Posts by Argim

The Merchant Fleet dialog, probably one of the most often visited, could improve a lot. Currently, it simply displays text, text and more text. And some huge AMBROSIA icons.

First, the Arrival time column could be replaced with a nice graphical progress bar, with the arrival times near the ship icon moving along with it, or centered on the bar. The bar would be a representation of the ocean, with start and target ports shown as icons at 0 and 100% of the bar. While the voyage progresses, the ship icon would gracefully slide right until it reaches 100% and arrives at the destination port.

Second, while cargo is being loaded, show translucid cargo items (with opacity:0.3) until they have been actually loaded. This would work as a progress bar, where the progress is shown by toggling the icons 100% opaque when that cargo has been loaded, until it reaches the last icon (100% loaded).

Screenshot

I took the liberty to edit with Corel the Merchant Fleet dialog to better understand the general idea of that suggestions:

This is just a rudimentary edit with some quick ideas. I'd prefer to entirely redesign it to make it 100% graphically appealing, but a large change would break the general text-oriented nature of the game's dialogs and be promptly rejected.

Suggestions not edited on screenshot

1. Kindly remove the icons showing the user's current ambrosia (13) amount from this dialog. Certainly you don't have to repeat that for each ship either, a single time would be enough, maybe at the top of the dialog. I think it's totally useless to show that info here when it's already shown in the top menu.
2. The removal of those buttons and the arrival time column would create a considerable space to convert the vertical Triton Engines button to an horizontal button. As they are now (vertical buttons) they increase the dialog's height considerably, creating an annoying vertical scroll when there are many ships on different routes.
3. The «Cargo:» label could probably be removed, and replaced by a «Show cargo» tooltip in the drop-down arrow.
4. A ship's hull or something of the sort could be used as a background for the cargo items, to clearly visualize the amount of wasted space on the ship. Eg, my ship from Byzantium to Corinth has a payload of 600, with 400 free/wasted space.

It's unfortunate that this dialog hasn't changed at all in the last 10 years or so. There's a lot that could be done to make it more interactive and visually appealing; these changes would require some JS programming, but surely the developers have enough budget to implement a few GUI improvements for a change.

If any of these suggestions are considered, kindly let me know, because on every single dialog window found in this game, I immediately envision endless possibilities for improvement. This is the curse of being a perfectionist web developer... eg., things like icons misaligned, which might be overlooked by others, are a pain in the eyes for me so I have to manually edit the CSS stylesheet to fix them for myself alone. It would be better if these details are fixed for everyone, and improvements considered as well.

Speaking of sea charts, do we really need to buy ambrosia to get the chart pieces from the shady merchant? Is there no way of getting them without actually paying?

I can confirm that the option to disable the tutorial was there, but the option to enable it again is missing, as @TAWDAMI said.

I used the floating Shop icon to exchange 8 ambrosia for 1000 marble, my ambrosia was deducted (I had 20 now I have 12) but I still have only 7 marble. What's wrong?? I want my ambrosia back or my 1000 marble in my town now, please.

Is there a contact form to report this? This is a serious issue, some users are actually paying good money to get ambrosia but the shop is not working. How is this possible? Is there a delay or do I need to login again to update the marble counter?

After registering, I was shown a list of servers to join, and I forgot the name of the selected one. How can I invite a friend to register and create a city on my same world? I assume each server is its own world and we cannot trade with players on other servers, right? Incredibly, there's no option to invite friends via Email, only by username.

Whenever I open a building that can be upgraded, they always display the "In building queue!" label below the Upgrade button. This is false and misleading, because the current building is not in the upgrade queue. This label should display Enqueue or Add to queue instead.

On the attached screenshot showing the Academy, In building queue! is displayed while only the Tavern was actually added to the queue.

If fixing the barbarian village raid bug is too complicated, leave it as is and simply delete the accounts of users that exploit it for their own benefit. Faster, easier and helps to clean up the community, everybody wins. The game's Terms & Conditions enable the system to take down any account at any time without warning so that wouldn't be a problem.

I have a question that might not be covered in your guide. Check the attached screenshot and you'll see that my Gold will soon run out due to a severe deficit (Income: 3, Expenses 60+8+66).

The question is, exactly how do I increase the income? Thanks

The tutorial, in which every new player is now stuck due to the barbarian pillage bug, shows some icons below the status bar. However, the status bar tooltips appear behind the tutorial icons.

This can be solved by either increasing the z-index of the tooltips, decreasing the one from the #tutorialAdvisor icons (currently at 50000000), or simply relocating the tutorial icons elsewhere.

I have used developer tools to lower the icons z-index and read the tooltip, because I forgot everything about this game which I played countless hours ages ago. My food stock is in 0 and there's no clue on how to start stocking it, any suggestion will be greatly appreciated.

It should also be removed (or allowed to be skipped) from the Tutorial, in which me (and every single new Ikariam user) is now stuck. I've played Ikariam ages ago with my brother but I have forgotten everything since, so I'm stuck until this is resolved. Unless this happens soon I'll simply remove the bookmark from the Firefox toolbar and forget about Ikariam for the next 10 years again.

According to other posts, the barbarian pillage option has been disabled due to bugs in the game exploited by fellow players wanting to screw up the game for everyone, and in this they have succeeded. There's no way to advance in the tutorial because we cannot omit tutorial steps.

Hint

Add a SKIP THIS option to the tutorial step that can no longer be performed, otherwise new players that require the tutorial (which is 100% of them) will simply close the tab and never return to the game.

I've played Ikariam with my brother 3000 years ago, but I've forgot absolutely everything since, so the tutorial was a really important feature. I was interested in inviting him to start a new game, but since I can't re-learn it, there's no point in inviting someone here anymore.

Since I'm stuck and can no longer progress, any hints on how to proceed from this step will be greatly appreciated. I barely rememer trading with other islands, but I can't recall what's the benefit of this nor how to do it for that matter. I've already built a ship but I have no idea how to use it, there is no "Ships" or "Fleet" icon anywhere. Thanks.