IkariamGuides.com » Starting guides

Start plundering inactives early

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:53:30 +0000

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.

I suggest checking your island and your neighbor islands frequently so that you are the first one to notice when someones godly protection has run out. Trust me, your active neighbors will be looking for this as well, so don’t be lazy when it comes to this. It will really help you speed up things early on if you manage to plunder a few of these inactives that come out of protection.

Plundering the barbarian village

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:42:48 +0000

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.

The barbarian population grows as n^3, where n is the number of times that you have attacked it. The resources in the village also increases, but not nearly as quickly. I usually don’t bother attacking it more than 3 times, since after that it will have a city wall and you need rams to break it. On the third attack you will get 500 wood, 500 sulphur and 500 crystal and you’ll need close to 100 spearmen.

You can only attack the barbarian village ten times, and when it reaches level 10 it will have 1000 barbarians in it, if you really want to waste your troops getting it this high. Even with 1000 barbarians in it you will only get 1000 of each resource, not worth it at all. Anyways, hope you found this post useful, feel free to leave comments or questions. Happy plundering!

Colonization

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 05:37:07 +0000

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.

If you’re a peaceful player look at which resource you need the most and build it on that type of island if there is one close, for a peaceful player that trades a lot it can be a good idea to spread your villages out a bit to cover larger areas with your trade offices, but there are also minuses in doing this like lots of time spent on moving troops and resources around. For aggressive players I think settling the closest wine island is definitely the way to go.

To found the actual city you need 40 idle citizens, 9000 gold and 1250 wood. I suggest sending max resources with extra ships too, so you can start building up your new city right away, that is 1500 of each type. Before you get a governor’s residence built there will be corruption, so I suggest using all your citizens there for taxes until you get the governor’s residence built up.

Starting guide – the first few steps

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 04:52:25 +0000

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.

Keep upgrading your academy to level 3 and keep putting more scientists in there, no matter if this is a new or and old server you should follow this route. Some people like to get the barracks and port before higher level academy, but I do not agree with that at all, you don’t even have enough money for a single ship and you don’t want to loose population training troops this early either. Anyways, next technologies you want to research is in the economy category, it’s conservation, pulley, wealth and wine culture. Keep upgrading town hall some more levels as well as the academy.

Where you go from here depends a lot on how old the server is, what your luxury resource is and what your island looks like overall. I’ll talk more about this in future guides.