Catching Spies in Travian

Catching spies in travian is generally a large problem. For a game focused on teamwork, having a traitor in your midst could pose a large problem to your chances of winning the game round. A spy in your alliance can do a lot to hamper your progress with very little effort. By being part of your alliance, a spy has access to battle reports (a report on a battle between two villages), alliance information and discussions, inside information on planned alliance wars, better understanding of the status of the alliance, and the spy may also be privy to information on troops in alliance villages so that the enemy alliance the spy works for has a better understanding of the defense of a village. But what makes spies more troublesome is the fact that there is no way to effectively locate a spy and remove the spy from the alliance.

A careful and smart spy can easily avoid the several counter-espionage measures you can place on you alliance. But having these counter-measures can really help with making a spy’s job harder than the spy intended it to be. Generally counter-measures are easy to implement into an alliance but they also require a lot of time and effort to set up and maintain. Also due to the way Travian is set up, there are few counter-measurers which will work to capture a spy. The easiest way of preventing spies from entering your alliance is to have every member to be connected to two other alliance members through the in-game sitter system. The sitter system is an in-game ability to give basic control of your account while you are off-line. In the sitter system, a player is able to access two other accounts and two other players are able to access the players account. A player sitting for another player has access to information on where the troops of a player are currently stationed. This allows a sitter to see if a member of your alliance is secretly supplying troops or resources to a member of an enemy alliance. Another advantage of having the sitter system is that the productivity of alll your alliance members is increased. A common problem experienced when playing travian is that players are unable to be on-line all the time.

There may come a time when resources need to be spent when a player is unable to access his or her account. By setting a friendly player as a sitter, your sitter is thus able to access the account of the player and spend the resources as needed. Also with a sitter, a player is furthur protected from suprise attacks as there is another player watching over his or her’s account to prevent this. But a sitter is also restricted in sending damaging catapult attacks and actions in affecting your alliance membership. The purpose of the sitter is that if a spy is forced to have a sitter, he or she will be harder pressed because direct help to an enemy alliance by troops, or resources will have a chance of being noticed by the spy’s sitter. One obvious defect to this method of counter-espoinage is that a spy is still capable of assisting an enemy alliance through information only. If a spy sent an in-game message with information to an enemy alliance, the spy is capable of deleting the message from his or her’s mail box and thus removing any trace that a sitter wouldn’t be able to discern if a message was sent. Also having a sitter gives up some of a player’s privacy as a sitter has access to all the messages of the player. This issue can be resolved simply by having an agreement between the sitter and the player where the sitter agrees that he or she will not read the messages of the person he or she is sitting for.

Another method for locating spies in travian is by looking for those members who have the potential to be a spy. Usually these members can be found through a variety of factors. One factor is by how many enemies surround the member. If a member is surrounded by several enemy members, then this is a good reason that the member could be a spy. Because of the spy’s close proximity to enemy players, if the spy was discovered, he or she would be able to be defended by the enemy players against an attack by the alliance the spy was spying on. Another factor is by how many times a player is attacked or how much difficulty they are recieving from an enemy alliance. A weak member who is unable to defend their village and is surrounded by offensive enemy players yet recieves almost no attacks from them has a strong posibility of being a spy. Also a player located extremely far from the rest of the alliance could be a spy because they will be harder to control,attack, or defend.  

 Aside from these simple methods for locating spies, another method to determine spies is by sending out false mass messages. Usually alliances send out mass messages to the entire alliance with information such as attack plans and generall updates. Generally a spy will forward copies of mass messaged attack plans and alliance updates to the alliance the spy works for. This can be used to your advantage if you trick a spy into thinking the message he or she recieved is an actual attack order. To do this is quite simple, you simply place in the subject of the message the current format of Mass Messages. The travian Mass Message format of 2008 for example is “MM -” followed by the subject of the message. A spy will generally be unable to tell the difference between a false Mass Message and a real Mass Message if the false Mass Message is submitted properly. Thus you can send out false attack orders to a single suspected member who thinks that everybody else is recieving the message. After submitting the message, a simple scouting of the mentioned target village is all that is sufficent to determine if the player is a spy.

Generally the target village should have a standard amount of troops which it always has. However if the suspected player is a spy, then the target village should have an increased ammount of defensive troops as well as large ammounts of reinforcements. If there is an increased ammount of reinforcements and you only send the Mass Message to a single member, then it there is a high probability that the suspected member is a spy. These simple actions can help to reduce the ammount of spies in your alliance. A simple start to locate spies in your alliance is to check out basice geographical information on each player. Another is to use false MM’s to locate the spy. But the hardest to implement action is the sitter system as it requires a great deal of cooperation and leadership to place in effect. Although these methods won’ entirely remove a capable and intelligent spy, they will make the spy’s job significantly difficult and possibly enough for the spy to give up out-right.