Ikariam

Template:Alert-box Ikariam is a browser based massively multiplayer online game of the strategy genre produced and maintained by Gameforge AG. The game is set in the era of classical Greece in an archipelago, with players being made tyrant of a small town, which they must expand and lead. Ikariam has received generally positive reviews.

Gameplay

Ikariam has been compared to the Civilization series created by Sid Meier. It has also been compared to the critically acclaimed Travian series created by Travian Games GmbH. The aim of the game is to expand the town which is controlled by the player, to gather resources and conquer or placate other players. The game can be played for short periods of time; building and researching takes place in real time so the player can return at a later point and assign the town's inhabitants new tasks.

Upon registering, players are given control of a small town. The town's inhabitants pay taxes to the player or can be sent to gather resources instead. The game world is split into islands, each of which can support up to 16 players and their towns. Each island has its own saw mill for producing wood and one of the other buildings which produces a luxury resource. There are five main types of resources: Wood, Wine, Marble, Crystal Glass and Sulphur. They are available from the Sawmill, Vineyard, Quarry, Crystal Mine and Sulphur Pit respectively. All these resources are required to progress in the game, making resource acquisition through conquest or trading mandatory. If a certain resource is lacking locally the player may trade with other players to acquire it. Each island's inhabitants may cooperate and donate building materials to improve the efficiency of their island's resource gathering facilities, which enables all local players to obtain resources more quickly. Failure to do so may result in hostilities between island inhabitants.

With resources the player may construct buildings such as barracks, dockyards and academies. Citizens of the town can then be trained as soldiers, sent to research new technologies, or perform other tasks, which they are paid tax money for undertaking. Citizens must be kept happy to prevent them from leaving the town.

Business model

Ikariam is nominally free-to-play but players may opt to purchase in-game advantages via a Microtransaction. system. This will give them access to a sixth resource, Ambrosia, which can be used for acquiring items on Ikariam Plus, the premium version of Ikariam.

The game was pre-released in June 2006, as a minimal 2D graphic game. Players used slash (/) commands to play the game.

Alliances

On building an Embassy, one can join or found an alliance. Alliances are groups of players who work together. They will usually protect each other. If an alliance member is attacked by another player, the whole alliance, or stronger members in the alliance will intervene and will ward off the attacker. If you are the leader of the alliance, how many members you can have in your alliance depends on your embassy level. Also, you get a small amount of "bonus" resources each day, depending on the number of people in your alliance. An alliance has three jobs that can be assigned by the leader: the Diplomat, the General and the Home Secretary. The diplomat is responsible for making treaties, answering messages sent to the alliance, and editing the external alliance page which is viewable by all players. The General is responsible for overlooking all alliance members military movements, and has the ability to call off any attacks being made by alliance members. The Home Secretary is responsible for editing ranks within the alliance and editing the internal alliance page which is viewed only by the alliance members. Alliances frequently draw together people from all over the world who have similar interests and have been described as a game play element not found in other web browser games.

Worlds

Several different game servers are available. Each of these servers represents a different game 'world' with its own population of players and its own map of thousands of islands. Currently the English language version of this game has eleven servers, each given a Greek letter designation from Alpha to Lambda. Older worlds such as Beta tend to have higher-ranked players and more economic and military stability. Newer worlds represent more of a frontier experience with free-flowing alliances and warfare. One of the attractions of the game is for an experienced player on an older world to create a new account on a brand-new world in an effort to rise to the very top (frequently impossible in older worlds who have players that have been active for many years). Due to the nature of the game it is quite feasible to manage accounts on several worlds/servers.