Hugglebear’s Guide to Huggling

As Hugglebear didn’t see a guide to huggling and snuggling for Gaul’s, he has decided to write one up. There is c69’s guide, but it isn’t quite huggleful enough. Please refer to Nailz guide for Teuton for other general starting points. Note this guide is for normal servers only and a bit of gold is required. Also note, that these are Hugglebear’s notes from over a year ago.This isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re active for 12-18 hours for the first three days, your chances of success are high. Otherwise, they are not. After the first 3 days, life becomes peaches and cream as you settle down due to the speed of the hugglebunnies. And also, if you’re using this guide, please choose a cute name to spread the love.

Step 1 – Getting the hugglebunnies! (see Appendix 1 for language)

Timeline – 0 hour:
You’re lonely. What to do? Why not take a quick walk around your neighbourhood?
Build – Main 2, Main 3, Rally Point, Barracks, 2 phalywally

Now it’s time to go visit your neighbours for a cup of sugar. You don’t want to visit the big city folk, just the down to earth small towners (with a population <=8). In fact, they probably won’t even be home, so just help yourself.

So with all the goodies you come back with, make some more phallywally’s! Hugglebear’s favorite unit is the heartswinger, but hey, you got to go with you got. And what you got are some phallywally. Think of them as half a heartswinger, which isn’t too bad. And you got to be a bit pickier with who you visit, that’s all.

Timeline – 12-24 hours
Anyway, if things are about average (see appendix 2), you have between 10 phallywally now and you’ll need to build some more stuff. Like a marketplace to help out your neighbours! The other reason that it’s important is the NPC, and we’ll need to use that about once or twice a day to make up for the fact we don’t have any heartswingers. BTW, if it really took you more than 24 hours to get the 10 phallywhally either you’re not knocking on enough doors or you don’t have enough neighbours. Might want to start over.

Build – Cropfield 1, Granary 1, Warehouse 1, Marketplace 1.

Now keep on visiting your neighbours…and keep on building those phallywally. Everytime you’re about to overflow, you’ll have to calculate the exact amount to optimize the NPC to build some more phallywally. It’s important. Also, trade anything for anything that makes you a bit more resources. You’ll be using the NPC anyway.

So what’s next you ask? More phallywally’s silly! You have soo many neighbours to visit still. You need to be careful of who you’re visiting still though. Maybe a bit bigger size by now will work. Romans under 30 generally don’t have armies. Don’t be attacking any bigger Gauls though, they have those traps and we’re just looking for some coco crisps.

Timeline – 24-60 hours
Should have about 30-70 phallywally right now. Now’s the time to keep those phallywally queued up and start building up to get your hugglebunnies. Now this is more of an art to decide how many phallywally you really need. And do you need hugglebunnies or swordywordies? Both are very good questions and outside the scope of this document. Essentially, you’ll need between 50-100 phallywally’s before you get hugglebunnies. Or you could go phallywally’s -> swordywordies -> hugglebunnies. I prefer the direct route myself. In any case, there are buildings that must be built in any case and if you have a good steady income and have your phallywally queued at 1 or 2 an hour, now’s the time.

Build – granary 4, warehouse 3, barracks 3, academy 5, blacksmith 3, stable 3 (in no particular order). Note that I left out the necessary crop field extensions which should be kept to a minimum. The population of your city should be about 55.

Timeline – 60-80 hours

You should have your hugglebunnies by now! And you should be anywhere from -50 to -100 crop. Note that depending on your activity, you’ll need to be building a few fields or sending away your phallywallies. More on that later. Hugglebear finds it difficult to be more than -200 crop / hour early game. Hugglebear sometimes sleeps in on the weekend and starves his poor hugglebunnies. It makes Hugglebear sad. If you’re not anywhere close to getting hugglebunnies, maybe it’s time to start over. Anyway, on to step 2.

Step 2: Use the hugglebunnies!

Timeline – Day 4 to Day 7
The great thing about hugglebunnies is their speed. The terrible thing about hugglebunnies is that they are so expensive. So you need to be careful using the hugglebunnies. At first, again, you’ll only be sending sunshine to the smaller folks (romans of size < 20-30 and most teutons) till you have about 10 hugglebunnies. After you have 10 hugglebunnies, it’s time to send some love and snuggles to all the teutons around. They probably won’t have any spearydudes and doubt they’d expect the hugglebunnies for someone coming out of beginner protection. But alas, there’s always a big meanie Teuton an hour or two away it seems, and the next step is to dealing with the meaniehead. They will probably about population 200 starting on their next village, while you are population 55 at -150 to -200 crop (50-75 hugglebunnies, 50-100 phallywally). Also, you need to be visiting within 1-2 hours of you depending on how many hugglebunnies you have.

1) Send the hugglebunnies to them directly and have a chit-chat with the heartswingers to tell their owner to not be a meaniehead. This could work. Of course, if you run into spearydudes, you have been dealt a huge setback.
2) Send the hugglebunnies all around the area to where you think the meanie Teuton is farming. This can help a little bit. The less resources the meanie Teuton gets, the more snuggleful he/she becomes. Of course, this is just a pre-cursor to step three, where you find out who is active in the area and who is not.
3) If people chat with you from around the Teuton area, let them know you’d be happy to help them. And then send your 100 phal to protect them. This serves 2 purposes. First, it will make the said meanie Teuton a little more cautious. No one expects to run into 100 phallywallys early game. And quite frankly, he’ll look around and be confused as to where they came from. And secondly, that’s 100 more crop for you! So essentially, you can get paid double for both protection and not having to pay crop. And you also get into that meanie Teuton’s head.
4) Tribute. Depending on how huggly you are, you could demand tribute. I personally don’t really do that. When folks ask me why the hugglebunnies come around so often, I tell them the truth.
“Hugglebear loves you and sunshine and peaches and cuddles, but Hugglebear still needs to feed his hugglebunnies! Can you help?”
It never hurts to be helpful if you’re not getting any resources. You could negotiate protection with your excess phal and get paid double and you can make sure no teuton gets their resources. And so on and so forth. Use your judgement. And, of course, you would like them to grow so they can give you more snuggles and sunshine later on. That’s very important. Once I negotiated a friendly chiefing of their first village, so it does pay to be nice. And if they suddenly become unsnugglesome, well, you know what to do.

Also, side notes – You should have a bigger marketplace, trading is a very easy way to get resources early on. Midgame I usually trade 750:1000 of every resource (at a profit of 250 per trade) and early game I aim for 50-100 per trade. Not as much as the hugglebunnies, but every little bit helps. And you should also start building your fields because it’s very hard to maintain -200 crop. And, of course, you should be queuing more hugglebunnies. Also, if it’s early on, clearing oasis every few hours gets you more experience for

your TT hero and free food! As long as it doesn’t cost you that much to clear the oasis that is. Also, about cranny and traps. They are cheap and you have building space. Build them. The cranny is just for peace of mind and the trapper is for release and counterattack. Teutons won’t send 100 heartswingers at you the first time. Or even the second time. So trap their heartswingers and send them back when you’re ready along with your hugglebunnies. Much easier than hoping to catch them at home. Anyway, it’s cheap, and dealing with meaniehead teutons is hard. Use the advantages that you have.

Step 3: New land of sunshine and happiness!

Timeline – Day 8 to Day 12
You’re probably still dealing with a big meaniehead teuton, but all the rest of them have been subdued into a peaceful state, and eating peach and mango cobbler while singing kumbaya under a coconut tree. You probably have between 200 hugglebunnies if you don’t keep losing them. I like being at about level 7 fields before starting on a new village. You’ll need to throw at least one party at this point in time, and maybe you decided to research swords to deal with the meaniehead Teutons speardudes. In any case, that’s where this guide ends. Nailz has written an excellent guide in general and there’s no need to repeat info in there. There are many things which he doesn’t mention as optimal building sizes for culture points, etc. and optimal army composition, so I won’t be doing that either. That perhaps belongs in a different guide.

Thanks to Theoweo and Meow for spell-checking and reviewing this guide. And have a huggly time!

Appendix 1 – Language:
Phallywally = Phalanx
Spearydude = Spearman
Heartswinger = Clubswinger
Hugglebunny = TT
Happy Boulder Thrower = Catapult

Appendix 2 – growth equations:
units = e^(hourly_resource_rate*t/total_cost_of_unit) + 1
So for a phalanx the total cost is 315. The hourly_resource_rate is about 30 resources per phalanx/hour for decent farming and decreases with time. The above equation holds for the approximately for the first 24-48 hours. Reality is, of course, more complicated than this equation.

This is just a bit more of filler for Gaul. Gaul’s can be quite a few things. Defensive specialists, offensive specialists. If you use the hugglebunnies correctly, however, you can do both.Multiple villages

There are really only a few options for the second village in week 2:
1) 15-cropper
2) 9-cropper
3) 5-clay

15-cropper:
If you’re lucky enough to have a 15-cropper with 100% oasis right near you, well, it might be worth taking it. In that case, what I’ve done (and this is extremely dangerous as you’ll be in ridiculously negative crop and possibly starve your troops before you get your second village), is build no crop fields at all in the main village. Build all the crop fields in your second village, which is more efficient. Note that one has to build a palace (make a cap and mason), destroy the palace, build a residence, etc. This is slightly more expensive, but not prohibitively so. One time I saw a player on .com do this and have 450 TT coming out of his first village when he took the 15-cropper on day 12. I never did ask them how negative crop they were, but certainly quite difficult to do.

9-cropper:
Sometimes, you’re lucky and sometimes you’re really lucky. If you have a 9-cropper and a 15-cropper in your 7×7, consider yourself really lucky. Hugglebear continually has trouble with crop and is very accustomed to running in negative crop. So a 9-cropper is extremely handy to take as a second village. A good distribution of resources and crop, and good for raiding base.

5-clay:
Perhaps the safest of all choices. Gauls are in constant need of clay and you’ll eventually need the clay for crop fields anyway. Worst case scenario this can either become a 100% hugglebunny production or a 100% phal production town. Either way works. In fact, a 5-clay next to a 15-crop is a no-brainer choice. Building crop fields in your main village is necessary though.

For the main villages, my preference in order:
1) Starting village: Will have several hundred hugglebunnies to start, but shall be phased out shortly into a supply village or a defensive village.
2) 9-crop: The main raiding village. Possibly house the hammer here.
3) 5-clay: Churning out phallywally 24/7. Or hugglebunnies 24/7. Could be #2 village.
4) 4×4×4×6: You’ll need another supply village before taking a 15C.
5) 15-crop: The capital. Preferably with the raiding/hammer village next to it.

Essentially, of the second and third villages, one will become your raiding headquarters for all future hugglebunnies and the other will be a second phalanx supply. Of course, it’s all a matter of style, except for the 5-clay and 15-crop, which you’ll definitely need as Gaul’s are so clay heavy. In fact, you’ll probably end up with 2 or 3 5-clay’s. Although I really like getting a 9-cropper as a second village, I dislike 9 croppers after that. If you’re going to get a 9-cropper as a 7th village, it’s not that much different from a 6-cropper at that point in time. Also, I like housing my hammer in a 6-cropper that looks exactly like all the supply villages if possible.

Army distribution

About 1.5 – 2 times pop in crop usage for offensive troops and as many defensive troops that you can make that you don’t need to feed. Note that if you really go too overboard in terms of troops, it could negatively impact your growth.

2 villages – day 15:
As a Gaul, you actually don’t need a defensive army because usually no one is stupid enough to attack you. So why do Gaul’s build defence? Beats me to be honest, but I build it because I can. In fact, I’m extremely heavy on hugglebunnies and phallywally early game, probably more than one should be at the expense of village infrastructure. Some people like to have 2-3x troop count per population, I prefer more. Note that there’s no way that you can house all your troops yourself. However, people in your alliance will gladly take 50-100 phalanx each. This adds up really quickly and can turn the tide of a lot of the silly early wars. And those expendable phalanx that you’re building right now will come in extremely handy in mid-game.

Some rough numbers off the top of my head after not playing for 8 months: I usually like building anywhere from 50-80 phalanx daily depending on how the hugglebunnies are doing out on the town for the next 30 days. This costs 15k daily. Maybe 30-50 hugglebunnies / day. Up to 50k daily. So that’s up to 70k daily just on troops. A party cost 20k and you’ll need about 2 of them. And you still have to build up your second village. And getting fields to 8 on your second village is a priority over the next 10 days. This will cost about 22k per field or 40k/day. This is an total of about 120k/daily. So has Hugglebear gone mad? Well, your main village should bring in about 40k resources daily. The hugglebunnies should bring in 30k to 60k from your neighbours in the first 2 months. Trades should bring in about 5-10k. And raiding oasis every 6-8 hours should bring in 5k daily. So this is anywhere between 85k and 115k. Anyway, as long as you don’t instabuild, you’ll be mostly ok. Adjust the above numbers based on your activity level, but you don’t have to be incredibly active once you get the hugglebunnies, just efficient. In any case, one should focus always on what brings in the most resources, whether it’s more hugglebunnies or more fields. It’s a situation based decision if you can’t have it all.

Now it’s my preference to make phalanx for alliance strength rather than concentrate on building a sword army for clearing early. By supplying defences for friendly Teutons (who are fairly far away from you or share farms with you), you can occasionally ask them to clear out pesky villages for you. Heartswingers are cheap, and who doesn’t want hero XP after all? And by alliance strength, I really mean the people you know and are friends with. So essentially, you defend and they clear while you build up your infantry force for mid-game.

3 villages – day 30:
Again, this is a matter of style, but I usually go for a sword/hugglebunny mix in one village and defense in another. By this time, it’s rather overkill, but depending on how much you huggle and snuggle (an extra 50k – 100k isn’t out of the question), you should be able to produce all three of them. This is why the choice of the second village is very key, it dictates your army strategy down the road.

4 villages – day 45:
More of the above…note that I don’t mention anything about druidriders and haeduan. Druidriders are a nice unit, but haeduan are terrible early on. Don’t bother with them until you’re about 10 villages in. So what kind of huggly force should you have at this point? I’m a bit heavy on the troop end of things, but these were my numbers. Generally speaking, you want to be less heavy on troops than myself at population about 1200.

2000 phalanx
500 druids
1000 swords
600 hugglebunnies (probably made 1000-1200 of them. A lot of them died. )
100 rams
35 hbt

If you think I’m exaggerating, please go check out this thread and read the block of text (and make sure to read my reply a few posts below also):
http://forum.travian.us/showthread.php?t=9523

After about 3 months (pulled from an old troop tool, numbers after fighting some minor wars):
4000 phal
4000 swords
1500 hugglebunnies
2500 druids (needed for long distance defence coverage)
200 rams
35 hbt

Hammer:
Generally, will be swords and haeduan. It’s expensive. Is it worth it? Well, yes. Hugglebunnies just take too long to build. Swords imo, are the best infantry, but both the hugglebunnies and the haeduan aren’t great for a hammer. Note that if you keep your infantry and cavarly close to 50%, you could end up being much hugglier. Why is that? It’s because most defensive players will have more of a defensive percentage for infantry. It’s tricky and I’m not going to go over all the calculations right now. This is, after all, a matter of style.

Village infrastructure and parties

The astute observer will note that I put every 15 days for new villages. I prefer an extra troop presence a bit early on, and that’s what adds those extra days. Some players prefer having new villages every 10-12 days, and that’s also easily possible, just cut down on the extra troops being made. Fields should be setup to a minimum of level 8 and maybe even up to 8-8-8-10 (for later villages), before starting on any new ones. Also, although parties are very important, never neglect your CP infrastructure. This will invariably catch up with you when you get to 10 villages (3-4 months in). Normally all the villages I build after the 5th are shell supply villages. Here’s a very built up supply city:

Marketplace: 20 = 115 cp
Granary x 2: 20 = 38*2 cp = 76 cp
Warehouse x 2: 20 = 38*2 cp = 76 cp
Main building: 20 = 77 cp
Supply buildings: 5 = 10 cp
Hero’s Mansion: 10-15 for oasis = 9 cp
Stable: 10 = 12 cp
Trade office: 20 = 115 cp
Embassy: 20 = 153 cp
Academy: 20 = 153 cp
Town hall: 1 = 6 cp

This adds up to 802 CP. If you just had a simpler shell city, you’d only have about 300 CP (minus second granary/warehouse, embassy, trade office, academy, and town hall). Long-term this is foolish as these buildings pay off in terms of CP in about 40 days. Well, not the granary/warehouse, but those second one’s are always handy anyway. Quick calc: embassy costs a total of 270k to build, which is worth approximately 13 parties or 6500 culture points. One gets 153 CP from an embassy, or otherwise equivalent in 42 days. At the 5 village mark, if you don’t build up your CP infrastructure your life going from 10->30 villages is going to be very, very difficult. There’s a balance. Throw the parties, but build the infrastructure. Doesn’t have to be right away, but it needs to be done. This example shell city is a bit overdone on the CP side for my taste, but I like my cities to supply about 700 CP daily.