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Tribes
At the start of a world you choose one of three playable tribes. Each has its own strengths, weaknesses, units, a unique building, and different merchant and Watch Tower stats. The choice matters, but all three are meant to be viable; the developer describes them as “very recognizable” to Travian players.
The three tribes are:
- Embermark Dominion 🔥 — the balanced, expensive, hard-hitting tribe.
- Verdant Wardens 🌿 — the fast, mobile, defensive/utility tribe.
- Stormfang Clans 🐺 — the cheap, aggressive, high-volume tribe.
A fourth, non-playable faction, the Ancients 🗿, controls NPC villages and Wilder Sites and drives the endgame.
At-a-glance comparison
| Embermark 🔥 | Verdant 🌿 | Stormfang 🐺 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Role | Balanced offense & defense; strong but expensive army; some of the strongest infantry | Fastest tribe; raids, fast support, map control; strong defensive cavalry | Weaker but cheap, fast-training troops; aggressive raiding & rebuilding |
| Unique building | Rider’s Wells | Thornsnare Grove | Stormbrew Works |
| Merchant carry | 500 | 750 | 1000 |
| Merchant speed | 16 | 24 | 12 |
| Trade Office bonus | Doubled | normal | normal |
| Watch Tower durability | 1× | 2× | 5× |
| Watch Tower flat defense | +200 | +160 | +120 |
| Watch Tower def. bonus @ lvl 20 | +80.6% | +63.9% | +48.6% |
| Shelter | normal | protects +50% more | normal |
(Merchant capacity does not scale with world speed; movement speed effectively does — see Worlds & Server Speed.)
Tribe balance notes (community consensus)
- Stormfang dominates the early game thanks to cheap, fast, spammable troops (great for early raiding and Wilder Site farming) but tends to be out-scaled later.
- Embermark fields stronger individual units (expensive, hard-hitting) rather than a stronger army overall. The popular “weak early, strong late” characterisation is disputed by players and shouldn’t be taken as established.
- Verdant is the mobility/utility tribe: fastest troops, the best defensive cavalry in the game, cheaper settlers, Wilder-Site utility via traps, and stronger Shelters.
The unique tribe buildings
Each tribe has one building only it can construct. Tribe-unique buildings are visible to all tribes in the build menu (so you can see what an opponent could have), but only the owning tribe can build them.
- Rider’s Wells (Embermark): reduces food upkeep and training time for Embermark cavalry in that village.
- Thornsnare Grove (Verdant): builds traps that capture incoming enemy attackers.
- Stormbrew Works (Stormfang): grants an attack bonus while a celebration is active.
Important shared correction
No tribe ignores a percentage of a defender’s Shelter. In Travian only a hero attack bypasses shelter; Thronewake has no hero, so shelters are never bypassed by a tribe trait. (A research exists that helps bypass shelters somewhat, but that is research, not a tribe bonus.)