Interview with Travian creators - need feedback

[Renex]

Hello everyone. I need your help on something.

I have to take soon an inteview for BBG Universe from Travian's creators so I would like some feedback.

What would you ask the Travian creators?

I have my own questions but I want to give a chance to everyone to find something they wish from Travian.

Please reply as soon as you can because tomorrow I need my questions to be ready.

Thank you.

[raestlyn]

I'd really would want to know how they handle their battle and building updating. Is it a timestamp comparison and user triggered updating or some other method.

[Scion]

Im not really sure youll get much implementation detail out of them....i know i wouldnt give that sort of info away....

But what i would like to know is

Did they plan all the game details early on or has it grown organically.....
What is their stance on multi's / or teams playing a single player...
What sort of set up do they have hosting wise.
What sort of data volume are they pumping ...
Do they have any idea how much bandwidth the use of image packs is saving them....
What frameworks / platforms are they using...
What one thing would they do differently given the chance to do over...

[jannesiera]

Intresting... but i's hard to find some good questions in such short time.
What the others said 'till now sounds good allready...

 - Why did you make travian?
 - How long did it take to built it?
 - Where did they get the graphics from?
 - What are the developers favorite games?
 - Other questions

[saljutin]

@raestlyn
they use unix timestamp time()
another important thing is this:
If you can see action to happen then game updates to current time, if you dont see it then there is no witness and thus there is no one to see if something is or is not encountered
meaning:
500 units moving from A to B would not have impact on C ... IF he is not scouting B or whatever. so this planing of events that can happen needs big logic and planing.
also maybe they have some cron that runs for inactive users or something...

I would ask them some questions:
1. how did they start with advertisement (when they had only german servers and later with only 2 english servers...I found this game when only S1 english was available but I cannot remember where )
2. how many servers they have and how good they are
3. what is % of members (donating users)

[Chris]

What do you mean by creators? Developers or the company who owns the game? Or are they the same?


- What is the nature of agreement between you and the national portals (for example Travian was a part of some Polish portals in the past)
- Do you keep one game server per country with multiple domains or separate servers with different game worlds (like www.travian.pl and www.travian.interia.pl )
- Do you keep control of all the servers yourselves? Are these centralised or spread all over the world (each national server located on that country)?
- Is there any association between Travian and plemiona.pl?
- What other games you released?