Inselkampf - I came, I saw and I am still playing........... (Inselkampf.com)

Member Name: DavidJWest

Product:	Inselkampf.com
Date:	15/02/07 (1127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Massive scope, great diplomacy, easy to learn but hard to master.

Disadvantages: Maybe the mechanics are too simplistic.

Inselkampf is a MMOG (Massive multiplayer online game) that can be played through a standard internet browser. It’s a strategy game in which you start off with 1 island in a huge ocean containing many thousands more islands, the aim is to expand your empire so that more islands fall under your control. The game is free to play (although you can pay to upgrade your account if you wish).

Signing up is easy, you just supply a username, password and your email address, which you need in case you forget your password. Once that is done and you’ve clicked on the link in your welcome email you can start playing straight away.

When you login you’ll see various options, but the main one you need is “list” which brings up a list of all your islands, just the one to start with. You can choose a name for your island which is a good step as it will be called “unnamed” at the start of the game and this means you are likely to be raided by any unobservant neighbours you may have as they may think your island is not “active” – in other words it’s not being played by anyone. The more observant players will realise that the island is active as it will have your username next to it, despite being called “unnamed”, but it’s always best to assume that those people around you are potentially hostile, so best to name your island as soon as you can!

You can also enter some text for your profile if you like, to tell those around you a bit about yourself. Later on in the game when you’ve had time to make some friends you can put in here that you are protected by strong player xxx etc.

Once you choose your island from the list of owned islands, you can see in more detail what the island has on it, in terms of buildings and military units. At the start of the game you only have one building, that being a main house level 1.

You’ll also notice you have some resources on the island, gold, lumber and stone, these can be used to build new buildings and armies, ships etc. There are a total of 10 building types you can aspire to, but with a level 1 main house you are limited to just a few of them. You need to increase your main house level to be able to build some of the more advance building types.

It’s a good idea early on to build level 1 gold mine, lumber mill and stone quarry so you can generate more resources more quickly. The game is realtime, so when you click to build a building it will tell you how long it takes (around 20 minutes for example for level 1 gold mine) and if you come back to the game 20 minutes later you will see your new gold mine in all it’s glory! Although don’t be disappointed as the graphics in the game are very basic, it relies on text more than graphics, this is a strategy game and not an arcade game so don’t expect much eye candy.

You’ll also find that your resources regenerate in real-time, a level 1 gold mine will generate 8 units of gold an hour which isn’t very much at all, ( a level 20 gold mine produces over 300 units of gold) so it’s well worth building the mines etc up a few levels, but you need to be wary of people around you who may try raiding your resources.

For this reason it’s a good idea to consider some defences quite early on. You can build up a stone wall to protect your island but without any military units it’s of quite dubious value. However, once you do get some units it does give a nice bonus to their defence, so shouldn’t be overlooked.

In order to build military units you need a barracks for ground forces and a harbour for ships, you also need a labaratory in order to research the various technologies each unit requires. All ship types require the sail technology and that will then allow you to build small warships and small merchants, once you get your harbour up to level 10 you can then build large warships and large merchants and also colony ships, which allow you to take over other islands.

In order to get a labarotory you need a level 10 main house, you can probably guess by now that the game takes a fair bit of time invested in order for you to start building armies, each level increase you make to a building requires around 20% more resources to action and 20% more time to build – for example while the level 1 gold mine took 20 minutes and about 200 gold, 200 stone and 100 lumber (these figures are not precise!) a level 20 gold mine takes around 14 hours to build and over 3k in gold alone.

There are 4 types of ground unit you can build: stonethrowers (aka stoners/stonies) who are pretty weak but quite cheap to build, spearfighters who are a good mix or attack and defence, archers who are good at attacking and finally catapults, which are expensive but are the only unit that can destroy enemy buildings.

You can start building spearfighters once you’ve researched spear and shield up to level one and have a big enough barracks, but if you research past level 1 (you can go as far as level 10 in technologies) you will then get additional combat bonuses. If you research sails past level 1 you will get faster ships.

The other building types are watch-tower, which gives you warning of any inbound attacks, the bigger you build it the further it can “see”. There are also storehouses, which you need to store the resources you are poroducing. A level 1 storehouse lets you store 1,000 of each resource and it also means if you are raided 10% of that cannot be stolen, any resource you produce when your stores are full are lost. You need a level 20 storehouse if you want to build a colony ship as that costs 35k gold and 30k lumber and you need a level 20 store to be able to stockpile those amounts!

It’s always worth building most buildings up to level 20 where you can, even though the benefit might not be apparent. For example once you get to level 10 of barracks, you can build all the unit types there are assuming you have the requisite technology, you might think there is no point building any further. However, with the barracks the higher the level, the quicker you can build the various units that can be built. It takes around 40 minutes to build a spearfighter with a level 10 barracks but only 30 minutes once you get to level 20. Also the higher building levels are more resiliant to catapult attacks.

Once you’ve got your island fairly well developed and you’re happy with the defences, you can consider raiding some nearby islands for more resources. There’s nothing to say you can’t raid active players, although I always raid only inactive or unowned islands, but then I’m a good guy! There’s an option on the main screen which lets you look at a simple map, centred on your own island and showing all islands in the immediate vicinity.

You can click on the neighbouring islands to get more information about them, such as score, who owns it, if they are in an alliance etc. You can get a good idea from the islands score as to how well developed it is, a score 1 island will have nothing on it and a score 1000 island will be fully developed. It’s a wise move not to raid islands owned by players who have a lot of islands as that’s a good way to ensure you get a good beating!

It’s a good idea to send a spy to any prospective target islands as this will give you a detailed report of the target island including how many resources and military units it has. There is a chance the spy will fail, in which case the target island will know that you’ve sent the spy and you will lose the ship sent to do the spying, this chance varies depending on how high the watch-tower level is on the target island, it’s around 30% for a level 1 watch-tower and nearly 70% for a level 20 tower.

Once you’ve identified a good target, one without much defence and with good levels of resources to raid, you can send out a raiding fleet. This needs to contain enough ships and military units to ensure you take no losses and some merchant ships to carry off the booty. Each small warship can carry 2 military units and each large warship 5 units plus a catapult – although it’s not advisable to send catapults if you are going raiding unless it’s just to knock down the stone wall if there is one.

When raiding indefended islands, I find 1 Large Warship, 2 Small Warships, 3 Small Merchants, 2 stonethrowers and 3 spearfighters is the smallest fleet you can get away without taking any losses. Of course you can send bigger fleets if you wish. There is a battle calculator which gives you the chances of success where you can enter the sizes of the attacking and defending forces and this will give you a percentage chance of success. However, bear in mind that even a 100% chance of success on the battle calculator isn’t conclusive as there is a random element thrown in so you can always lose if you are very unlucky.

Eventually you’ll want to start expanding and you’ll need to get a colony ship built in order to achieve this. Before you do finally take the plunge and go for another island, make sure your main island is well defended as you can lose control of it if you have another island. The rules of the game state that all your islands can be capture by another player, with the exception of your last island – this is very well worth remembering as it takes about a month to get a 1 point island fully developed, so there are some players out there who will try to take island that have already been built up to save them the hassle, developed island are very, very valuable!

In order to colonise another island all you need to do is send a fleet containing a colony ship to any island of your choice. Assuming you win the combat round there is a 50% chance of the colony ship being successful and the island falling into your hands, if you do succeed you lose your colony ship, if not then the colony ship returns and you can try again.

Bear in mind that you can only colonise islands that have main house at level 1 and they must also be either unowned, or owned by a player who has other islands. If you are attacking an island owned by another player it is a good strategy to send waves of attacks to enhance your chance of success and to impove your chances of taking over the island. So you may want to launch a “clearing” wave with most of your forces in it to ensure that the enemy island has no defences when your colony ship arrives, ideally just a few seconds later so the enemy cannot reinforce the island with defences. The clearing wave should include catapults targetting the main house to make sure it is down to level 1 in preparation for the colonisation attempt.

In essence that’s how the game works, build up your islands, expand, defend and attack with your fleets and armies and then repeat the process.

However, there is also the diplomatic angle to deal with too. The game has it’s own message system so you can send messages to other players in the game. The are also alliances that you can join, or even setup your own. Each alliance has various titles that can be bestowed onto it’s membership, administrator, admiral or diplomat.

Overall Inselkampf is a simple game to learn and play, in fact uit’s so simple that it would be quite boring after a fairly short period of playing. However, the political/diplomatic side of the game is very immersing and if you do get drawn into this side of the game it can be incredibly addictive.

Alliance wars can be huge in scale, the planning that can go into them can take days or even weeks and then if you do find yourself in the middle of a big war the amount of information flying around can be incredible. Most of the top alliances have their own forums which are password protected to try to stop spies, and there are thousands of threads in the forum which my alliance has setup.


There are a few drawbacks to the game however. The game is plagued by “Multies” and “scripters” who can ruin the game for new players. Multies are basically people who are playing several accounts, which is in breach of the rules, but the game doesn’t contain enough safeguards to stop this abuse. Multies can often grow their empires much more quickly than normal players as they can put all the resources from their accounts into one account and also tend to have much bigger fleets than normal as well.

However, multi-hunting has become something of a sport in Inselkampf as players try to spot these cheats by their suspicious activities, often given away with their usernames which are similar as well. For example I have two new players near me, one called “sixfeetunder” and the other called “sxfeetunder” – I’ve been raiding both these account daily as I am sure they are multies and neither has complained, if I can keep doing this I will prevent them from gaining strength. The really big multies are named and shamed on the Inselkampf forums and then dozens of players can be motivated into bringing them down, you see Inselkampf is self-policing.

“Scripters” are accounts that are controlled by a computer program. There are some people out there who are so incredibly geeky that they don’t want to play the game themselves, but write computer programs to do it for them. The advantage to this is that the computer program never sleeps, so can also grow it’s empire much quicker and more efficiently than a human. These can also be detected by their suspicious activities and are dealt with in the same manner as multies.

One word of warning, I wouldn’t let my children play this game as there are people playing the game who have dubious avatars bordering on pornographic and there are some players who can be quite offensive. As long as you aren’t of a sensitive nature, this doesn’t spoil the game too much and overall it is a lot of fun trying to build an empire while enjoying the diplomatic side of the game, just don’t take it too seriously, it is easy to get drawn into it!

Summary: An absorbing free to play browser based game with a lot of diplomacy for those who want it.