As you may have seen on the Travian public forums such as .co.uk & .in Agge (our Lord & Master) has given the green light to posting screen shots of Travian 4. However the following must be mentioned before I show any screen shots and that is that these screen shots come from a BETA and everything within them is liable to massive change. I'm going to try and show as much as possible in this post about Travian 4 so don't worry if it seems long, it'll mostly just be the images. Remember you can click on all of them to get a larger size image so if you can't make anything out just click on them. I'll also do some explaining of what the image shows.
What you see above is the Hero Adventure panel, this panel shows you how many and which adventures your hero has available to go on. I believe at the beginning of the game there are 3 adventures a day for your hero and then over time the number of adventures available slowly reduces. There are a number of danger levels of the adventures ranging from Normal to Hard, the harder the danger the more damage it will cause your hero (all heroes have 100 HP). Once your hero has reached his adventure spot he will 'Explore It' and will find either resources, silver (a new currency I'll explain), consumables or an equipable item. All of the items are completely different in their values and have many different uses. For example a 'Cage' allows you to trap nature troops and use them as defence for your village, this is extremely useful for early game and traps were going for massive amounts of silver at the beginning but by endgame they'll be worth close to nothing as people can train their own defensive troops.
This is the auction page, where you can buy and sell the consumables and the equipable items that you received in your adventures, as you can see the currency for the actions is Silver. Silver can be made in three ways. The first is through adventures as there is a chance your hero will discover some silver while he is on the adventure, the second is through selling your items and the third is gold conversion. For each single gold piece you convert you will currently (liable to change) receive 100 Silver pieces. What you do is place the maximum you are willing to pay for that item in the 'Maximum Bid' section however you will only pay just above the next highest bid. Auctions last for 6 hours and at the end whoever has place the highest big will win the auction. Here you can see me bidding for the extremely valuable 'Short Sword of the Imperatoris' which gives all EI soldiers travelling with your hero an +9 offence points bonus and when stationed at home with your hero they receive +9 defensive points each.
In this screen shot you see the inventory and the equip page, all items you receive from adventures or purchase from auctions can be found in your inventory. If you have one you would like to use on your hero you simply drag it to the square on your hero's body that it corresponds to; for example a helmet would be dragged to the spot on the heroes head. As you can see through purchases and adventures I've found items for all of the hero's parts except for his feet so I need to either find or purchase some boots. The helmet you see on my heroes head gives him a 15% experience bonus so when he kills units he gets 15% extra experience, so if my hero killed 100 units he'd gain the experience of if he'd killed 115 units. Although currently it isn't worth a great deal due to the low numbers of units in the game by midway through the game it's most likely going to be worth a significant sum. Although currently no one has compiled a full list of items for the public as soon as there is one I'll look to release it here.
The hero attributes screen has also been given a massive rework and is no longer found in the heroes mansion, as you may have heard the offence and defense traits have been merged into one Fighting Strength attribute which can be upgraded (80 Per Point For Gauls & Tuetons, 100 for Romans). Offensive & defensive bonuses still exist and I believe they still go up to 20%. Regeneration speed has also been removed in favour of 'Resources' which is great to help boost your start to the game, below the attributes part you can that you can set how you want your resource production to be spread. It now takes slightly less experience points to level up your hero however for each hero level you will now only receive 4 Attribute points rather than the previous 5. The higher your hero strength the less health he will lose while taking part in adventures, so it is very worth it to pump points into this ability.
The map has been completely reworked by Travian to give an altogether more full and realistic feel, instead of having set movements on the map to change place you can now scroll across, there is also no longer a 7x7 and instead the default map shows a 7x9. Unfortunately this makes the map nearly impossible to use on mobile screens as well as taking longer to load than previous Travian maps have taken so a good internet connection is currently needed to make use of the map features although due to the support for a less extensive graphics pack it is likely that there will be one available on or near launch (but no promises).
However the map offers many more functions than before with the ability to go fullscreen, to zoom the map out to 50%, 8% & 3% which offers a great impression of the spread of members on the server. You can also mark squares, oasis and players and place marks for the rest of your alliance members to see on the map themselves. Oasis however seem pretty poorly thought out on the new map with all of them looking exactly the same regardless of which resource they are for, so a 50% wheat looks identical to a 25% iron which can get very confusing. The cropper finder will remain in the game however they have not yet completed it and the beta version currently does not work as intended. So far we have seen that the village look (on the map) changes at 100 population & 250 population, no village has yet reached 500 population but I am guessing it will change again at that milestone and possibly at the 750 milestone or the 1000 milestone but those are less likely although it would be nice.
Before I start doing the proper screen shots of the overview I thought I'd show you the changed navigation bar, it's only a small change which along with new icons for everything has made messages and reports two completely separate buttons. Also there is now a resource bar underneath your warehouse totals which shows roughly how close to being full your warehouse and granaries are. You can also see whether you have plus activated, how much gold you have available and how much silver you have available.
As you are about to see both the resource field overview and the inner village overview have been given a massive overhaul to give them a more cartoony, colourful and appealing design although this has annoyed some people who would rather it was toned down and kept simple. The full screen is too big for the blog line so click on it to see it in full size.
As you can see the how interface has been changed and everything is bright and easy to read. Links are displayed under the villages box and you can press your heroes picture to go to the Hero Page, your Username to go to your Profile & your alliance name to go directly to your alliance. The little crest to the left of the alliance name shows you how many unread messages in your alliance's forum there are. It is now also easier to auto-complete buildings with there being a one click button on top of your building queue. It's aim is to be a lot more appealing and to give the effect of distance from where you are to your resource fields.
As you can tell the central part of the village has been made a lot larger and the building plots moved further apart so that none of the buildings can be hidden or made unclickable, and from my experience this is working well, unlike 3.6 I haven't mis-clicked on any of the buildings so far. As announced and shown in the Dev Blog all the buildings have been redesigned to go with the new graphic packs and they all look rather good. On a side note the icons for troops have also been redone although I am not as keen on them and I quite liked the icons used in Travian 3.6.
Alliances still seem to be a bit of a work in progress but they have been overhauled in a couple of ways in order to make them more easy to use and to give a more flowing and interesting design. The profile has been changed slightly to look like this:
The look of medals/ribbons has also been redesigned although I think they don't fit in with the new design and they look ugly and the old ones actually would have a better appeal then these ones, anyway that's something you can judge for yourself. However the best new feature of alliances has to be the 'Overview' tab which looks like this:
This has completely replaced the news tab from 3.6 but includes a number of new features, for example the very obvious graphics showing fighting points as well as alliance strength. However this is not the only thing, the events section on the right of the page now includes when someone founds a village, conquers a village, the alliance wins a medal (possibly players as well but I'm unsure). I'm not sure but it might also include when someone takes an artefact or Oasis as we haven't reached that stage of the game quite yet.
Another extremely interesting new feature of the game is the Vicinity Report (or Surrounding Report) which shows important events that have occurred near your villages. As you can see it shows a number of events such as oasis being raiding, fights happening in other villages, village name changes, foundings and more and can be used to keep track of other members in the area. While not a feature I'd use all the time it's something that will come in useful for a number of different reasons throughout the game.
I think that'll have to the end of my coverage for today as that's a lot of information and a lot of screen shots to absorb for one post but I will be doing another post soon in the future (a couple of days) either about NOx end game or simply another post about the beta (more likely) so feel free to come back soon. If you want you can subscribe to use by using the buttons on the right side-bar or share this post to facebook or twitter. We'd also appreciate it if you could like the page.
Steve
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