Total Score = Citizen + (Value of cargo ships)/300 + Master builder + Generals + Scientists

Citizen: 1 point for each citizen you have.
Value of cargo ships: The total amount of gold you have spent on cargo ships.
Master builder: 0.01 points for each resource you spend building, so a building costing say 700 wood and 300 stone would give you 10 points.
Generals: Your military score, 0.02 points for each resource you spend building troops. When troops die you loose points here.
Scientists: 0.02 points for each normal research point you spend, this increases if you research future researches.

The score system is fairly balanced, troops give more points for resources spent, but they die frequently. Research gives more than building buildings, if you compare the costs, but the buildings will enable you to grow quicker overall. Buying ships also gives you a lot of points, and the more ships you have, the more you can raid. My advice is to try and balance it all, and exactly how you do it depends a lot on the players around you. In general though, you want to focus heavily in research the first few months till you get the important researches done, steam giants will help you a lot if you get them before most other players.

When it comes to military, unless you’re in a war, don’t build more military than you need to pillage and defend yourself with. That can mean a lot of troops or hardly any at all. If you’re in a very quiet neighborhood you don’t need much defense at all, only enough troops to raid with. You need to pay upkeep for your troops every hour, that hurts your growth, so that’s why you don’t want too many of them.

To grow fast you need to get a lot of resource income from pillaging other players. In general it’s not a good idea to pillage other players on your island, as they will hopefully help you in the future by donating to the mill and luxury resource at your island. If they don’t want to donate however, pillage them as much as possible. Have high level hideouts, both for defense and also to be able to spy on potential pillaging targets efficiently. Don’t make attacks where losses will be high, you need to both pay resources to rebuild your lost troops as well as loosing some population for a while. In general with troop building, don’t build a bunch at a time, you want to have close to max population all the time to get maximum income.

One more thing, always have your mills and luxury resources at full production. An idle citizen will only give you 3 gold per hour while a citizen working in a mill will give you at least one building material per hour. You can sell resources for 7 or more gold easily, so it’s definitely the best place to put your citizens.

A easy way to check out how much troops he has at home when he’s attacking you use to look at the number of units he’s attacking you with and his military score. Military score is the number of resources you’ve spend building your army times 0.02. A hoplite takes 70 resources to build so it’s 1.4 points, archer takes 55 resources so it’s 1.1 points, etc. If you’re attacked by say 100 hoplites and 50 archers, that would be 140 + 55 points which equals 195 points. If his total military score is say 220 points, he can only have 220 – 195 = 25 points worth of defense left at home. He can of course have reinforcements from other players, but most often people don’t have that.

I’ve heard several times players claiming that you don’t really need war ships in Ikariam anymore once you get the occupation technology. Then you can occupy other players cities and use these as a base to launch attacks after all. I agree that it’s really usefull to be able to avoid other players fleets now and then, but you can’t depend on this strategy for 100% of your plundering.

For one, on some islands everyone has a tiny navy in their cities and then you are not able to occupy a city there without using war ships. More frequently however, there will be 3-4 small cities on the island you can occupy. Using a small city as a base to attack from is not optimal though, they often have tiny trade ports and few action points. If you have to use a long time to load resources and troops you will give the enemy more time to block your city with his fleet, and then the resources will be lost.

Even if you manage to occupy great cities to plunder from frequently not having a fleet of your own still makes you very vulnerable to harbor blockades in general. It’s really easy for your enemy then to just put a few war ships in front of each of your cities, and stop you from both moving troops and resources around. With no fleet of your own it might take you a long time to get help from allies to lift these blockades, and you may end up loosing lots of both troops and resources over this time. My general advice is to have at least 3 war ships for every city that you have for the first few months of the game, and just keep increasing it as your neighbours do so.

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!