Have you ever wondered what your old friends or foes from Travian are doing today? If your answer is yes, this series of posts will be just right for you! Today we sat down with Clemens “subcommandante” Paulusch and had a chat about good old times!
Q: Hi Clemens, thank you for taking the time! Please briefly tell our readers who you are.
A: In-game I was mainly playing as subcommandante, but in some worlds also with names like sonnenkoenig or Luca Brasi. I’ve played mostly German servers, but once I joined an Arabic server for fun. As one can imagine, that was quite difficult. We still led the ranking at one point, though. More about that later.
Q: When did you start playing and how was your Travian career? What was your recipe for success?
A: I started playing Travian in fall 2005 in world1, which I think was the 4th server after .org, .at and .com. I always played an offensive game and as far as I can remember always as a Teuton. At the time the key to success (besides some game knowledge) was mainly to be active. That’s also why the account was soon after played by two and at peak times seven players.
Q: What did Travian mean to you at the time?
A: It was a great pastime, maybe more of a time-guzzler. Travian has always been a very communicative game with a focus on team-play. And of course it was good fun.
Q: Do you still play Travian?
A: No, I stopped more than five years ago.
Q: What are the nicest memories?
A: There are quite a few of them, the most extraordinary one being an invitation from a sheik. He invited me to the Persian Gulf in 2008 to teach him and his entourage how to get better at the game. The mentality on the servers was completely different to anything I experienced on the German servers. Here multi-accounting was the exception rather than the norm (since I worked as a MH in the initial phases, when there were few automated protection systems, I am able to draw a comparison), the sheik and his team played on multiple accounts, most of them not very well. Due to the large success of Travian in the Arabic world, there wasn’t a working administration or MH structure at the time and so no one really noticed whether someone played with just one account or 15. Money wasn’t a problem either. In the six days I spent at the Gulf, at least $3,000 were spent on the accounts, mostly on NPC trades and instant completion. After a couple of attempts, my “student” then managed to win a server.
Other memories are more closely related to the game itself, such as successful conquests across half the server or having eight of ten Wonders of the World in our meta alliance. Or the situation in our old Wallace account, where we had three of the ten biggest armies of the server in our account and managed to keep them until the end.
Q: What memories are you less frond of?
A: Generally I always played successfully, so I never got any bad memories. Possibly the end of my first game round. At that time I passed on my account (top 10 for inhabitants and offensive with speed artifact) to another player a month before the end and they then really wrecked it. I had invested quite some time, it was a single-player account still, but couldn’t continue playing. That made me a bit sad afterwards.
Q: Did you ever meet friends or foes in real life?
A: A couple of them. On the one hand I always attended the Travian meeting in Diebach and on the other hand there were meetings of the different alliances. I’m still friends with a few players.
Q: What do you do nowadays?
A: I’ve got nothing to do with computer games anymore, but rather joined the family business. So now I’m trading old maps and old images from the 15th to 19th century.
Thanks for this nice interview and your time, Clemens!
We would like to continue this series. Do you remember a friend or foe from back in the day and would you like to know what they are doing today? Simply give us their name and server and we will take care of everything else!
