IkariamGuides.com

Being an active pillager is definitely the fastest way to grow, especially in the beginning. You’ll notice many accounts going inactive, and keep attacking them as often as possible, not more than 6 times every 24 hours though, in case they suddenly log on and report you for bashing.

Usually pillaging active player on your own island is not a good idea, it’s better for you that they grow as long as they donate frequently. An exeption to this would be players who don’t defend themselves and get looted by people from other islands frequently, it’s better that you get the resources than someone on another island does.
It’s important to have high level hideouts so that you can spy many possible targets at the same time, I usually just send one to each target and spy on their resources. If they have a lot I then spy on their military. It’s important to remember to blokade their harbour if they have war ships. Early on I usually don’t bother pillaging people with war ships, later on pretty much everyone does though. In the starting weeks of a new server you can usually just check out their military score and don’t waste spies spying on their military.

You really have to get some trade ships and start plundering the inactive players around you early on. Many of them will have had those first 30 workers getting them lumber for several days, and when the godly protection runs out you want to be ready with a few spearmen and trade ships to take that lumber. Some of them will have as much as 1,500 lumber which is a lot early in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Just thought I’d take a quick look at the miracles that were implemented with version 3.2 of Ikariam. There have been many complaints in the various forums about them, people saying most of them are pretty useless. The fact that you need a building space for a temple makes quite a few players that already have all of their villages full of high level buildings kind of upset. Also many players set up their cities according to how the old wonders worked, and now want to be allowed to move them. Read the rest of this entry »

Plundering the barbarian village is something you should do very early in the game, getting the 500 lumber from the first attack will really speed up things for you early on. If you’ve read my first few steps guide you could consider this short article here as a part 2. What you need to plunder the village is one trade ship and three spearmen. The spearmen only costs 30 wood each and it’s definitely worth training them to get the wood that’s there at this point.

The barbarian city grows each time you attack it, so you can only attack it once with your 3 spearmen. The next time you need 13-15 spearmen to do the job. On the next attack you will get both 500 wood and 500 sulphur however, which can be very usefull if you can manage to trade the sulphur for something else, either with other players or using ambrosia. If you’re ready to use ambrosia I suggest you do this, use the 500 wood from the first attack to train 12 spearmen more. Remember though, always send enough cargo ships, for the 2. attack you’ll need 2! In the third attack 40+ spearmen will work, the more you send the less losses you have, and you’ll also need an extra trade ship now, 3 total. Read the rest of this entry »

This strategy is for the players who prefer to go around with huge armies and plunder their neighbors instead of doing it the boring way and produce resources yourself. This is how I play the game usually, and it’s the best way to grow quickly and dominate your area. This works best when you’re on a fairly new server, else you’ll just have some player way larger than you come and crush your army sooner or later.

Anyways, your setup is basically a capital with a huge city wall, trading post, trading port and warehouse. This city doesn’t have to be a wine city, all your other cities however should be built on islands with wine, close together is better for quick resource moving and defense. In your capital you can produce whatever you want, you’ll always have your army here when you go offline, and this will be where you store all the resources when you go offline too. Read the rest of this entry »

Wine is by far the most important resource in Ikariam, and in my opinion it’s not even close. The first reason is that once your town halls starts getting larger you need to spend wine every single hour to keep your population growing, or just to make it stable even. If your citizens don’t get enough wine they’ll get angry and start leaving your village, and you definitely don’t want that too happen. What good is a large town hall when it’s only half full. Read the rest of this entry »

In Ikariam you can quickly build your second village. All you need is to research expansion in the seafaring technology tree as well as upgrading your palace. It’s a good idea to build your second village fairly quickly in my opinion, as it will give you an income boost cause of the extra population as well access to another resource. You should really build it on a different island with a resource that you need, unless you’re using my wine and plunder strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

There is pretty much one standard way to start out with a new account in Ikariam. I’ll just go through it quickly here, this is how I do it and how most people do it. You start out by building an academy, fill it up with scientists and have them research well digging. Well digging is the thing you should start out with since it will give you room for 50 extra people right away, population is important both for taxes and wood income early.

It’ll take some time for the academy to be finished though, so just send as many workers as possible to the saw mill while you wait for this. You find the saw mill by clicking the view island button and then clicking on the pile of wood on your island. Depending on if this is a new server or not the saw mill might be at level 1 or at a higher level. The saw mills level decides max number of workers each city can have there. When the academy is finished you might have to withdraw a few workers to get enough idle population to fill the academy to the max. Academy is your main focus, you want to get that well digging technology quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re here you probably know already, but in case not here is a short description. Ikariam is a massive browser based strategy game produced by Gameforge AG. It’s similar to games like Travian, TribalWars and Evony. You could also compare it to the classic game civilization if you want to, the biggest reason being your number of opponents. There are tens of thousands of players on dozens of servers. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to IkariamGuides.com, the new strategy website for the massive browser game called Ikariam. On this site you’ll find lots of tips, strategy guides and other useful articles. I’ll also write about various tools and addons for Ikariam. I’ve been playing Ikariam for a while now, mostly on the speed servers, and been pretty successful so I hope you will find my posts here useful. Feel free to leave comments and questions, I love to get feedback.