Posts by Reignman

So what's the deal with the number format? The vote is overwhelmingly in favor of changing it back to the original format, with all digits fully displayed. After a month, I'm not getting anymore used to the kkk format. It's annoying to have to constantly hover your mouse over large numbers to get an exact amount. Lets go! Change it back! Don't make me get my torch and pitchfork.

Quote from Chuck "Bee" Bashlick

One more thing, it writes the nickname of a player who has a title without spaces in the title and if you hover over the nickname with your mouse (which happens in search results, not in the normal sorted list) it shows it as HTML code (i.e. <i>title</i>nickname).

Would be nice if the titles went in a separate column. I don't know them all by heart so sometimes I don't know where the title ends and the name begins. And some of those titles are just too damn long.

Is there an alternative way to verify our Discord invite to the Ikariam server? By email perhaps, or ticket?

Quote from JuneBarcarolle

This game is all about numbers, whether that's people calculating the best ROI for upgrading mines/producers, or people calculating the most effective military set up to maximize the damage ratio in CRs, or people calculating the least expensive way to upgrading reducers, or people competing to get the highest score, most OPs, etc. Without actual numbers, this becomes an exercise in frustration for everyone. Hiding the numbers and rounding to the nearest million doesn't help anyone.

Well said, thanks for sticking up for those of us who like to play with numbers xD.

Quote from Rastan

Seems to be a debate about the technical validity of that format, instead ignoring that fact that even if it is correct it seems pretty universally disliked.

Boom! Right there, nailed it. He keeps referring to it as anecdotal evidence, while the rest of us see an overwhelming dislike for the new format, which includes several polls with 300-400 votes.

Quote from Rastan

Again express your thanks to the Team for the town/list changes from us I've not seen a single negative comment about it.. it's a home run.

This too, some very cool new features are being overshadowed by just how bad the new number format is.

Quote from badidol

As always: we'll gather feedback and see what happens. I am not going to go into panic mode after not even a full 24 hours of the thing being live and in total not even 50 unique users mentioning dislike.

It's not so much that there are only 50 unique users, it's the ratio of 50 to 0 where you can draw some meaningful conclusions. There's not a single person in our alliance that likes the new format. Not one person who even suggested maybe we only need to get used to it. It seems to be universal, everyone likes the town/building arrangement options, but hate the new number format, and for a variety of reasons.

There's also those of us who like playing with data and making calculations. With the old format we could copy/paste numbers directly to spreadsheets quickly, now we can't. That's going to be a pain to hover over every individual number and enter it manually.

What about an option in the user menu where people can choose how they want numbers displayed?

Quote from God_of_war

The way resources, scores, and gold show is terrible, I am not sure who at game forge thought that was a good idea but they need to be fired. This needs to revert back to how it was ASAP

I don't know about fired, but I'd settle for a flogging in the town square lol ... or for them to change it back and just issue an apology.

Like everyone else, LOVE the building and town rearrangement feature, but I don't understand the point of the new number format. Who was complaining about the old format? Now my gold says 1.04kkk. Did my gold join the Klan? I'd rather see numbers instead of a bunch of "k's" everywhere.

Even when it comes to upgrading buildings that require large amounts of resources, now I can't see the exact amount I need unless I hover over each number. 16.55kk isn't very informative or helpful, and it just looks ugly.

It helps to join an alliance and make friends too. It doesn't hurt to contact the person attacking you and striking up a friendly conversation with them. That's worked for me in the past. Even during wars I'd chat and joke around with the "enemy", let them know there are no hard feelings. It can help diffuse tense situations. If none of that works, a bigger player might help you in exchange for pirate points.

Quote from DogEnds

Decent/clever strategy, thanks, but not for me. Too much like hard work! I don't doubt it costs in, though.

I'm finally corruption free in the 13 towns, so I can finally test the mobile barbarian pillaging strategy out with #14, so I'll let you know how it goes lol. Well not quite yet. I'm busy pillaging a nice juicy inactive account atm, so after that gets ghosted, the MBP will get put into action.

Quote from God_of_war

I don't put much stock into production buildings. If you do the math you get very little benefit, I'd say I'm most proud of maxing out all my reducers. These buildings will save you millions of resources up front and you don't need to wait 10+ years in order to get paid back like you would on production buildings.

Yeah the reduction buildings are a must, especially for GR upgrades. All 5 of them, level 50. By far the most important buildings in this game now, and they're relatively cheap. You're literally pissing resources and points away if you don't have them.

The production buildings are still good though. Yeah the return on investment is horrible, but the buildings themselves are worth a lot of points, and they increase your ability (albeit slightly) to make more resources/points. They're a better investment now than donating to the sawmills and mines. Build the reduction buildings first though lol. In my new 13th town, that's the first and only thing I did for 2 months, upgrade all 5 reduction buildings to level 50.

Quote from God_of_war

Right now my warehouses can hold 30m so those resource conversions we recieved go a long ways in making the necessary resource conversions to marble.

Indeed, I just converted a crap ton of wood/marble into the wine/crystal I needed for GR upgrades with my 30m resource warehouse. And with the freighters, it now doesn't take long to get it shipped around. Well it still takes awhile, but now I can do large chunks at one time instead of needing to be online every 20 minutes to ship 100k at a time lol.

Quote from Quartz

If Gameforge can program that they can program to exclude all impossible tasks.

Why is the Research Point reward so low? For 500 favour I can get 3,500 RPs. For 150 Favour I can get 22,000 crystal, which I can convert into 11,000 to 22,000 RPs with an Experiment. I'm guessing that someone forgot to scale the RP reward.

Yeah the math isn't adding up on some of these rewards lol. I can get 10 steam giants for 450 favor, or I can get 22,000 sulphur for 150 favor and build 250 steam giants with it xD. The one day hammers and drills aren't worth it either unless you have 10 towns of that resource. I have 2 sulphur towns so the one day steam sulphur only nets me an extra 16k sulphur for 700 favor. While the 22,000 sulphur reward only costs 150. But I suppose that's why they limit you to one reward per week, or I'd just load up on those one time resource rewards, which you could do with the old system.

As far as what they can program, yeah they already have other checks in place for other things, so you know they can do it. The rewards are higher on my larger account, so there's some code in place checking stuff already. As far as my 24h clock idea starting when a person clicks it, they're already doing that with the cinetheater. The 12h clock starts after you watch the video and not at a set time everyday.

And there's definitely a bug with the passive resource task, as was pointed out earlier, and it seems to only happen if you're already logged in during the daily reset. It doesn't start counting until you check the tasks or hit refresh (or log in/out). I got screwed on the sulphur this time. I'm collecting enough to reach 118k in 24h, but after 10.5 hours, this should say 52k sulphur collected, so I'm going to miss the goal, like I did with the wine last time.

As far as the passive resource collecting tasks go, what if the 24h clock didn't start until you collected the favor? It would incentivize people to collect it as soon as possible because the next 24h won't start until they do, but then it wouldn't punish those who can't be online to collect it at a specific time, it would just stay there until they're able to be online. Everyone would then have a 24h cycle that better fits their own schedule.

Quote from Chuck "Bee" Bashlick

Have those who complained about receiving favors manually encountered the "Be online for 30 minutes" task?

Yeah that one is a bit annoying. You have to be online a consecutive 30 minutes. Would be nice if it were just a total of 30 minutes because sometimes it's hard to be online a consecutive 30 minutes.

Quote from Quartz

Is the reset time on Alpha correct? I have the daily challenge of producing Marble and when I checked at about 10:00 server time I had produced nearly zero when I have 6 towns producing Marble at over 14k per hour, and here it is just now:

I just came to report the same issue. My account had been open in the background since the daily reset, but when I checked the passive progress, it shows I've only collected 12 minutes worth of resources after nearly 2 hours. And yes that's after hitting refresh. The maximum sulphur I can produce in 24 hours is 118k so I barely would've made it, but now because of this bug I'll only produce 111k by the deadline and fail the task.

Quote from asumi

I don't like how the passive tasks need to be collected manually. I have enough production to complete them in 24h, but since the tasks reset in the middle of the night, I won't ever complete them (except for marble or wood), since I can't complete it while I'm still awake and I'm not gonna wake up at 4am just to click a button.

Exactly, mine ends at 2am, and for some it might end while they're at work or school, so the favor should be claimed automatically. This is the most baffling thing about the new system.

Quote from Quartz

I disagree: it's Ikariam that's setting the task so Ikariam should make sure it's possible for the player to complete it.

It shouldn't be too difficult to have the game check if the tasks are possible for each account. It must run some sort of check already because on my smaller accounts the passive requirements are lower. (50k and 80k).

Quote from AJP

NOt certain the pillage increases in the village after 50, but the plus 50 babrabin fleets appear to and give some great pillage. ( A neighbour recently got 3,200,000 Gold, 1,200,000 Building material, 486,000 Wine, 414,000 Marble, 324,000 Crystal Glass and 576,000 Sulphur from defeating a post 50 fleet.)

Yeah the rewards don't increase anymore after level 50 with the villages. I defeated a level 50 fleet recently, which rewarded about 750k total resources, but it almost wasn't worth it based on the cost it took to build my own fleet and upkeep. I wanted the achievement though. The barbarian ships are a little stronger and have more ammo than player ships (without forge), so my first attempt at a level 50 fleet failed.

I don't think the fleet levels are tied to the village levels anyway. Because I got the level 50 fleet before the level 50 village. And after failing with the level 50 fleet, I was worried I lost my opportunity to defeat it, but it appeared again when I finished the next map. I got that map by pillaging a much lower level village.

Quote from ExtremeBoys

I think this days no point to spend that much resources to make town halls 40+ lvl or museum 20+ just full focus on palace/gr

For most people that's probably true, but it really depends on the level of your mills and mines, and whether you have temples. If they're high levels, then you need high level TH's to maximize resource gathering. Especially if you're using technocracy and want to take full advantage of helping hands.

Quote from ChanieL

After a small research, I think I'm the only one who has all GR at level 13?

I know of someone who has 15 towns on Pi, 2 months ago already, but to your point, I don't know how many level 13 GR's he has lol. Maybe he just has a lot of corruption. He's well over 105m points though.

Quote from ChanieL

Lets gooo

I'll join the 14 town corruption free club in a week (13 level 13 GR's), they're all upgrading as we speak. I actually had a 14th town a couple months ago because I had upgraded my palace to 13, but I didn't keep the town for more than a minute because of the corruption it created in the other 12 towns lol. As I alluded to earlier however, the 14th town will be used as a mobile, so I won't have a permanent 14th town until #15. I'm not ready to upgrade a new town so soon anyway. I'm still building up #13 and I'm already bored of it xD.

Quote from Wolf of Wall Street

That city must always be portable because it is a big plus, every 21 days, pirates treat me roughly 8.5 million resources.

That's also a pretty good use for a mobile lol. I don't have the ambro to compete in piracy. And anytime I try to sneak into the top 50 someone just comes and takes my points anyway. After doing the math, I figure I can pillage more from the barbarians every 3 weeks than I could earn from a top 50 finish anyway, and I don't have to worry about losing it all in the final minutes lol.

The tasks don't seem terribly difficult to complete, and the rewards are a lot better. Now you have to check everyday to see what you have as opposed to just doing your normal routine. Overall I think it's better.

The passive resource collecting tasks seem to be tied to the ability of your account. I have a big account that's requiring me to collect 115k wine and a smaller, which is doable, and an account where I only need to collect 50k which is also doable, but yeah at least these seem possible regardless of account size.

Quote from Draxo

Feel free to develop your own game and make the code available to everyone. Also personally I don't get the reason why someone should be so worried about seconds or even minutes for a game which is supposed to be played for years.

Nobody is asking for the game code, we're asking for the math behind the build times that Ikariam publishes themselves via the in game help menu. If another game wants to steal those build times, for whatever reason, they're all right there.

You personally don't get why people are interested in doing math lol? I fail to see how that's relevant to this discussion. Why are people interested in doing anything? Clearly people are interested in this. If our quest to unlock these mysteries is bothering you, feel free to ignore us ;). Otherwise if you want to be helpful, you could let us know what those coefficients are and save us a lot of time.

Quote from panos78

I can give them to you if you want.

For hideout, I have already collected them too. The levels went from 32 to 60.

The Pirate fortress has not changed with last update.

For Dockyard, I have the first three levels too.

If you put them on the wiki I'll see them haha.

The PF didn't have a formula on the wiki, but I'm guessing a single formula won't work for that one because there's an odd jump from lvl 10 to 11. And then again from 15 to 16, and 20 to 21, so every 5th level there's a bigger jump, except from 5 to 6.

1. 40

2. 414

3. 817

4. 1,253

5. 1,721

6. 2,228

7. 2,779

8. 3,370

9. 4,010

10. 4,702

11. 8,989

12. 10,487

13. 12,150

14. 13,997

15. 16,045

16. 30,528

17. 35,449

18. 41,058

19. 47,455

20. 54,745

21. 76,684

22. 88,880

Quote from DogEnds

I still have the same 12 towns that I had before the raised levels of version 8.8. Now I would not have corruption in any of them were I to build #13 (i.e. all GRs/Palace upgraded), but I've found little sufficient reason to rush this. Plenty of useful levels to build on those 12 towns... The best island for mill/mine levels near me, one on which I already have 2 towns, is Wine, so I could produce even more of the 1 good I'm not short of for the medium term. So, a "watching brief"...

I'm finally corruption free in my 13th town and it's finally producing a decent amount of wood/crystal after nearly 4 months from when I first planted. You say you have a 13th town ready to go, corruption free? Well let me suggest a productive use for that town while you decide what to do. Use it as a mobile barbarian pillager.

Here's what you do. Plant a mobile on a nearby island where you don't have any other towns. Then from one of your main towns, pillage the barbarian village that's on that mobile island. Pillage it to whatever level you want, and you can reset it back to level 1 whenever you want just by removing the mobile and re-planting. The barbs will never attack your main town, only the mobile, which you're not using for anything anyway. And they can only siphon resources from the mobile island, which again, you're not using xD. Never have to worry about retaliation and you also never have to pay a cease fire. Reset it as often as you want.

I didn't think of this strategy until after starting my 13th town, but I fully intend to do it with #14. Pillaging them to level 39 is really easy even without a forge, and that puts an additional 1.7m resources in your coffers. Minus troop losses and upkeep, which is almost nothing. It starts to become a little more expensive after level 39 into the upper 40's, but the rewards get bigger too. I would avoid level 50 at all costs however, unless you're going for the achievement (defeat lvl 50 on 3 different islands). They start using balloons and gyros at level 50 and it turns into a bloodbath.

But you can rake in an extra 4.7m resources from level 1 to 49. Again, minus troop losses and upkeep. It's still a healthy profit.

Quote from L.O.B

Who knows, maybe one day you will get the ability to expand beyond your original plan. Did you believe in yourself that one day you would get town12th when you had 4?

You're not lying. I still remember the very early days, when I had maybe 2-3 towns. An alliance mate posted what it took for a level 4 palace, and it was like 48,000 wood or whatever it was back then. And I remember thinking, good lord, it's going to take me 10 years to reach that amount lol. Well 15 years later I'm making that much wood about every 1.5 hours now, and it's only 10m wood for a level 14 palace.

Quote from DogEnds

Your point about donations is important, which is why there needs to be an improvement / dangled carrot in a version update. Nobody donates on my islands anymore, and that now includes me.

The best solution would be to add donation score to total score. You military score, science score, builder score, and citizens are added together to get total score, so why not include donation score to that too? I stopped donating too, because my islands are in the 52/42 range and it doesn't make sense to donate 200m wood just to gain an extra 30/h, when I can just upgrade production buildings.

Quote from Draxo

Quote from Reignman

Knowing it won't give anyone an unfair advantage over anyone else. That seems like an odd thing to keep from your community.

Think a bit wider - it's not only about community but also about other games and their developers.

That still doesn't make any sense. Why would another game care about the construction coefficients of some 15yo browser game? If someone is smart enough to code their own game, they wouldn't need to steal a very simple formula for something like that. The point being, we're not asking for the nuclear codes here lol. I doubt some developer is camping the ikariam wiki waiting for this closely guarded secret to be revealed so they can finally finish their own game xD. Ahhhh that's how it's done, each additional level takes longer than the previous! Genius!

What is a pain in the arse though, is making your community reverse engineer the formula.

Quote from panos78

For reduction buildings, I have already collected them.

So I can stop doing those lol? I got up to level 15 on all of them on an alt account. I was also doing hideouts and pirate fortress. I don't remember if the hideout even changed, but I know the pirate fortress was never available. And I only have the first 3 levels of the dockyard.

Quote from panos78

Reignman If you want we can exchange information.

Yeah I'll share whatever information I dig up. Unfortunately I already finished upgrading all 5 reduction buildings to level 50 in my new town before I knew the information was needed. It's too bad the test server couldn't be used for something like this, but over there you have the same slow building pace. It would be nice if it had some tools to let testers instantly finish buildings/troops, and instantly add whatever resources you needed to actually test things without having to wait 5 years. Where's the ikariam sandbox server haha?