a preset.
Or alternatively you may create a new preset from the preset menu that opens when you click on the button in the radial menu.
Once you have your presets set up, it will be a matter of 3 clicks to send each farm run, 1; click on target, 2; click presets from radial menu, 3; click the attack option for your chosen preset.
It is entirely up to you how you set up your presets, however I will try to limit how many presets are active in each village. I create my presets based on troop walking speed. So for a defensive build during start up, I will have 1 preset for swords, another for spears and archers, and a third for cavalry.
I will also send them out in that order, so starting with my village at the centre of my map view, I will send infantry to the nearer villages and work my way out, with cavalry doing the longer runs.
I do not often choose a defensive build start up, but when I do, I build light cavalry to farm with.
I don't build a huge number of light cavalry, just enough to let me farm further out while I push towards heavy cavalry. Heavy Cav are the most expensive barracks unit, and take the longest to reach, so it isn't a bad idea to build some light cavalry that you can kill off later when you need to make room to complete your defensive village.
Efficiency:
Personally, I never check farm reports, I only need to know one thing; Are my farm runs regularly draining the village?
When you are looking at your reports folder showing your attacks, you will see an image of crates next to each report title.
A single crate means that your troops aren't carrying to their maximum capacity, which means you emptied the target village. 3 crates means there was still available resources to be plundered.
While I have never put too much energy into monitoring which villages drain quicker, or how little the haul is from villages that have been drained, I will adjust my sending based on what i see from my reports folder. If I see more partial hauls than I do full, I will divide my forces further, the more commands you have attacking different villages, the more resources you will pull in. Right up until that attack limit is hit.
I have my own limits too, 3 hours out on sending. That is the maximum I will let my troops be gone unless I am troop saving (another upcoming mention). So I will recycle my runs as they come back, if they return from a village I am regularly draining, I might send them to a village I am regularly receiving full hauls from.
It is important to remember, that villages are always generating resources, and so unless you are competing for farming with an active neighbour and you are unfortunate enough to come in behind their attacks, you will always get
some resources.
There is more reason for you to maintain a tight circle of farming than to keep on pushing out and out and out, as you do not want to come under attack with your armies 4 hours away farming under the perceived efficiency of getting full hauls regardless of how far you have to travel to get them.
Farming is also the first place you can gain a victory over your neighbours. If you can actively, and consistently, steal the resources they are trying to farm before they get to them their own productivity will drop and you will be passive-aggressively beating them out of your area. The rate at which you grow compared to your neighbour will become more defined and you will be on track to being better prepared to make them a target. It can be very demoralising to a player putting energy into farming and not being able to maintain efficiency.
Farming is fairly simple, just keep a few things in mind:
-The more you farm, the more resources you have coming in to put back into troops and village building.
-As you recruit more troops, your farm runs will grow, so keep your preset groups updated to make the most out of your troops without losing out to the attack limit.
-Be mindful of your hauls, and adjust your sending to suit.
Barbarian Villages
From what I have observed, Barbarian village growth seems to be affected by a number of factors, including province growth, neighbouring province growth and village growth. So the more active your area, the quicker your farms will grow.
Their growth is not dependent on resources, and is random, so don't worry about draining them of resources. Those barbarians work for free.
Barbarians do not build walls, the only instance you will ever find walls is in player owned villages, so if a player restarts or deletes the wall will remain. Beyond that, empty barbarian villages will not cost you troops for hitting walls.
Barbarian Villages: Advanced
-Shaping:
More active players sometimes choose to build a complement of catapults in their villages so that they can engage in "farm shaping". This is an activity in which a player sends catapults to lower all other buildings except resource and warehouse to try to create the best resource production possible in that village. Barbarian villages grow to 3,500 points, and so this technique requires upkeep at least on a weekly basis.
-Spiking:
I would like to make it known that I do not consider this a valid tactic.
Spiking is a technique used by some players to try to dissuade their neighbours from being as active or as liberal in their farm run sending. This was a more common strategy in tribal wars where barbarian villages built walls. However here, it can be a costly technique to employ.
Barbarian villages have neither walls, nor faith and so your troops will be at their most vulnerable trying to protect these resources. It is much more fruitful trying to outmanoeuvre your opponent by beating them to the resources.
IF you feel this technique is worth trying, then your troops would be better spent defending inactive player villages where morale will be your ally.
One other use for spiking is using single unit supports to get an idea of your neighbour's activity and online times, though there is no way of being certain who exactly is hitting your troops.
Inactive Players:
Keep an eye on inactive players in your area, the minimum warehouse hold is 1000 of each resource, and when the 5 day beginner protection runs out, that could be yours if you are quick enough.
Alternatively you might use this against your enemies by employing the spiking strategy who might try to beat you to it.
Inactive players MAY have small numbers of troops as you get 30 spears almost immediately when you run through the tutorial.
I would say one more time that I do not waste my resources trying to spike villages. This might be something you try however.
Village Growth
It is my opinion that the village quests are very important to your start up, they urge you to build your village fairly quickly and give you boosts along the way. It is certainly much slower trying to build a village without the quests.
However, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. I have already told you to start building troops endlessly, and what you might find yourself is that trying to do that and stick to the quest tree is not possible.
You need to keep on top of how quickly you will use your farm provisions, and how quickly you will bring in resources. So it is worth going off script to maintain a balance.
-Build farm to keep up with provisions.
-Build warehouse to keep up with hauls, remember the academy will need 75,000 clay (just a little less of each wood and iron) this means a minimum warehouse level of 22.)
-Build HQ to deal with increasing build times. My rule is to build a level of HQ whenever the build time is lower than that of the next resource building. Though you might find your own preference.
Note: We aren't quite there yet, but I think this is worth mentioning now. You don't NEED to build every single building to its maximum level. While this is again a personal preference, it can mean a noticeable difference in your troop count. We will go over this later too.