Addictive Browser Game That You Can Probably Play at Work

[Signe]

Uh oh. 

(it's cute, too)

[Viin]

I've actually played that for about a year now. It was just reset a month or so ago.

I think it's lame.

It's all about building your village, making sure you have the right structures to build the right units, and then go kill your neighbor and take his land. But you really have to play every day or the guy who does will come in and steamroll you about a month in. And then you just hobble along, barely scraping enough resources together to finally put your defensive wall back up and some other bozo comes along and cleans you out (takes your resources or burns all your crap down).

Huzzah.

[angry.bob]

It's a horrible game, just with cute graphics. Unless you are prepared to be nothing more than a constantly attacked resource cow to guilds of predatory guilds running bots and using multiple accounts, don't even bother. They will let you develop your villiage to a certain point where you are worth the time to raid, and then they will send wave after wave of attacks that you can't possibly defend against and you will never be able to develop your villiage any further, and will be nothing more than a resource production node for them.

[Samwise]

I played it for several months thanks to this thread.

I wish I hadn't, honestly.  It's like Viin says, but it gets worse and worse the longer you play -- you start out having to play every day, and eventually it ends up where you have to be online every minute to stay in the game.  You spend months building up your villages, and one catass from Romania wipes you out while you sleep.

What's interesting is that it's actually a pretty fun little game for the first few weeks or so while everyone's still small and catapults haven't really entered the game yet (catapults = permadeath, basically).  I wish the Travian team would try making a more casual-friendly version of the game instead of catering to the catasses exclusively.

(edit) I will say the "addictive" part is very true.  I had trouble quitting it even after I realized that I hated it.  After I've spent months building something I get very stubborn about not abandoning it, even if the thing I've built causes me nothing but agony.

[Venkman]

I've actually played that for about a year now. It was just reset a month or so ago.

I think it's lame.

This here is the main reason mediocrity persists: "about a year" and "it's lame". 

[Sairon]

I used to play http://www.farahad.com/ before, it's worthy of a shot if you like browser games. There's guilds and all that sort of stuff I recall. It can be pretty complex though.

[Endie]

I've actually played that for about a year now. It was just reset a month or so ago.

I think it's lame.

This here is the main reason mediocrity persists: "about a year" and "it's lame". 

Well, I played for a longish time, too - about 3 or 4 months - and I think it's lame.  That's not the conundrum you suggest.

The game sucks you in by hiding its later nature at first.  If you play it right and get in at the beginning, you can make yourself not worth attacking for a long time.  That is, you can make attacking you expensive for literally zero award.  You think you are driving off attackers.  W00t.  I made it into the top 10% of the game in the PvP stats like that.

But once you want to get big enough to play the game "properly", and not just as someo sort of armoured, withdrawn turtle, it is only a matter of time before a bunch of people on Hong Kong time notice you, and then there is nothing you can do unless you are in one of the few, incredibly powerful, alpha alliances.  As others have said, they use alts and bots - it is very easy to bot - and you will be hammered into the ground.  I stuck around long enough to build sufficient stores to make me unfarmable, and never went back.  It is rare, as an MMO, in that I have never been tempted to return.  I like PvP just fine, but I like to have a *chance*...

On the upside, it has the kernel of a good game in there, if it shared some of Nationstates's more recent social safeguards and focussed the bigger guilds into competing with each other on large-scale achievements and structured warfare, instead of becoming a pointless gankfest.  It inspired me to write a prototype for myself, which is something i meant to do for ages.

Edit: for teh sppelung

[Xuri]

Is Travian a clone of TribalWars, the other way around, or are they both clones of a third, unknown (to me) game?

[JoeTF]

It sucks monkey balls and I didn't have to play it for 1 minute to know this.

Funny thing about browser-based games - they have incredible flexibility of coding and testing out new gaming mechanisms, yet design-wise they are absolute shit .
No other mmo in history were so damn prone to griefing and botting and ganking. Heck, even first muds were far better thought out than all this webbased shite.