Wine and plunder strategy
This strategy is for the players who prefer to go around with huge armies and plunder their neighbors instead of doing it the boring way and produce resources yourself. This is how I play the game usually, and it’s the best way to grow quickly and dominate your area. This works best when you’re on a fairly new server, else you’ll just have some player way larger than you come and crush your army sooner or later.
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.
Poor strategy, unless you want to be locked in 2 or 3 towns. You need marble to grow up.