IK Hints

Revision as of 14:48, 4 March 2008

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Starting Out

Be prepared to spend an hour or 2 online. As build times are quite short and you want things to whip along.

You start with a town hall. The first thing you will need to do is assign people to work in the forest. "Click on show island" then "click on the wood pile" Assign the max people you can without making your town income negative.

As soon as you get enough wood. Build an Academy. This allows you to increase your knowledge build new buildings/units/etc. Click on your Academy Assign the max people you can without making your town income negative. What you research depends on your playing style. But I would highly suggest you concentrate on WEALTH on the Economy stream. This will allow you to produce Resources.

You now need to check on it often. And assign any new population to the woodpile or research.

A trading port will allow you to send and receive ships with trading goods. You can start trading wood. But it's plentyful and not many people do.

If things are hostile, you might consider building a barracks to train troops. A Warehouse comes in handy as well

You will now need to keep an eye on your town hall. At the start your population will grow at the rate of 3 an hour. So you need to keep your town hall upgraded enough to hold your population growth.

Also in the town hall there is a population satisfaction rating. It's stuck at 3 when you start. But (from memory) after lvl 3. It will begin to drop. To keep it on or above 3. You need to have researched "Wine Press". After that you can build a tavern. At a tavern you need to set the no of wine you serve an hour. Wine is a resource you need to make or trade for

Production/Trading

Putting people into wood or luxury production is far better than have them make 4 gold. Wood costs you 4 gold to make and sells for 10 gold. Marble/Wine/Crystal costs 8 sells for about 20 gold

Increasing Population Growth Rate

Your population growth is dependent on the satisfaction of your citizens. You have the following options to keep your citizens in good spirits:

You can start by building a Tavern, to build this, you must have researched Wine Press.

The tavern gives you the ability to serve wine. Each upgrade to the tavern increases the amount of wine that can be served. The served wine is deducted hourly from the town´s resources.

If you do not have wine on your island, you will have to trade/buy it off someone that does.

The other building you can use is a Museum.

You can exhibit cultural goods from other players in museums. To be able to do this you must first enter into a cultural goods treaty with another player. As soon as the treaty is signed you can determine how many cultural goods should be exhibited. Each museum upgrade allows you to exhibit one more exhibit, and with that a higher bonus on the satisfaction level in the town.

You can also research Holiday (Under Economy) to increase the population growth rate.

• Tip: If your satisfaction level falls into the negative, frustrated citizens will start to leave your town to try their luck in the unknown!

Adding a New Colony

New colonies are absolutely vital to grow your empire. They should be placed on an island nearby, with a resource which you need (often marble if you didn't start on a marble island).

Whats needed for a new Colony?

Have researched Expansion (Seafaring) Construct a Palace (635 wood for first level)

Have the following resources:

1. People: 40
2. Gold: 12000
3. Building material: 1250
4. 5 Trading ships

Each new colony costs the same amount. However the palace upgrades become very expensive.

Currently it is not possible to upgrade your palace past level 3, because you cannot store enough resources in the warehouse to perform another upgrade.

Pillaging

The easiest form of pillaging is to send 1-swordsman attacks against inactive players with 0 defence.

To work out approximately how much defence someone has, search the Generals highscore list. First find a town you're interested in, and the name of the owner. Then go to highscores, and select "generals" from the dropdown tab, and hit "submit". If you don't do this first then it doesn't work.

Now type the name of the owner into the "player name" box and hit "search". This appears to be a subsearch of whatever you have in the main box. Zero means zero defence, and one swordsman will break. If they only have a couple of hundred points then around 10 swordsmen should break.

For the larger attacks (i.e. not against 0-defence inactives) scope out one particular island with a neede resource, searching for each town's owner in the Generals highscore list. Choose 2-3 fat targets, based on size and military strength. Also if you see any level 3-5 inactives then check if they have any military and farm away.

After your spies are in place, wait a bit until the chance of detection falls to 5%.

Then in your Hideout, click the name of each town you sent a spy to. This gives you a view of the town.

Check out the level of the trading port and the warehouse, as these are what determine how much stuff you can pillage. A level 2 warehosue lets you pillage 600 goods/attack, level 3 is around 1100/attack and lvl 4 is around 1800/attack. It's not really worth attacking people with a level 1 warehouse, which only allows 200/attack, unless they are 0-defence inactives. While you are here also check out the level of barracks and shipyard and town walls.

Then go back to the hideout page, and send each spy on a mission to "spy warehouse". This lets you know how much stuff they have in total. Remember that they'll have a warehouse which will protect some of their goods.

Then decide which one (or two) are the best targets, and approximately how many times you can attack them to clean them out (assuming you are multi-tapping people. This isn't a very nice thing to do).

One limiting factor is your number of trade ships. If you raid successfully but have no available ships, you get nothing.

I've been sending out around 15 swords/5 phalanxes/3 rams against 1000-general points towns and winning them all. I lost one where I only sent 10 swords. It may be worth spying military levels for anyone with more defence than that. Also as everyone develops their colonies the Generals points will become less indicative of how much they have at any one town.

Also remember that if they have ships your attack force won't be able to get through. Where you suspect they might have ships, send out a fleet of war ships to blockade at the same time as your attack. If your attacks gets turned back then you have ships on the way, and just resend your attack once they arrive. If your attack gets through then cancel the blockade.