Travian & Joining an Alliance

"Ok, now that you've founded your second city, you're starting to enter a new phase in the game where your priorities are going to shift a little bit. You can't count on crannies to hide your resources anymore, and you've got to find a different means of protection. One of those is to have friends. Now I personally don't really like to have friends. It's more fun for me to beat up on smaller players, but then I realized that other people can be useful. And that's where the alliance function comes in. When you join an alliance, you need to have a level one embassy, which you can build by clicking on any of those building buttons in any of your cities. Once you have done that, hopefully somebody who is already in an alliance will send you an alliance invitation. And you can just accept it. Usually you can find, message someone in game to ask to be accepted into their alliance. When joining an alliance, just like when joining any social circle, your goal is to find the most powerful and useful people to be your friends. So look at the alliance rankings screen on the fourth button, and join the most powerful alliance that you can."