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!

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.