How many tests?
Someone asked about how many test rounds there have been. With reservation that my memory fails 🙂
I played the first beta as dual and king until Final started. I think that must have been autumn 2014. You expanded your kingdom by settle a new village at the border. 7 kings could form an alliance. I’m not sure if there was dukes.
The second autumn 2015 jumped in as dual on a friends account to check what has changed and later started an own account to test how it was to start late. This round a king could expand by settle a village and clear all oasis around. That allowed a king to take very large areas – without any other villages than his own. Dukes existed on this server but I never figured out how it worked.
Both those servers was slow and no free gold, the map was bigger then now.
I don’t know when the Test servers started. If I check in my lobby I have played the 3rd, 4th and 5thround.
Hattori Hanzo invited me to the 3rd. First time with the lobby for me. I think they had implemented the treasuries then but if I remember right the king could expand areas för every village and several kings could form an alliance. This was in May/June and I played as governor.
I played the 4th July/August only as observer and governor. I don’t remember any great changes.
After that we had to wait until October for the 5th and that round many new changes was implemented about how to form kingdoms that is similar to today, no alliances any longer. That server was restarted after a week, too many bugs. A low pop village could give 30.000 extra resources and more in the tribute when raided. The Tuesday they closed it brutally we got several thousands of extra gold. It restarted one week later. I played as king. Dukes became more important and the strategy to merge kingdoms had to be figured out.
This server ended before WW has opened (that happens day 44). The devs was satisfied, they had what they wanted to implement the changes on all ordinary servers. It wasn’t popular. They gave us a week and 600 gold extra to have fun a last time. The devs had fun too. 2h before end ALL players on the server was attacked by Natars. The server crashed when the attacks hit. The Travian staff was surprised we didn’t take the chance to conquer a WW the last minutes since we should have understand that they was empty.
I didn’t play the 6th because Final started the same week in November.
So this round (1 February) is the 7th and devs have decreased the amount of dukes a king can have, only 4 now, so we need a different strategy again.
This changes is done to make it hard to form big metas that covers a great space of the server. From 7 kings down to one and less dukes. Well we will see how it works 🙂