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.

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!

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.

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.