Ikariam
May 2008 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Crafts Revisited
- Gaming in the Media: How Can Grand Theft Auto Transition from Base Entertainment to Art?
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Into Monster Camp
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP organization.
In an IRIS retrospective, Olivia recaps some of the more memorable milestones of the past year.
Robyn shares her thoughts on a recent preview of D&D 4th Edition, held by Wizards of the Coast in Los Angeles, California.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
- Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
- Ikariam
- Retro Review: Final Fantasy VI
Odds 'n Ends
Ikariam, Browsergame, GameForge, 2008
After reading about this game called Ikariam that “plays somewhat like Settlers meets Civilization” (Japanmanship blog) I wasted no time signing up for my own account. While I was put off by the lack of female models (the only one I’ve seen so far is in the background of the market screenshot that you can see on their main page), I find the gameplay to be intriguing and the overall experience to be fun.
General Gameplay
The game world consists of several islands. In addition to having about 18 spots open for players’ poloi, each island has a saw mill, a wonder (there are about 7 different types that an island can have), and one of four unique resources (wine, marble, crystal glass, or sulfur). Like every other MMO, there’s no real “ultimate goal” of the game, but the fun lies in building an empire — you can found new poloi, make treaties with players, enter into an alliance, etc.
You start out with a polis (aptly named “Polis”…. which I promptly renamed to “Aeolia”) that has a town hall in it and nothing else. After getting some workers started on mining wood from the saw mill, I went to construct my first building.
Here’s where I hit a snag: you can only construct (or upgrade) one building at a time, and the wait time is in real time.
So I went for my port first (when I should have gone for my academy) and had to wait 15 minutes for it to finish. The time increases with both the complexity of the building and the level (for upgrading). This makes the game rather frustrating in the beginning, when you have very little to do, especially if you approach it as you would a normal strategy game — ie. with the expectation of instant (or near-instant) gratification.
If you can get over the first hump and get a playing strategy that works, though, the game gets much more fun as you progress. What I do is I leave the game open while I browse or do other things and check back in every so often to see if there’s something new to do (like build/upgrade a building, trade with someone, donate wood to upgrade the shared resources, etc).
Research
Like most strategy games, research is an integral game element. Through research you can learn how to build new buildings, units, learn how to make treaties, and reduce the costs of things. There are four research fields: Seafaring, Economy, Science, and Military.
Unlike more traditional strategy games, research is mostly automated in Ikariam so you don’t have to worry about losing out because you need to go to school or have those 7 hours of sleep. While the research trees within the fields are linear, some of them have requirements from other fields. If you’re missing a requirement (or three) the game will automatically begin research in the required field without you having to change the field you’re focusing on. Once you have all the requirements, it’ll switch back to your selected field.
The research points are also cumulative, so if you’ve been researching one item for 12 hours and you realize that it would have been better to do something in a different tree, you aren’t screwed. If your overall research points are enough to fill the requirements for one item, as soon as you switch it’ll be instantly available to you and the remaining points will go towards the next item in the newly selected field.
Interactions with other players
There is more interaction in Ikariam between players than I would have initially guessed. Although I haven’t made friends with any of the players, it wasn’t very long before I got my first trade request. While trading is a bit of a risky proposition — there’s no guarantee that if you ship your goods to the player that they’ll ship theirs to you — my experiences so far have been that all the players are prompt and friendly.
The game also allows you to loot and go to war with other players, but I don’t have much interest in that aspect and I’m apparently too low of a level to make a good target yet, so I can’t comment on that aspect of the game.
Closing thoughts
There are still many aspects of the game that need to be fleshed out and/or fixed up. The help page leaves much to be desired, for instance, and the navigation can be very clunky at times. I would also like to see them at the very least add the option to chose your gender, because I am annoyed at the assumption that I’m a “Lord” (having the option to choose female advisers would be nice, too).
I would definitely recommend this game for the busy gamer — whether it be school, work, family, or something else that takes up your time — because even if you have only a few minutes every day you can still have a great gaming experience. It also has a “vacation” feature that you can use if you know that you’ll be away from the computer for two days or more; it freezes your account (and protects it from deletion) until the next time you log in.
If you decide to check out the game, you can find me as “Claudia” in the Lambda world. If you’re interested in talking more about the game, be sure to visit the Ikariam thread on the forums!
