Being an active pillager is definitely the fastest way to grow, especially in the beginning. You’ll notice many accounts going inactive, and keep attacking them as often as possible, not more than 6 times every 24 hours though, in case they suddenly log on and report you for bashing.

Usually pillaging active player on your own island is not a good idea, it’s better for you that they grow as long as they donate frequently. An exeption to this would be players who don’t defend themselves and get looted by people from other islands frequently, it’s better that you get the resources than someone on another island does.
It’s important to have high level hideouts so that you can spy many possible targets at the same time, I usually just send one to each target and spy on their resources. If they have a lot I then spy on their military. It’s important to remember to blokade their harbour if they have war ships. Early on I usually don’t bother pillaging people with war ships, later on pretty much everyone does though. In the starting weeks of a new server you can usually just check out their military score and don’t waste spies spying on their military.

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.