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The Ancients 🗿
The Ancients are Thronewake’s non-playable NPC faction — analogous to Travian’s Natars/Nataris. They guard the map, hold special villages, defend Wilder Sites, take over abandoned player villages, and drive the endgame.
Where the Ancients appear
1. Wilder Sites
Unclaimed Wilder Sites are controlled by the Ancients and defended by Ancient troops that regenerate over time. See Wilder Sites for spawn/respawn rules. One named Ancient unit that appears in Wilder Sites is the Stonepike (respawns roughly every ~12 minutes on 1×, ~4 min on 3×).
- Ancient/Wilder-Site troops are meant to be Smithy level 0 (a bug once briefly set them to level 20).
- Their troop numbers scale with the number and size of active players on the world.
2. Ancient special villages (endgame)
The Ancients own the special villages needed for the endgame:
- Ancient Stronghold villages and Ancient Monument / Ancient Wonder villages — these contain the building slot for the Ancient Monument. Alliances must conquer one to start building.
- Plan Sanctuary villages — spawn later in the world and hold the Construction Plan artefacts. An in-game announcement is made 7 days before they appear.
- After you conquer an Ancient Stronghold/Monument village, the Ancients try to take it back after a short time (protect it by raising the Monument to at least level 1).
- From Monument level 10 onward the Ancients attack the Monument with siege every 5 levels (plus at level 5 and 96/97/98/99 without siege). See Endgame.
3. Abandoned / deleted player villages
When a player is inactive (their profile is scheduled for deletion after 7 days of inactivity) or deletes their account, all of their villages are taken over by the Ancients (not just the capital, unlike Travian’s 1/5-chance capital→Natar).
- These villages keep their buildings as they are and do not disappear on their own; they can be catapulted to 0, at which point they disappear.
- The Ancients will slowly build up some acquired villages over the course of a world, but they do not train new troops in them — so villages taken from players usually have no Ancient troops and can be farmed freely.
- Attacking a 0-population Ancient village yields some resources and then the village disappears.
4. Optional: the Ancients’ own Monument
On worlds where the toggle is on, the Ancients also race to build their own Ancient Monument to level 100 to end a stalling world. See Worlds & Server Speed → infinite-server safeguard.
Fighting the Ancients
- Ancient troops are strong; early feedback repeatedly noted they are “troops on steroids”. Their strength has been balanced over time.
- You can attack/raid Ancient-controlled targets, but note the Safe Time rules: as of update 19/07 you can no longer attack normal Ancient villages or unowned Wilder Sites during your own Safe Time; however you can attack an Ancient Capital/Stronghold/Wonder village during Safe Time (doing so drops your Safe-Time protection until the next day).