Now I go on with the carpenter, forester’s house and academy. I want to get about 10 levels on the carpenter and 4-5 levels of the other buildings before I go on reducing corruption more. I also always increase town hall as population is getting close to max. If you’re in a dangerous area, increase the hideout and wall level also at this point. I now alternate between reducing corruption and increasing the other buildings levels. When corruption is only 20% or less I fill up the rest of the city with useful buildings.

For your whole empire you only need one workshop. You want this to be in a city on a crystal island and you also want to build an optician in this city. You will use this city for both unit upgrades and buying research. I like to have 2 barracks and 2 trading posts in my whole empire, maybe 3 if you’re really spread out and have many villages. The rest of your villages should have these buildings in order of importance:

• Town hall.
• Palace/residence.
• City wall.
• Tavern.
• Hideout.
• Academy.
• Trading port.
• Carpenter.
• Forrester’s house.
• Wine press.
• Museum.
• Alchemist’s tower/glassblower/stonemason/winery.
• Shipyard.
• Architect’s office.
• Extra warehouse.

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.

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.