Second reason is too keep population growth high, a happy population grows more quickly, and during times of war when you need to recruit troops quickly it’s very important to be able to get a high population growth rate. Another thing when it comes to wine and war is that it’s much much harder to beat down a player with lots of wine cities, it’s almost impossible. Even if he loses all his troops he’ll be able to recover real quick since he’ll still have max population in his cities, he’ll be producing and consuming wine even if you plunder his other resources after all. A non wine city will have a much harder time keeping it’s population if it’s being plundered often since it depends on getting its wine sent from other cities.

If you’re in a peaceful neighborhood, being a peaceful player that and just sticking to yourself I guess having a mix of all kind of resources is ok, but for an active plundering player that risks being attacked back during night, wine is definitely the superior resource. If you worry about raids during night just set wine production to the same as you consume, stop producing all other resources, and you’ll wake up in the morning with lots of  gold and no losses. I’ll write more on this in my wine and plunder article.

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.

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.