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.

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.

When you create an account in Ikariam you are randomly placed on an island with up to 15 other players. You start out with a little town which you start out expanding and eventually you can build more towns on other islands. You can train an army to attack other players with and you can also research new technologies. There are alliances, lots of buildings, units and ships, quite a fun game actually. I’ve played all the browser games I mentioned before, and I definitely think this is the best among them.

The game is free to play so there is really no reason not to sign up and check it out, you can either play at your own country’s server if there is one, or you can play at the international .org server. This is where the speed server is, a server which goes much faster than the standard game and is real fun to play.