Ikariam Update

Posted by Stropp on April 29, 2008

A few weeks ago I started playing Ikariam, a web browser based MMO in the style of the Civilization games. I figured it was about time I gave you an update.

I now have two towns on the go. There’s Stropptopia (pictured) and Stropptown on another island. Each island provides only two resources, wood and crystal, stone, sulphur, or grapes. There are several ways to obtain all the resources you need. Trade or buy them, attack other players and loot them, or build a town on four islands with each of the resources.

Stropptopia is on an island with crystal, which is useful as it’s used for research upgrades. But for many other upgrades I needed stone. So I built a palace which allows an extra town for each level and then built Stropptown on a stone island. Once I’d gathered enough I shipped it back to Stropptopia and proceeded with the upgrades.

At this stage I haven’t built an army, I’ve just been upgrading and researching. As you can see from the screenshot, I have lots of money in the bank and I’ve maxed out the amount of wood (building materials) that I can store.

To be honest, now that my main town is effectively built, I’m finding Ikariam a little boring. It’s not a fast game, you can really only do one thing at a time per town, and once you get a ways along it takes a long time to do anything.

So, I’m not really spending much time in there now. The place is running on autopilot while I’m doing other things.

The big problem is I find the gameplay a little shallow. I quite enjoyed the depth of gameplay in the Civilization games, especially 3 and 4. One of the things I liked was aiming for a non military victory – I especially liked building up my culture and watching enemy cities defect to my supremely decadent culture.

Ikariam doesn’t have that depth. That doesn’t make it a bad game. There are a lot of players enjoying it. I’ll probably keep an eye on it, but I don’t think I’ll be doing much else with it. At least for the moment.

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