Planning for Expansion beyond 7 towns

I've based a majority of my growth within the idea of rapid expansion. That is to say building a reasonable town hall/wall/hideout level and then quickly focusing on expanding to the next town.


In this guide we'll discuss leveling your towns and planning to expand beyond 7 towns. This is no easy feat as leveling of palaces and GRs becomes very expensive. It is my goal that this guide will help others avoid some of the wasted time I've had to deal with as I've expanded.



Towns 1-4 (avg town level 12-16)

These should be your "easy" expansions. resources will be limited due to both worker #s and the availability of resources. However in this era you should be able to find high ranking members that will cut you good deals. 2:1 for goods or something similar. No one needs to expand like I did, however I'd suggest that your first 4 towns encompass one of each resource type. This is important for rapid expansion as you'll need all goods eventually to level up your Palace and Mansions.

*of importance* if you didn't start on a wine island, be sure to search for the absolute best island you can find that's within a reasonable distance. When searching for new resources you can go to the world map, click on an island and then hover over the forest and LUX resource to see what level they are *prior* to placing a colony on that island. You're better off to be on a level 18 vineyard that's 2 islands away versus the level 14 vineyard that's right next door.

Regardless on your wine island you must build a Wine Grower (+2% wine per building level) and focus on getting this building to at least level 10. If you follow my exact plan you'll want to pull in 600+ wine an hour, without overloading the resource. This can be done, in fact I'm producing 800+ wine in a single town with only a level 15 wine grower and without overloading.


*hideouts should be as high level as you can afford. level 20 will be your goal, surpassing that will nearly ensure you're not attacked unless someone really wants to attack you....*


Town 5 (avg town level 15)

Town # 5 should be the best marble island you can find that's within a reasonable distance. (reasonable distance being say 1-3 islands away)
At this point in time you've likely researched the ability to use that additional building space, what you should do is ensure that each town has 2 warehouses. You're probably thinking... "two warehouses? Flip is crazy!" trust me on this, if you follow my advice you're going to save yourself a lot of demolishing later down the road.


*from this point forward...*

You're going to start focusing heavily on leveling your town halls and museums... you have multiple marble towns and you should be able to produce a large amount of lumber. Museums are critical as you need them to reduce your overall wine consumption. I would not advise building wine cellars. Their payoff ratio is low...

A level 32 (the cap) wine cellar reduces the need for wine in your town by 32%. Let's use easy math... town1 uses 100 wine per hour and has a level 30 wine cellar (these get expensive!)

town1 uses now only 70 wine per hour....


The same can be accomplished via museums however...

saving 30 wine an hour is roughly the same as building a level 3 museum, actually the level 3 museum is much better when you're using higher levels of wine. For example...

In one of my towns I could use as much as 150 wine per hour... so the level 30 cellar would save me 45 wine.

Three levels into the museum however would save me 40 wine as well as an additional building space... also, remember that your tavern provides a base happiness of +12 per level, leveling up your tavern is a cheap way to get a little happiness even if you have no intentions of providing more wine.



Town 6 (avg town level 16-18)

Find yourself another marble island. If you found a decent one (say level 17+ marble and level 18+ forest) in your other 2 marble towns you might consider building a second colony on the same island. Personally I avoid this for two main reasons...

1) ability to cripple two of my towns with one solid occupation
2) reduces your ability to pillage others as your exposure to the world will be limited



Town 7 (avg town level 20+)

For those of you with a good wine island you can choose another Marble town. Otherwise you'll likely be stuck going with a wine town.

By now if you followed this guide you'll have 2 warehouses in every town with a combined level of 35. This will allow you to level up your palace/mansion to level 7 and therefore allow you to expand to town #8.



Town 8 (avg town level 22+)

Unless you're amazing you'll need to go wine here, there's nearly no way around it. If you soft capped all taverns and leveled you wine grower to 18+ and are sporting high level museums (which is possible) you'll be able to choose which island resource you want to go with.

For town #8 I'm considering crystal which would allow me to cash out my researches much more rapidly and continue to boost my total points.

No matter which you choose for #8 you're going to have to overcome some obstacles... you now need 3 warehouses per island if you're going to consider a move to island #9... knocking down resource reduction buildings is probably the best bet, if you have trade blocks you rarely use these are prime to be demolished. At this point you should be bringing in 2500+ marble and 4000+ lumber. You should be able to deal with paying higher building costs as well since most of your towns buildings are now close to being maxed out.


I have little advice I can offer beyond this point... I'm planning on going to #8 soonish and then I'll have a better idea of what can be done to reach #9. Population is what wins this game... once you have that everything becomes easy.

My guide is going to have you skimp a bit on population until you have 6+ towns... when yoy reach #6 and beyond you'll begin to get lots of population boosts, receive Utopia (+200 population to your capital) and get closer to researching economic future.


Good luck out there, if you have questions please just ask me!


Flip

Thank you this was an excellent post!

Ide like to try for number 8, but I just keep thinking I should get to 160 ships first, if I can do that then moving resources around will be easier, any thoughts?

I've been working on the ship numbers, and the warehouse problem myself lately.

I'll respond to multiple posts here...


Memento I'm glad you liked the post, if you have questions let me know. I also have another post that I worked on as I was growing and expanding. I think it's called "Solid Town Building vs Rapid Expansion". You might want to check it out as it is sort of part 1 of this FAQ.



Spart:

I hear you... ships are something I need as well as I'm only sitting on about 90 at the moment. My thought is to basically continue driving expansion until my final level 1 "Future" completes. I have 2 down and 1 about 50%, so likely the beginning of August I should be either done or close to done with my last level 1 future.

Once this is done I'm going to layoff all researchers in my 7 towns. This should provide a gold flux of > 7,000 per hour alone which I can then use to purchase the rest of my cargos... granted that it's only going to allow me to purchase ~1 per day at first, declining as things proceed.

I'm hoping that by the time my cargo ships cost > 250,000 (I have the island wonder that decreases their overall cost thankfully) each I will have my 8th colony established and will be working on reducing corruption there. With completing this I will have another town leveled to 22+ with which I can tax for more gold and increased cash flow.

I'm not worried about needing to build additional military to support the new town as I should have enough existing to properly defend 10 towns if that were needed. So the sole focus of town #8 will be to drive revenue and likely increase my Wine production.

As much as I had hoped I don't think I can get away with going to a crystal island... instead of focusing on looking for a new crystal island I've been working to level my own to a very respectable level. I will follow suite with my Sulfer town, as I do not want to ever need to go to two of those.

Flip

Flip, you have some great ideas here as I have taken many of the similiar routes:

... A few observations I'd like to share:

1) Build a carpenter building up to level 25 as soon as you can. This will not only enable you to save on building materials, but will also compensate for using more than one warehouse to expand colonies. With the carpenter at level 25, you only need to upgrade the warehouse to level 26 to upgrade the governer's residence to level 7 (it takes just below 209,000 BM, just short of the 209,500 cap). This obviously frees up a space for another structure instead of using more than one warehouse. Also, since expanding requires significantly more building resources, I believe we will see building resources become more valuabe in the future -- perhaps just as important as marble, if not more. If you need to eventually tear down the carpenter building in lue of another warehouse for town 9, then so be it.... at least you'll have saved alot of BM by building up the carpenter building early, which doesn't take too much effort/ materials.

2) It is true that having two towns on the same island makes you more vulnerable to multiple attacks if you are not online and you get less exposure to pillaging others. But, we should note the pro's are that if you are online, you can defend yourself more readily, by doubling defenses if necessary. Having two towns on the same island also helps you to expand more rapidly by eliminating longer shipping times (this was more crucial in earlier versions of ikariam). Short and simple: if you find a good marble/ lumber island, I do not think it is a bad idea to have two colonies on it, as long as you have towns spread out to other areas in order to increase your pillaging radius.

3) Having a wine cellar in a town where you have a 11+ museum can be helpful to be able to upgrade your town hall since museums require lots of resources to upgrade, especially after level 11 or 12 and/or while you are trying to expand governer's residences at the same time.. Not to mention, if you have wine cellars on about 4 out of 7 colonies that are well-upgraded, as well as a highly-upgraded winegrower on your wine island 23+ /46%+ with an 18+ vineyard, I think it might be possible to get by with the 8th colony as a 5th marble colony. I'd suggest that if you try this route, you have your wine-town in the center of most of your other towns.

Anyways, those are some initial observations I have to share. I'm not able to write much more at the moment, but if I get any more ideas, I will make additional responses to this post.

Kris you point out a very good idea here:

1) Build a carpenter building up to level 25 as soon as you can. This will not only enable you to save on building materials, but will also compensate for using more than one warehouse to expand colonies. With the carpenter at level 25, you only need to upgrade the warehouse to level 26 to upgrade the governer's residence to level 7 (it takes just below 209,000 BM, just short of the 209,500 cap). This obviously frees up a space for another structure instead of using more than one warehouse. Also, since expanding requires significantly more building resources, I believe we will see building resources become more valuabe in the future -- perhaps just as important as marble, if not more. If you need to eventually tear down the carpenter building in lue of another warehouse for town 9, then so be it.... at least you'll have saved alot of BM by building up the carpenter building early, which doesn't take too much effort/ materials.


One thing that I focused on in the beginning was to build Architects in each town. I did this thru town 6 and normally kept them leveled to 16+

At town #7 I had four marble mines all on reasonable output islands, thus marble became less important to me as I could generate several tens of thousands in a single day.


I strongly believe that between town 7 and 8 a change of focus on perhaps, 1/2 my towns from saving stone to saving lumber will be of *huge* benefit.


I'm working on this actively now, having leveled only 2 of my 7 GRs....

Great post Kris, this is exactly the sort of feedback that I hope can help everyone that is shooting to expand to 8 towns and beyond