Roman era online multiplayer resource management

Travian is a free to play online multiplayer strategy game. The goal is to manage your resources well enough to expand your territory while fending off other attacking players.

Travian is not an action game, but a resource management game that requires a lot of waiting, and ideally is played for a while here and there during a day. You begin by choosing one of three classes of people. Gauls are best at defending and are faster, Teutons are better fighters and Romans are pretty well balanced.

During the first few hours of playing Travian all you will do is slowly increase your resources around your village. Every action has a time cost – so if you want to improve agricultural land, that will cost you 3 minutes, and so on. Once your resources have improved, you can use them to build buildings and expand the village, an eventually construct barracks and armies, so you can explore and fight other villages.

Travian is presented in non-animated, hand drawn style graphics. They are functional. The tutorial is useful for teaching you the ropes, as without it Travian makes little sense!

Like many online management games, Travian features a lot of waiting. However, if you want something you can play quickly in the background every so often, it can get addictive.