Consumer

Paria Springs TV Show?

Paria Springs, a eco-tourism community in Trinidad, *might* get their TV show picked up by the Travel Channel.

You can see a trailer here.

Courtenay, the one featured in the trailer, is a friend of mine through Brian Vaughan.

Along with my wife, Julia, and I, Courtenay lead a National Geographic filming crew to film some bat caves the last time we were in Trinidad.

Here’s some pictures from that amazing trip:

Travian: Managing Multiple Villages

Village Management:

• Keep your infrastructure in the same positions in all your villages.  This will make it easier to jump from one village to the next.  For example, if your marketplace is in position 34 for your 1st village, build your marketplace in position 34 in your 2nd village.  As you jump around your villages, you’ll keep that “marketplace” view.  This will save you lots of time going through the screens and finding the marketplace for each village.  The marketplace, and military producing buildings will be the most important ones to consider.
• If you work tightly with others, consider having everyone use a common village layout.  It’ll save everyone time when they go looking for the appropriate buildings.

Troops Management:

• Troops built in one village belongs to that village.  This was a surprise to me.  Unless someone could show me how to do otherwise, you can *not* make troops in one village and then permanently base them out of another of your villages.  I was expecting to move my raiders from my 1st village to my 2nd and then attack other villages in the area with those troops from my 2nd village.  This is not the case.  They are only considered *reinforcements* and cannot launch attacks from the 2nd village.

Resource Management:

• If your villages are far apart, make sure your marketplace is sufficiently upgraded.  You’ll want to be able to constantly send resources to your new village.  They key to growing a 2nd village quickly is to keep it feed.  All your development will come to a standstill if you run out of resources.  The appropriate number of merchants is a function of merchant capacity, travel speeds and amount of resources required to build an upgrade or set of upgrades.
• Keep in mind that building up a cranny to lvl 10 will take you a good chunk of the day.  Consider your situation and if it’s possible to build up your resource fields a few levels before building your cranny.  This will help keep your village feed and help you draw less resources from your other villages.  The overall difference should be pretty minor, but it’s something to consider.
• Your new village will start off with 750 of each resource.  If your village is far away, you’ll need to balance how quickly you spend this starter fund with how long it’ll be before your merchants arrive with more resources.

Travian - Rubyist Playing on Server 1 in the NW

A group of us have started playing on S1 in the NW region.  Join us for some pillaging fun.

“Travian, It’s how simcity should of been done!” -Winston Tsang

To learn more about Travian, check out the wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travian