Suggestions for a new player

First of all, welcome to the game.

Quote from Arvy7

Should I look into joining alliances? When does it make to even join one?

Obviously opinions will be different, many people play this game completely allone.

Imo. joining an experienced/active alliance might be the most important thing as a new player.

They can help you with questions, protect you from attacks and so on.

I'm not on Pangaia 4 myself, so no idea which alliances would take you in.

Quote from Arvy7

What to avoid, what to do?

Be on good terms with your neighbours, probably wise to avoid conflicts in general for now.

first off.. do the tutorial, not only do you get goods but also some ambrosia

make sure you get a town of each resource type, try to keep them close together, focus on forge, posieden, and colossus islands as those are the best wonders to have depending on your playstyle.. posiden is probably the most universally useful one.

msg every player in your island chain and introduce your self, ask them for tips in game.. this established a relationship with your neighbors which will be important esp early on.

sign cultural treaties with every player in your island chain once you get them researched, this will cause many to hesitate attacking you due to breaking the treaty negative effects.

make sure you keep your hideouts at least the same level as your town hall.

make sure you build the shrine of the gods as soon as possible and use it, further try to do as many of the daily tasks as possible for the favor which can be used for rewards.

I could go on but this should keep you out of trouble starting out (usually)

Quote from Arvy7

Are there any priorities on the islands?

It depends on your playstyle and current options.

The easiest thing would probably to go for wine, since you will need wine for Palace level 4 soon in the future (crystall only starting with level 5).

You might want to take a look at monuments regarding islands, Forge, Poseidon and Kolossus are the most popular choices, while f.e Ares is probably the worst of them all, Athene also not recommendable.

Quote from Arvy7

Also, should I look to build 3rd one soon again, or rather reinforce my current two?

That's a question you always have to ask yourself and depends on your individual situation, you can rarely make a mistake with going for another city.

Quote from Arvy7

Is it worth now having any fleet or army while I'm so tiny or am I just risking to lose these if someone attacks me?

You can use these to raid barbarians or inactive Players.

Ya I mean the benefit of friends is you can see each other online and get research points when they research something and gold when they found a colony.

Im pretty selective who I put on my friends list though.. while others just want to fill it up asap.. it's up to you.

If I would be in your place, but, well, that depends on your style.... I would go to world map, look for a marble with poseidon for my principal island. Ideal would be an island with big mines and a lot of free spots, because, in time, I would be happy with 10 towns on the same marble with Poseidon (6 dolphins = continuous activation); adjacent, wine with Colossus, sulphur with Hephaistos... I would find the perfect place, create a colony and move the capital on marble, delete first town...

And have a lot of pacience.Ikariam it's not a game where you can do things quickly, but to think. That's the nice part... when you start to play, you ask yourself what you should do next. After 10 years, you will still ask yourself what to do next. And it is beautiful.

Find the right place for a long future. Building an empire on islands with wrong resources, miracles, neighbors, would be a waste of time. Can anyway be corrected later, but with a cost.

Keep your towns close one to another. If today you make 10 minutes between two towns, you will always make 10 minutes between them. If you make 30 minutes between two towns, you will always make 30 minutes. And time is a precious resource (sometime, underrated one).

if "a lot of big players are around,"... you won't find good places for you. good places are taken by big players... isn't? .

how impactful are miracles.. in that case, you may find what is an account with big neighbors, good places already taken by them, and a slow, very slow growth on wrong islands.if it was about me, I would visit world map andlook for a place to grow. It would help if you would post a screen shot with your current world map position (without coordinates or names)

I agree with a lot of stuff in here but I will also add my own advice.

It depends on the server and where you are located, how you can play the game.

Personally I find investing in military early to only benefit you IF you plan on being active pillaging. The same goes for holding hideouts in all of your towns. I say this because, in a lot of older servers most players are going to be much more advanced than you and you will not be able to defend against them with your military or hide outs. If they want intel on you they can throw as many decoys and spies from all of their towns and find out what they need to find out, and if they want to blockade you/pillage you there is very little your hoplites/spearman/Rams and low level walls can do against their Steam Giants, Carbineers and Mortars.

Best bet? Invest in Warehouses in every single town. I personally always use my capital as a Level 1 town hall with extremely high Town Walls/Warehouses and dump most of my resources for my other towns into it as a sort of "Safe house". The other towns can hold resources, but this town acts as the main storage for everything. I also make two trade ports in it to make loading resources and transporting faster. Later down the line I add a sea chart archive and multiple depots/Resource reducers like carpenter/etc to make future upgrade of the palace easier. I usually plant this town on a Poseidon/Dolphin wonder island because the low amount of population makes it easy to load up temples and activate it. Your Capital is a "free" town, so for me, especially in early game when upgrading palaces, I have the first town be anything (but try to relocate to a Poseidon island for the faster transport) and follow up with Marble > Sulfur > Wine and Finally a Crystal town and have a complete 4 towns for producing resources while the capital pulls most of those resources together. After that you can really invest in resource boosters/reducers on every town and choose from there what islands your future towns will be on.

I don't personally agree with Museums. I think now that the game is a little more inactive, it poses more harm than help for you. If you do want to pillage others, it makes it difficult to have any competition because those you have treaties with aren't going to war with you. Even if you actually don't want to war anyone, investing in a museum means you need to find cultural treaties and the game is not active enough to have treaties with everyone. You'll find it hard to get the return on investment of the museum. I usually focus on wine press/producing more wine for towns and sticking with that.

TL;DR: In short, Get your first 4-5 towns on Poseidon islands (The big dolphins) so you can get a permanent boost to transporting resources. If you can get just three of the first towns to be Marble > Sulfur > Wine in that order and Poseidon, you have a good setup. Try to look for islands that are an hour maybe even two hours out. You're looking for longevity and once you have a permanent Poseidon the distance of these islands won't matter. In the mean time, you can invest into Hideouts/A Small army and use the spies to search inactives around you. You might score big on resources and go pillage them while you work on building your towns up, and it can become a fun mini-game searching for resources.

Quote from Arvy7

How impactful are the miracles? My capital spawned in an area that is quite densely populated already and thus I did not feel like it makes sense to move, coz if a lot of big players are around, then it should be fine, no? (or is everyone playing it wrong haha?)
I also really wanna experience an active alliance. Wars, defenses and attacks. Thus, I guess being close to allies is also one of the objectives?

they are vital, everyone should have posiden because it's useful every day both in war and peace.

Colossus is good if you are a builder or defensive player, I've fought players which tons of colossus towns leading to a very short cool down.. it won't stop a determined and practiced attacker, but it will keep most at bay assuming you're active enough to see the fight.

I recommend everyone have at least 1 of those for an emergency.

Forge is vital if you're a fighter, any serious fighter will have enough towns to give them 0 cool down, I'd recommend you have at least one of these if you're a builder if you're ever put into a position where you need to defend your self or attack it'll give you a 24 hour window.. after that 6 days of cool down... hopefully you've dealt with the situation by then.

I would not chose an island that didn't have one of these 3 wonders, the rest can be mildly useful in certain situations.. but these are the 3 to focus on.

Picking an island is a big decision unless you have money for ambrosia for town warps this will lay the foundation for your empire and you'll feel the affects of this decision forever.

You can get warps for free.. sort of.. if your account ghosts out you're put in the graveyard server.

But to do that your account has to be inactive for like a month.. so that means putting the account in vmode.. and then 4-6 weeks you'll go inactive I think.. then another 4-6 where you're a sitting duck inactive so the cost is you'll probably come back with your towns ravaged of all goods.

it also means not playing for a couple months, So i'd recommend you just choose wisely in the first place then go thru that hassle.

the time does vary I think its' 4-6 weeks max but I think younger accounts or maybe it goes off score? time out faster.

Quote from Arvy7

A week passed since I made this post, so I already grew a little. Right now I have Colossus, Demeter's Gardens, Holy Grove & Ares Stronghold.
Sulphur - Marble - Wine - Marble. Looks like I had an option for Poseidon Island as 4th (Marble) but I chose Ares Stronghold as I had "friends" there (people I had positive communications from my starting island). I'm planning to have 5th as Crystal, for which I could use and island that is 3-4 blocks away from my "core". but would have the Poseidon. Would that make sense? (I've attached a screenshot of the map)

5th town should be Marble

Quote from Arvy7

Quote from EddyTaka

Quote from Arvy7

A week passed since I made this post, so I already grew a little. Right now I have Colossus, Demeter's Gardens, Holy Grove & Ares Stronghold.
Sulphur - Marble - Wine - Marble. Looks like I had an option for Poseidon Island as 4th (Marble) but I chose Ares Stronghold as I had "friends" there (people I had positive communications from my starting island). I'm planning to have 5th as Crystal, for which I could use and island that is 3-4 blocks away from my "core". but would have the Poseidon. Would that make sense? (I've attached a screenshot of the map)

5th town should be Marble

Even if I have two Marble towns already? :O

Sorry my bad. I read it wrong.

Hello and welcome to the game.

As far as placing your 5th town, that looks like a good location. There are different strategies to placement of towns. Some people like to keep their towns clustered together. This makes it very easy to move resources between towns since it's a short trip. But unless you are really lucky, chances are you'll sacrifice getting optimal wonders that way. Another drawback is that if someone is attacking you, it's very easy for them to hit ALL of your towns.

Some people like to have their towns more spread out. For people who enjoy pillaging, that means a much wider selection of pillage targets. It also means that if you're in an alliance that's at war, your enemies aren't as likely to be hitting all of your towns in rapid succession because of the distance. The drawback to this is that it takes longer to move resources between your towns due to distance.

At your stage of the game, you can easily experiment and if an island turns out to be less than ideal, you can tear it down and pick something else.

I would also agree with everyone who has mentioned the miracles. Wonders are extremely important further into the game. So securing some good ones is important. Poseidon is useful for so many things, I would recommend trying to get 4 or 5 of them. Having a colossus or 2 is handy in case you get attacked. And having at least 1 forge is a requirement for fighting, even self defense.

Making friends and establishing yourself as a good neighbor is great. Having friends that can help you out, with resources or even just advice, is the ideal situation. Getting into an alliance with some seasoned players will help you, too.

Quote from Arvy7

A week passed since I made this post, so I already grew a little. Right now I have Colossus, Demeter's Gardens, Holy Grove & Ares Stronghold.
Sulphur - Marble - Wine - Marble. Looks like I had an option for Poseidon Island as 4th (Marble) but I chose Ares Stronghold as I had "friends" there (people I had positive communications from my starting island). I'm planning to have 5th as Crystal, for which I could use and island that is 3-4 blocks away from my "core". but would have the Poseidon. Would that make sense? (I've attached a screenshot of the map)

Your world map looks horrible. you said that you want a mix between constructions and fights in an alliance. If you want to build something, you will ned marble. Your options for marble are a headache. I told in an earlier post that you need a main island, a core, and best is to be on poseidon with adjacent islands on colossus and forge. Spreading yours towns around the world makes you a bit harder to attack by enemies, but it's an improbable thing; but having spreaded towns will make you lose time anytime when you send resources from a town to another. Also, in time, spreaded towns will make freighters uselss.After a while, you will cry for that, but you don't know that today.

In your world map, I don't see posibilities to obtain a resonable amont of points in 1 year. After 2 years will be worst.

You said you would like to go to some fights with your alliance. Nice, what you need? Not just army, but gold and satisfaction. Army eats gold, population... and you need trading ports, trading posts, town halls, museums and taverns. They all eat marble. And that, a minimum marble required if you are a warrior. Marble that you can't get it where you are today. After a while, you will want something else, something more. And will require a marble that, where you are today, you wont get it.

Equilibrum is 8 marble, 3 wine, 2 sulphur, 2 crystal and a bit of ambrosia from time to time. If you intend to be an attacker, and that's fine, you yill need with what: town halls that needs satisfaction, then barracks and shipyards. That means marble. you won't get it here.

For comparing, I made a small research on a server (not your) for something what would be nice. Looking at mines level, were quite nice.

A nice marble with decent levels and free spots for new towns (in time, need 8 - 10 towns on marble are needed), forge and colossus.

Would you lose what you build till now, in two weeks? No, if you want to play a long time.