In most cases, the expansion slots are also present at the back or the sides of the machine, which makes it very easy for the user to connect any additional peripherals with ease. These slots are more commonly found in desktops, since the CPU unit has the space to house many such slots. PCI slots were the first physically-incompatible expansion ports to directly squeeze ISA off the motherboard. At first, motherboards were largely ISA, including a few PCI slots. By the mid-1990s, the two slot types were roughly balanced, and ISA slots soon were in the minority of consumer systems.

Both expansions are not really needed, mostly for convenience. Including the exhib u allrdy have 12 blueprint slots, thats enough imho. 200 storage space should also be enough for a while if u dont keep all the white items (sell them high and buy them low if needed). For the description, +1 for more detailed info.
Expansion slots fill the need for that ability. However, interfaces such as USB and Ethernet are already replacing some of the expansion slots. For instance, you can have network attached storage via Ethernet and USB attached storage for Terabyte drives already.

Conquering is an important part of your expansion. To remain at the top of the overall player rank, you need to conquer more often than you found new villages. Without conquering, you will find it difficult to keep up.

Conquering is done using chiefs (or senators and chieftains). A village is conquered by attacking with chiefs to lower its loyalty. When loyalty reaches zero, the village is conquered.

The Advanced Basics

Before explaining further, there are some basic rules about conquering you need to understand. I call them basic but yet they are not so basic:

A Capital cannot be conquered. A player’s only village also cannot be conquered.
You need culture points in order to conquer a village. Without the necessary culture points, your chief will simply do nothing. He cannot even lower loyalty.
A village cannot be conquered while the Palace or Residence still exists.
You can send the chiefs and the cleaner and catas ALL in a single wave. The catas will destroy the Residence and the chiefs will still do their job.
You must use the Attack button. The Raid button will not work during a conquer.
Once a village is conquered, it will take the tribe of the conquerer.
A conquered village will lose its walls, all researches in the Academy, all troop upgrades in the armoury and blacksmith, and all troops trained from the conquered village will be dissolved.
The conquered village will inherit any used expansion slots. For example, if the conquered village had founded two other villages, then two expansion slots would have been used. When you conquer this village, the expansion slots will still have been used.
In order to free up the expansion slot, you need to zero pop (cata down) the village that it had founded. If the player deletes, the expansion slot will also be freed.
When a village is conquered, the chief that conquered the village disappears. One expansion slot from the village where the chief is trained is then used up.
Any troops that accompanied the chief will stay in the newly conquered village as reinforcements. They will eat crop from the new village until they are sent back.
You can’t inherit non-relevant structures. For example, if a Roman conquered a Gaul village, and it has built the trapper. Since Romans can’t build trappers, then it will be demolished once it is conquered.
Population penalty. If a player with a higher population conquers a player with a lower population, then a population penalty is applied. This applies for players with a higher total population, NOT the individual population of the conquering villages.
All structures, including resource fields in the conquered village will be leveled down by one level. If a structure is already at level one, then it will not be affected.
Population penalty does not apply to a Natar World Wonder village. Natar structures will not level down.
The loyalty of the conquered village starts at zero. Build Residence or Palace to increase the loyalty. The higher the Residence or Palace, the faster the loyalty increases.
You can conquer your own village. Supposing village A has founded village B and village C. So two expansion slots in village A would have been used.
You can use village B to conquer village C. This will free up one expansion slot in village A, and village B will have one used expansion slot. This effectively transfers the expansion slot to another of your own village.
Remember that village C will lose all researches, upgrades and troops, even if you had conquered your own village.
This measure is used only when accidental conquers occur. For example, if village X has 3 chiefs and accidentally conquered a village. Then you might want to re-conquer your own village to free up the expansion slot to retrain the chief in village X.
You can conquer your own village at anytime, even if you do not have enough culture points.
You do not need a free expansion slot in the Palace or Residence in order to conquer a village.
You need a free expansion slot in order to train chiefs or settlers. Once the chiefs have been trained, your Palace or Residence may be demolished or destroyed, but your chiefs will still function just as well.

How Loyalty Works

When a chief attacks a village to lower its loyalty, there are a number of factors that influence how many loyalty points it will lower. The factors are:

The attacking tribe. At base value, Roman senators are more effective in that they lower between 20 to 30 percent of loyalty points. The Teuton chief and Gaul chieftain lowers between 20 to 25 percent.
Great celebration, whether they are held in the attacking village or defending village. A Great Celebration held in the attacking village will cause each chief to gain up to a 5 percent increase in loyalty attack points.
Likewise, if a Great Celebration is held in the defending village, then the effectiveness of each attacking chief is lowered by up to 5 percent. However use this only a guideline because sometimes a Great Celebration may alter effectiveness by only 3 or 4 points per chief.
Player population. If the attacker has a higher population than the defender, then the defender is granted a defensive bonus. This is also known as “morale bonus”. The bigger the difference in population, the higher the morale bonus.
If the attacker has a lower population, no bonus is granted to either attacker or defender. The population difference is calculated on the player’s total population, NOT on the population of individual villages.
The number of points that morale bonus plays can be quite significant. The worst I have ever seen is when my Teuton chief lowered loyalty by only 11 points when attacking a player about ten times smaller than my population.
The highest I ever had was around 22 or 23 points.
A random factor. Travian adds in some excitement by throwing in a random factor to every loyalty attack. You may send 2 chiefs to attack from two different villages – and yet each attack lowers a different amount of loyalty points. The random factor can run anywhere from 1 to 5 points.

When conquering villages, you need to estimate how many loyalty points your chief will lower.

As a rough estimate for the tribes, without any Great Celebration :-

Teuton and Gauls

against equal or higher population players – over 20 points
against slightly lower population players (ie. 90%) – below 20 points
against even lower population players (50% to 90%) – around 15 points
against lower than that – 11 to 14 points

For Romans, the same estimates apply, except add between 2 to 4 points to the estimated values.

Again, I need to qualify myself. These are only estimates, because you can get different values due to the random factor added by Travian. Hopefully the defender does not hold a Great Celebration, as you can see how that will upset your estimates.

A Practical Guide

If you play the game aggressively, one of the challenges you will face is running out of villages to conquer. Because of your aggressiveness, you would have cleared your neighborhood of any threats, and by doing so, left with limited choices of who to conquer.

That is why you need to keep that in mind. Plan ahead and don’t overkill the area by killing everybody in sight and also dry up your own hunting grounds in the process. Spare some for your future growth.

Don’t stop other players from settling near you. Let them settle, and then wait until they have grown enough so you may conquer them.

Tell your alliance leader a

How Many Expansion Slots Do I Need