Now I go on with the carpenter, forester’s house and academy. I want to get about 10 levels on the carpenter and 4-5 levels of the other buildings before I go on reducing corruption more. I also always increase town hall as population is getting close to max. If you’re in a dangerous area, increase the hideout and wall level also at this point. I now alternate between reducing corruption and increasing the other buildings levels. When corruption is only 20% or less I fill up the rest of the city with useful buildings.

For your whole empire you only need one workshop. You want this to be in a city on a crystal island and you also want to build an optician in this city. You will use this city for both unit upgrades and buying research. I like to have 2 barracks and 2 trading posts in my whole empire, maybe 3 if you’re really spread out and have many villages. The rest of your villages should have these buildings in order of importance:

• Town hall.
• Palace/residence.
• City wall.
• Tavern.
• Hideout.
• Academy.
• Trading port.
• Carpenter.
• Forrester’s house.
• Wine press.
• Museum.
• Alchemist’s tower/glassblower/stonemason/winery.
• Shipyard.
• Architect’s office.
• Extra warehouse.

Total Score = Citizen + (Value of cargo ships)/300 + Master builder + Generals + Scientists

Citizen: 1 point for each citizen you have.
Value of cargo ships: The total amount of gold you have spent on cargo ships.
Master builder: 0.01 points for each resource you spend building, so a building costing say 700 wood and 300 stone would give you 10 points.
Generals: Your military score, 0.02 points for each resource you spend building troops. When troops die you loose points here.
Scientists: 0.02 points for each normal research point you spend, this increases if you research future researches.

The score system is fairly balanced, troops give more points for resources spent, but they die frequently. Research gives more than building buildings, if you compare the costs, but the buildings will enable you to grow quicker overall. Buying ships also gives you a lot of points, and the more ships you have, the more you can raid. My advice is to try and balance it all, and exactly how you do it depends a lot on the players around you. In general though, you want to focus heavily in research the first few months till you get the important researches done, steam giants will help you a lot if you get them before most other players.

When it comes to military, unless you’re in a war, don’t build more military than you need to pillage and defend yourself with. That can mean a lot of troops or hardly any at all. If you’re in a very quiet neighborhood you don’t need much defense at all, only enough troops to raid with. You need to pay upkeep for your troops every hour, that hurts your growth, so that’s why you don’t want too many of them.

To grow fast you need to get a lot of resource income from pillaging other players. In general it’s not a good idea to pillage other players on your island, as they will hopefully help you in the future by donating to the mill and luxury resource at your island. If they don’t want to donate however, pillage them as much as possible. Have high level hideouts, both for defense and also to be able to spy on potential pillaging targets efficiently. Don’t make attacks where losses will be high, you need to both pay resources to rebuild your lost troops as well as loosing some population for a while. In general with troop building, don’t build a bunch at a time, you want to have close to max population all the time to get maximum income.

One more thing, always have your mills and luxury resources at full production. An idle citizen will only give you 3 gold per hour while a citizen working in a mill will give you at least one building material per hour. You can sell resources for 7 or more gold easily, so it’s definitely the best place to put your citizens.

Risk on a spying mission can never be lower than 5% and never higher than 95%. The formula is:

Risk % = MBR + CR + SOD * 5 + THL *2 – TTL * 2 – AHL * 2

MBR: Mission base risk.
CR: Current risk.
SOD: Spies on defense.
THL: Target hideout level.
TTL: Target town hall level.
AHL: Agressor hideout level.

Mission base risk for some common missions.
Infiltrate Town: 5%
Spy Tresure Chamber: 24%
Inspect Warehouse: 30%
Recall spy: 30%
Spy on research: 40%
Spy online status : 50%
Spy on garrison: 70%

If you play around with this formula for a bit you’ll really see how important it is to have high level hideouts. Most players won’t bother attacking you if they have to waste tons of spies checking out your warehouse and army. Intelligence is really important in Ikariam for sure.

I’ve heard several times players claiming that you don’t really need war ships in Ikariam anymore once you get the occupation technology. Then you can occupy other players cities and use these as a base to launch attacks after all. I agree that it’s really usefull to be able to avoid other players fleets now and then, but you can’t depend on this strategy for 100% of your plundering.

For one, on some islands everyone has a tiny navy in their cities and then you are not able to occupy a city there without using war ships. More frequently however, there will be 3-4 small cities on the island you can occupy. Using a small city as a base to attack from is not optimal though, they often have tiny trade ports and few action points. If you have to use a long time to load resources and troops you will give the enemy more time to block your city with his fleet, and then the resources will be lost.

Even if you manage to occupy great cities to plunder from frequently not having a fleet of your own still makes you very vulnerable to harbor blockades in general. It’s really easy for your enemy then to just put a few war ships in front of each of your cities, and stop you from both moving troops and resources around. With no fleet of your own it might take you a long time to get help from allies to lift these blockades, and you may end up loosing lots of both troops and resources over this time. My general advice is to have at least 3 war ships for every city that you have for the first few months of the game, and just keep increasing it as your neighbours do so.

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.

In your other cities you only produce wine when you’re offline, and only enough wine to keep your tavern at full speed. The reason is to stop people from getting anything when they attack you back when you’re offline. When you’re online you can produce stuff in all your cities if you want, and extra resources needed for building will be sent from your capital.

The reason you only want wine cities is explained pretty well in the wine article here. Basically it’s so that you can recover quickly, always be at full population and not loose anything when being attacked. You will probably get a lot of enemies using this strategy, but it’s not really that much they can do to you unless a bunch of them band together, but hopefully you yourself will be in a good alliance by that point. The only city you will have resources in when offline is your capital, and here you will have your whole army and a huge city wall.

You need to be pretty active to pull this off, but to be successful in Ikariam you really need to be active period. This strategy is obviously not for all, some people just like playing the game like sim city and that’s fine by me. I’ll write more on plunder in general, what too look for and so on in another article. Feel free to leave comments or questions.