How can an attacker send so many troops?

In Travian there are a number of different village layouts, everyone starts with a 444-6 village which has 4 fields of Wood, Clay and Iron and 6 fields of wheat.  When settling more villages there are other combinations available – some have less of one resource and more of another, for example you many find one with only 3 clay but 5 iron. There are also 7 crop villages (which will have 1 less of one of the resources as well as 9 crop (3 each of the others) and 15 crop (1 each of the others).

Obviously the more crop you produce, the more troops you can hold in that village, so the experienced players will tend to settle the 15 crop villages quickly.

On a standard speed server  a 15 crop village with all fields at level 10 will produce 3000 crop per hour, but we can build both a flour mill and a bakery, which each give a 25% bonus taking our crop to 4500 per hour.

Then we have oases, some oasis give a 50% increase in crop and you can take 3 oases per village, so if 3 of these oases are owned then the crop will be 9000 per hour. Finally we have the 25% crop bonus that can be bought with gold, bringing the total crop per hour to 11250.

Each building in your village consumes some crop so we can deduct between 500 and 1000 from that total. Therefore the maximum number of troops in any village should be between 10250 and 10750. (I will explain capitals later)

Troops consume different amounts of crop per hour – all foot troops consume 1, whereas horse troops consume between 2 and 4.

So how do people get 20000 troops in a single village?

This is easier than in seems. I have my 15 crop village with a population of 1000, so my “Spare crop” would be 10250 (with all the bonuses above)

The 15 crop village is the middle village on the map, and all occupied villages around it are owned by the same player. All these villages will only be used to “support” the 15 crop village. Every spare resource will be sent to the “Cropper” to build troops.

Once the cropper is full of troops, then some will be sent to the adjacent village as a reinforcement, that way they eat the crop from the village they are in.

When the time comes to send out the big attacks, they just withdraw all troops back to the owning village and send the troops out on the attack. Whist the troops are attacking (and until they return from the attack) they will be fed from the owning village, but the adjacent village are now empty of troops so will produce a lot of crop, this can easily be sent to the cropper to keep the granary full whist the troops are there.

Looking at the picture above the 15 crop village could hold 10000 troops and the other 7 villages around 3000 troops each so that means over 30000 troops can be sent out from a single village.

In the capital, all fields can be built above level 10. If the owner holds a Great Warehouse Artefact then level 21 fields are a possibility (you would need 11 great warehouses and 3 great granaries to do this!) If someone did get level 21 fields then the total crop (before deducting population) would be 171563. So a 150000 attack force is a possibility.

(The troops above have been hidden for obvious reasons!)

An attack force of this size is commonly referred to as “A Hammer” whereas a, much rarer, defence force would be called “An Anvil”