Browser Games Digest

Solarium is an ikariam script to create more better ikariam visual experience. It creates effects of day/night changing and weather effects on cities and islands. As usually for ikariam scripts it made for firefox but you also need some web server (local would be the fastest) to load pictures. The faster server would be the faster will be pages loading. So, here are set of the script feautres:

• Night effect on cities, islands and world.
• Sunrise and nightfall effects on cities.
• Weather (only rain & fog so far) in cities
• Uses local time.
• Images load fast
• All images compressed decreasing loading time by around 30%

So, if you like it, download the script and the graphic pack. After upload the graphic pack to your website and use greasemonkey and User Script commands to select image host. The host should be the root directory of where you put the images.

First of all for both script work you need Firefox or Greasemonkey compatible browser.

The first script is very useful to bypass login procedure in automatic mode (isn’t that just me, who thinks manual server choosing is stupid?). To use the script, install it and simply complete login procedure once, and after the script will bypass whole login procedure for you.

The second script, is autorefresh script which keeps your Ikariam “live” and upto date giving you a competitive edge. It refresh all your ikariam pages and you can customize a refresh timing. So just install it and good luck in use!

There is a very nice script for travian called Resource++. Its main features are monitors for recourses overflow, which are very nice to plan your time. Watch the video to understand how how cool the script is.

At the moment, there are 4th version already available. Here how it looks:

The script gets info about all islands near yours. It only works in the World page.
How to use:

1. Install Ikariam Menu
2. Install Ikariam World Scan
3. Press ‘Show World’ button
4. Move the mouse over Tools and click ‘Scansione’

Download the script

Kronos Utils is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that changes the user interface for Ikariam in many useful ways. You can participate in feautres discussion on userscripts.org page.

The script is a little more advanced than GM scripts usually are; it tries to understand (and get an overall view of) what happens in the game as you play it (by peeking over your shoulder, so to speak — it peeks at all views you bring up in the game, while it improves a thing here and there), rather than bashing the servers with http requests, as soon as it needs some piece of data. This means that you should start with a tour to your library (there is a link to it in the left pane of your Academy), just after installing it:

As you probably note, the view has been combined up a bit into a tech tree, where the vertical line shows how far into the tree you are now. Adjacent techs can be researched right away by choosing the appropriate category, techs farther to the right depend on prior advances. Hover a name to see all its prerequisites get checked, and a tool tip about how many Research Points they will take to get to, cumulatively. (You can filter the view to only show unresearched advances by clicking the header. This is useful if you don’t have a large enough screen to see the entire list in one go; chances are you’ll get a better overview with the smaller selection.)

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The Town Wall gives all your defending troops a defense bonus. It is very useful if you know how to use it. A Town Wall which is not properly scaled with your Town Hall could work against you giving an attacking bonus to your enemies! In order to optimize the wall you have to check both the Town Wall level and the Town Hall level, according to the formula:

% Def = (10 * WallLvl^2) / TownHallLvl

Where:

Def is the defense bonus in % over the defending troops.
TownHallLvl is the Town Hall’s level.
WallLvles is the Town Wall’s level.
From this formula you can easily see how it will do you no good to keep over upgrading your Town Hall while forgetting about the Town Wall, since the defense bonus % will shrink with each upgrade. On the other hand, if we make the extra effort of upgrading them together, we will enjoy a nice defense bonus equal to the shared level *10 in % over the defendig troops. In other words, if both the Town Wall and the Town Hall are in level 1 your troops get a 10% bonus while defending, if both are at level 2, the bonus would be 20%

We can see all combinations in this table graphically:

CityWall / TownHall Level Defense Bonus Relationship
# 1T 2T 3T 4T 5T 6T 7T 8T 9T 10T
1Wall 10% 5% 3% 2% 2% 1% 1% 1% 1% 1%
2Wall 40% 20% 13% 10% 8% 6% 5% 5% 4% 4%
3Wall 90% 45% 30% 22% %18 15% 12% 11% 10% 9%
4Wall 160% 80% 53% 40% 32% 26% 22% 29% 17% 16%
5Wall 250% 125% 83% 62% 50% 41% 35% 31% 27% 25%
6Wall 360% 180% 120% 90% 72% 60% 51% 45% 40% 36%
7Wall 490% 245% 163% 122% 98% 81% 70% 61% 54% 49%
8Wall 640% 320% 213% 160% 128% 106% 91% 80% 71% 64%
9Wall 810% 405% 270% 202% 162% 135% 115% 101% 90% 81%
10Wall 1000% 500% 333% 250% 200% 166% 142% 125% 111% 100%

Holes in the wall - Ikariam
In Ikariam a Town Wall has as many holes as its level. So a level 5 Town Wall could possibly have a total of 5 holes in it. In order to make a hole though your Town Wall, the attacking forces need to count with “Battering-Ram” units. That special units with that ability. The units that can break though walls are:

Rams
Catapults
Mortars
Each hole in your wall gives the attacking forces an extra 10% attacking bonus. From this one can deduce that if your Town Wall is not upgraded at least to your Town Hall level; your enemy could use your own Town Wall agains you!

Example:

Your Town Hall is at level 6 and your Town Wall is only level 2, by looking at the above table we can see how we only enjoy a 6% defending bonus for our troops. Because the wall is at level 2, it can host up to two holes, that is a 20% attacking bonus for your enemy. 20% - 6% yields a final 14% bonus for your enemy.

Source

If you catch a spy and only beat the island name out of him, what could you do? You can use island search tool and find the island. Other depends on you!

Ikariam Attack Calculator is an utility which helps avoid getting banned for bashing by counting how many times in the last 24 hours a certain city was attacked. It is optimized for Opera, so it doesn’t work in Firefox well. It also updates frequently and have very nice interface. Check it out.

How to use IAC

1. Go to the Military tab in Ikariam.
2. Highlight and copy content of that page. In most browsers you can do it by pressing CTRL+A and CTRL+C.
3. Paste the content into a text field on the right.
4. Choose language of the log.
5. Click [Analyze].

Limitations

* IAC can not distinguish between multiple towns sharing the same name.
* In general, IAC can not distinguish between won and lost battles.

Opera Users

If you do not want to subtract the number of lost battles from the result IAC gives you yourself, follow these steps:

• Save this style sheet on your computer.
• Log onto your Ikariam account.
• Right-click anywhere on the page.
• Choose [Edit site preferences...].
• Go to the [Display] tab and click [Choose...].
• Locate the style sheet you downloaded and click [Open].
• Click [OK].

If you go to the Military tab in Ikariam you will see that a word “won” appears before each won battle. Copy and paste the Military log as you always do and forget about subtracting the number of lost battles. IAC will take care of it.

Ikariam like Travian have pillage system in the game for aggressive style players. I’m not sure about Ikariam yet but in Travian it was one of the best game styles cuz “best defense is offense”.

So how could you make you win chances almost 100%? Well, the tool I’m loving at the moment and I use constantly is the Ikariam Score Search Tool. This tool displays the total score, military score, gold score and it also tells you whether the selected town has any allies.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a town with a military score of 0 has no army whatsoever, so you can send everything you like and they will pillage it without any problems.

So what pick an island with the resource you want and preferably one that has the wonder that increases the resource gained because usually the towns will have a lot of the resource stored. Then check each town between level 3 and 7 to see its army and total score. A town with a total score of 300+ and military score of 0 is what you should aim for. The total score may mean that the port level is higher than 1 (most people new to the game just upgrade their port thinking it will help them and only later realize their mistake), therefore the higher the score the better the target. This means you can just send in 2 or 3 slingers and return with a full shipment of goods!

Sometimes you will only get 200 wood and maybe 10-20 of the Ikariam luxury resource but other times you might get 1k+ wood and 300-400 of the resource depending on how many trade ships you have available at home which is another important part. A little investment into 10+ ships will pay off very soon. The problem is, sending 2-3 slingers will cost 400 gold at most. Therefore, even if you only get 40 wood back which is very unlikely you still won’t loose money. On the other hand, if you would have to blockade the port first then launch your own army you could very well be into thousands of gold spent which is risky unless you’ve used a spy beforehand.

Okay so those are the steps to getting your first pillages if you are new to the game and don’t have huge amounts of resources. Nonetheless after you’ve raised 3 colonies, got a town level of 12+ and a larger army you may want to move and attack larger cities so you get more resources per pillage if this method begins to bore you. But by that time you will have the combat experience in Ikariam!

Ikariam Score Linker is a useful little tool for Ikariam based on Greasemonkey engine for Firefox.

The script adds some extra information when a city, either yours or a random one is selected on the island view. It also offers the same functionality in spy view. Here what it adds:

1. Total Score
2. Military Score
3. Gold Score

The information window on the left side of the Ikariam screen should now have those three extra scores added:

Download Score Search Tool

The credits for the script go to immortalnights and wphilipw from the official Ikariam boards.