Today morning I was in for a rude shock when I opened up my Delhi Times to see those dreadful words printed across the front page.

Guys are SCUM (with even bigger fonts)

Then they went on to explain that “Girls would agree – that’s even more true now. SCUM is a neologism that means Self-Centered Urban Male.” This little explanation made it look even worse because it is claiming it to be true! I honestly expected it to be some kind of a joke, just a good headline to get people excited. If there is a joke in there, I fail to notice.

Or maybe the writer expected us guys to behave the way we almost always do. Being a guy I should have laughed at it without giving it a second thought instead of getting offended. But what the heck…I don’t want to join the PIL bandwagon and demand an official apology (read 15 minutes of fame). I don’t want any “pangaa” with the largest news feeder of the country. But I can’t help but wonder, since when an urban male became a Scum? And what if there is a neologism for a Self-Centered Urban Female is something as demeaning as scum, say WHORE. I bet not one in the country have the balls to even think of putting out something like that.

I am an urban guy. I don’t know any of my urban guy friends beat up their girlfriends. Instead they wait patiently for their partners to get ready in just five minutes. When a guy waits for his girlfriend, it is chivalry. Make a girl wait for actually five minutes (exactly 300 seconds; not to be confused with the female version), you get the tag of being “rude” and “bad dating/husband material.” A poor guy goes through salsa classes, peppy chick flicks, PMS tantrums, and a host of difficult questions like “Am I looking fat?” only to be named Scum? That’s unfair.

It is even unfair that we are supposed to put down the toilet seat after use. Can’t the girl simply pull the seat down instead of complaining in rims and rims of cheap newspaper?

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I am a big fan of the online browser game Travian and have been playing it for quite some time now. It is a war game where a player chooses among three tribes – Roman, Gaul or Teuton and start building his/her village and troops. One has to build different civilian and military buildings as well as resource fields (Wheat, Wood, Clay and Iron). The manual gives all the information one needs and the starting training quests are quite helpful too in learning to play the game as well as earning some extra resources as well as 35 Gold. So, I won’t delve much about the basic but share a few war strategies that I’ve picked up.

High level Cranny/Wall/Residence:
To any veteran players, this will seem as too trivial to mention but then many players miss this basic point. Players end up as farms because the raiders get away with precious resources. If you are playing a defensive game, it is better to build two crannies to start with (one for Gaul as their cranny capacity is twice than that of Roman and Teuton). The idea is to be able to hide as much resource as your warehouse and granary can hold. One start with 1200 unit storage capacity, so to hide it from raiding armies, your cranny should be able to hide about 1600 units. This will take care of Teuton’s ability to see 1/3rd resources hidden in crannies.

As you grow and upgrade your warehouse and granary capacity, I reckon you upgrade/build new crannies. Along with it, build city wall and residence/palace. Higher level palace/residence and wall gives decent defense. When your raider gets nothing for their raids and end up losing one or two soldiers every time, he will eventually leave you alone.


Dodging:
For those playing an aggressive game (esp Teuton) and raid other villages for resources, their army is their bread and butter. When someone attacks you, it is always better to dodge their attacks rather than defending them (unless you’ve grown fond of the rat given by the Quest Master). Send your army out to raid someone else when you see an attack coming. Make sure that you don’t give away any resource to your raider. Use up any extra resources that your cranny is unable to hide. Remember, the raider is going to use the resources to build his/her army and eventually use it against you.

Before going offline, send your army to raid someone who is weak and is far away from you. Supposedly, you are going to be offline for eight hours, send out your armies to raid some village who is about four hours from you. That ways, by the time you get back online, you’ll have your army at your disposal and don’t have to wait for them to come back. I prefer small Teuton villages for this purpose because their initial defenses sucks – big time!

Counterattack
So, the raider is getting onto your nerves and you want to retaliate. In almost all cases its the Teutons raiding Romans & Gauls. Teutons' initial army unit - the clubbie sucks big time defense-wise. An experienced Teuton will generally dodge your one off attack. The best way to get his army pants down is to counterattack. This takes some active playing and a fast internet connection because seconds matter in this move.

Say Mr. X from village Y has launched an attack against you. First, check out how much time does your army takes to reach village Y. Then check out how much time would Mr. X’s army will take to get back to his village. You can use many tools to calculate the timings. Plan your attack after one second of when Mr. X’s army reaches back to his village.

This works best when your army’s speed is less than that of the attacker so you can send your army well before the attacking party reaches your village. Things can be a bit tricky if both your and Mr. X’s army takes the same time. If you are to send your army after some time of the attack on you, your army will have to withstand the attack…right? But there’s a way around it too.

Supposedly it takes 30 minutes for Mr. X’s army to reach you and vice versa. Send your army to attack before 29 seconds of Mr. X’s attack on your village. Call them back after 15 seconds. That way, your army will take a total of 30 seconds to go some distance and come back (15 to go and 15 while coming back) and will be back to your village 1 second after the attack of Mr. X. All you have to do now is send your army hot in wheels of Mr. X’s giving him no more than 2-3 seconds of response time.
(I don't know if it makes any sense to you at all :-\)

Attacking with rams and catapults:
At a later stage of your game, when you have rams and catapults, you have the power of razing somebody’s village to ground. I have many friends who choose to attack random target until the village population becomes zero. But this is a long process as Catas take a hell lot of time to travel. It happened with me once when I was being attacked by some big player with Catas. But soon after the attacks, I’d build back everything. The guy got impatient that he had to send army with his catas which he otherwise would have used to farm other villages (he got absolutely no resources from me). After 2 days he got careless and started sending only Catas. All I had to do is ask for my friend’s little help to take down his defenseless Catas.

There are many other ways of carrying out fatal assault on a village. I am sharing the one strategy that worked for me. In the first wave, I send my first wave with 80% infantry, 25% of my cavalry and all my Rams. Second wave of attack is with cavalry that land in a few seconds after the first wave. Try to send the Catas with a few infantry after a few seconds of sending the first wave (as Catas takes almost the same time to travel as Rams). That ways, the defender will have minimum chances of dodging the first two waves and defend the Cata attacks. Target his/her Main building, Rally point and Market first time around. Then target his crop production – Granary, Bakery and Grain mill. After that, target his croplands – this way, he can not create new troops (lack of crop), buy it from the market or rebuild his infrastructure immediately (Low main building level means his progress will be slow). Keep raiding him as frequently as possible. He will soon be frustrated and delete his account…if not, you have a new farm!

This post has already become awfully long. You can find some more insight here

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