How to Fund a New Colony

Colonies are satelite cities builr to serve your Capital and expand your Empire. The first and most obvious advantage is that you can choose the island (and hence the local resource) where you want to build a colonie. This efectively means that you can found new colonies on nearby island and gather wine/marble/crystal/sulphur by yourselft.

The first thing you need to do is buil a Palace level 1. The cost of such a building is 635 logs or wood units. However, in other to build a Palace you need to have discovered first Expansion (Navigation). Which in turns has two dependencies that have to be filled to unlock it: Ship Maintenance (Navigation) and Wealth (Economy). You may find this Ikariam research technologies tree useful.

 

Once you have a Palace level 1 and Expansion discovered you will need to gather enough resources to pay for the founding of your new colonie:

Resouces Needed to Build a New Colonie
Resource	Quantity
citizens	40
Gold	12,000
Wood	1,250
Cargo Ships	5

The construction process will take about 2 hours and once it is done you will have a new colony with a level 1 Townhall. It used to be somewhat awkard to enter your colonie, you needed to go back to your capital and select it from the drop-down menu on the upper left. This has change for the good and now you can simply click on your colonie from the island view.

In order to fund more colonies you need to keep upgrading the Palace in your Capital. (Palaces in colonies do not count!). The amount of resourcs you need to upgrade your Palace grows at a very fast rate. So much that having one or two colonies is trivial, getting the third will surely put a strain on your economy, and building a fourth would be a colosal task at the beggining, more so if your environment is heated up with battles that require most of your resources. However, it is possible if one plans well and looks ahead. Here you have a graph how much it will cost to upgrade the Palace:

Resource needed to Upgrade the Palace
Palace level	Resources
Level 1	635
Level 2	5,488 525
Level 3	20,462 7,170 4,780
Level 4	56,448 12,544 31.360 25,088
Level 5	225,792 100,352 150.528 100.352
Level 6	451,584 200,704 301.056 200.704
Level 7	903,168 401,408 602.112 401.408
Level 8	1,806,000 802,816 1.204.000 802.816
Level 9	3,612,000 1,605,000 2.408.000 1.605.000
Level 10	7,225,000 3.211,000 4.816.000 3.211.000
Level 11	14,450,000 6.422.000 9.633.000 6.422.000
Level 12	28,901,000 12.845.00019.267.000 12.845.000

This building time is 4hours for level 1, 9 hours for level 3 and hours for the rest of the levels. In the following graph we can see clearly which resources have a bigger specific weight at each upgrade. In the first levels, Wood and Marble have a bigger weight, while on the latter levels, Marble weight is double that of Crystal and Wine. Because of this, if our Capital doesnt produce marble, our first colony should definitely be on a marble island with a Gea Temple if possible to get the extra 10% bonus. From level 5, the proportions dont change anymore.

Notes, tips and tricks:

• Your Gold is shared among all your colonies, the rest of the resources belong to the city where the are in, and must be moved to other colonies if you plan to use it there. In order to do this you need Cargo Ships and a Port.
• The technologies discovered are shared amongs all cities.
• If you build more academies in your colonies, scientists from all cities work toghether on the same topic.
• To move resources from your Capital City to a colonie you do NOT need to have a port in the colonie, however, to send resources FROM the colonie, you do need a port.
• Do not upgrade too much your trade port, this will minimize pillage.
• A deposit will keep your goods safe on your colony while waiting to be transfered to the capital.
• If you send some wine and wood at the beginning to your new colonies, you will kick-start them much faster.
• It is a very good strategy to build first a tavern and grow the population quickly.