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.