Planet Geek

Ikariam Screws the Pooch

Life. Don't talk to me about life.

AAAARGGGHHH!

So, I've been having some fun playing Ikariam for the last month or two. It's a low-key, enjoyable game. I'm part of a large alliance, my cities are growing nicely, I'm not involved in any wars. Spiffy.

Lately I've been making a move to expand my settlements from 3 to 4 cities. This requires an ENORMOUS investment in resources and logistics (it's one of the throttles on the game that limits expansionism). Last night I decided to move my resources to the last city that needs to be expanded before I build my new settlement. This involves loading a lot of ships, sending them off, and making sure there's space to receive them.

This morning, I look, and all the resources I set to ship between the cities has vanished.

I've seen this happen once or twice before. It usually means the location I'm heading to isn't large enough to accept the shipment or something. But having the results of weeks of manufacturing just vanish has me totally ticked off.

If this is a bug in Ikariam, they need to fix it. If this is normal gameplay, it would be nice to NOTIFY a player when something they're doing is going to cause a major financial loss.

Right now I'm considering ditching the game and moving on. The tediousness of recreating all that material and re-shipping it is something I'm not too inspired to do, particularly if there's some chance of it all disappearing silently again.

Posted by dbs at May 28, 2008 10:43 AM