Fun... for a while (ikariam.org)

Member Name: ChandlerFord

Product:	ikariam.org
Date:	28/06/09 (47 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Can be free, Playable on any web browser, Lots to do at the start

Disadvantages: Players who play have too much advantage, Little to do after a couple of weeks

Ikariam is a massively multiplayer online played game in real(ish) time. You start off with a town hall at level 1 (more later) and 40 citizens on a random island. Its played via a web browser with no downloads required. There are some 3rd party add-ons that can be downloaded to help you, but as they deliver an unfair advantage most are banned. The game is available for free, but some paid options exist.

The first thing you'll need to do is set some or all of your citizens to work gathering resources. At the very start you need to set them all to work in the saw mill, creating building material, or wood to you and I. Each worker will produce 1 unit of resource per hour, and the buildings initially available to you can be produce using just wood and in small amounts.

Buildings have levels, for example the town hall at level 1 that you start with. The level of the building dictates some of the parameters of your game, your initial town hall influences your town so that it can house a maximum number of 60 citizens. Buildings can be upgraded (though sadly their appearance doesn't change) with the use of raw materials. In the first day or so, only wood will be required so upgrading the town hall is easy, allowing for a bigger population. As the levels rise, so does the requirement of raw materials to build it to the next level. Pretty soon an extra resource is required... generally marble. Here is my first criticism of the game, each island has wood and another resource, so players on an island with marble have a big advantage.

An important building to construct early is the academy. At level 1 it can accommodate 8 scientists, so it will need expanding. Here you can research 4 paths of knowledge: Economy, Science, Military and Seafaring. Start with Economy, but be prepared to switch paths on a regular basis to ensure you can compete with the players around you.

Finances are a big part of the game. Each citizen pays 3 gold an hour in taxes, unless that citizen works for you! If you assign a citizen to work gathering resources, your income drops by 3 gold. Later in the game, a trading post can be constructed, and you decide how much to sell each resource at. Bear in mind that it has cost you 3 gold per unit in effect so the absolute minimum you'll want to charge is 4 unless you're really desperate for cash. Scientists cost even more, not only do you lose the income, their research costs money. Each scientist, therefore, cost you around 9 gold an hour in lost tax and expenditure. The 3rd profession is military, including doctors, cooks, and ship crews as well as army. Again these workers are paid a wage, differing on their exact training.

The early aim of the game is to set up colonies on other islands so that you are pretty much self sufficient. This can be done relatively easily until the 3rd colony, then it gets expensive!

At some point you will be in a position whereby you need a lot of a resource to progress. Here you have 3 options:

1) Wait for days until your workers gather enough resource.
2) Use your trading post and trade ships to buy and collect resources
3) Send your army, and possibly navy, to someone else's town and pillage.

Option 1 is very boring and will have you playing the game less and less as time goes on, so really you need to go for the other 2... here's where the multiplayer element comes in... and with it the challenge. If you pillage your way to progress too much you'll find that even small towns have powerful allies, and you'll be on the receiving end of some retribution... all the way up to occupation of your town by another army. Retribution is pretty much guaranteed as some players make treaties with each other and further form alliances. On the other hand, if you buy too much in, you'll constantly be short of gold.

So there's the basis of the game, I don't want to write a guide! One last thing to cover is the paid options I mentioned at the start. You can buy an extra resource called ambrosia, which can not be traded or pillaged, but can be used to open advantages in the game. One advantage is to be able to ship resources using mercenary vessels, leaving your fleet available for pillaging or trade. Another is to give a boost to resource gathering of 20%. Also you can trade one resource for another on a 1:1 basis, so you can turn the least useful resource, wine, into the most scarce, marble. As you need lots of marble pretty soon in the game, this gives players who pay a massive advantage. Makers Gameforge have to make a profit, but this last advantage is a little too much... maybe an exchange rate of 5:1 would lessen the advantage whilst still being attractive enough to make the funds the company require.

The game is well presented, and as it doesn't require downloads it is operating system and browser independent. I have played it on PC, Mac and even on my iphone as it doesn't even use flash or similar common browser add ons. Graphically it's pretty good, though buildings should in my opinion change appearance to denote their levels. The major problem it has is that buildings need more and more resources to upgrade and also each level takes more time than the last. You can only build or upgrade one building at a time in each town. so whist at the beginning there's lots to do, fairly soon there is little you can do on a daily basis. This needs addressing as this type of game is open-ended and there's a point in this game where effectively there is nothing to do other than start again. Overall it's a good effort, but needs a lot of work. Technically, it's still in Beta (though this is debatable) and it remains to be seen what version 1.00 will be like.

Summary: Has the potential, but needs a lot of work.