You can do whatever you like with your towns. There are two islands, Windseeker Isle, which we'd like to keep entirely under our control, and Farra Isle. Farra Isle is much larger and therefore it would probably be bad form to claim it all. Therefore we are willing to negotiate with people who want to move in, and usually there will be no problem with individuals moving to the island. However, I'd prefer that other alliances who are going to relocate en masse do so to a different island (which I can help find if they read this first)
EDIT: Moving close to us would enable us to send you resources faster. Ask in game about faction advice too in alliance chat and someone should hopefully give you a reply with some info about how Harpies infest Farra Isle, and the Windseekers are on Windseeker Isle. Factions aren't active yet but they are important enough that the devs let us know well in advance the basic details so we can pick sides and stuff.
Other than that put your first town somewhere surrounded by as many good production sovereignty squares as possible. It will keep the basic plot structure for your race (7clay for orcs, 7 wood for elves for example)
Your settled cities will change to take the plots of the square you settle on once you have the population for a second city.
EDIT2:
Also travel time is pretty long so distance does matter quite a bit. If new people want to form a colony, that would be possibly a good way to do it if you find an area or faction you like. It would be something to work out in advance probably though.
Scattering all over could be useful for a trade player, who we can send a lot of gold to send supplies back to us for efficiency. However that would make it difficult to defend you as travel time can literally be over a week back and forth. I believe someone is already doing this so if you don't specifically want to you can just go with the flow. I recommend looking at the map and the factions screen and seeing what sounds like a good spot to you, and remember that the closer the better. (although you'll want a bit of area around you to claim sov on, maybe 5 squares, 10 squares would be better. This is because there is now a building that can be built multiple times to reduce the cost on claiming level 1 sov squares; and you can claim like 200 squares now. That means if you built several of that building you could claim a lot of cheap sov level 1s, which would be pretty good. Multiple buildings of the same type reduce effectiveness though so you'd want to build the first one first most of the way maybe depending on the level (haven't done the math or tried it yet)
Also you can settle on Farra and Windseeker Isle.
EDIT3:
Differences between Farra and Windseeker Isle are quite severe despite being right next to each other. Windseeker Isle is Mountainous and has very good sov (sovereignity) squares for production of many goods and also infantry troops. Farra Island is more a tropical island and has a good mix of average sov squares, which is good because it covers what Windseeker Isle does not which is Cattle production (and everything else that's not common in a mountain biome)
I mention Cattle production because Cattle are the most consumed basic resource, which creates a strong demand and value for them on the market. With specialization you can be a Cattle producer or a Cattle processor. Cattle would be the way to go to make some profits on the market until the markets adjust, which this post has a good chance of influeincing. You can actually take a loss on many adv. goods vs trading the resources to make them away due to how cheap they are on the marketplace due to saturation of the market.
The reason for this is because you are limited to 70 caravans (which have no upkeep) at 3000 units. Gold coin is weightless as it represents value and forms the currency. Basically the game is saying that the caravans are large and magical enough that it can pack in as much gold 'value' as required for purchasing a universe in one caravan. This is awesome because it makes buying very easy, since you send out one caravan.
Selling can be difficult because you are limited to moving those 70x3000 caravans worth of goods out of warehouses that are 750k+ capacity for every basic resource, of which there are 5 that qualify for this type of shipping (food, iron, stone, clay, and wood)
Since you are limited to that amount of shipping, and since transit takes 2-4 days from our remote islands, basic resources are more difficult to trade and thus are not traded as heavily as they should be.
In addition setting a marketplace order sends you to the caravan's moving screen. So does accepting an order. This is really annoying and makes trading more clunky. If it could just stay at the same screen and maybe have a small text window that says: Trade accepted: Details:' or similar if you are worried about not knowing if I've accepted a trade or not.
It should be where you set the order, the page refreshes with your order sent and the list updated of course and maybe a little green checkmark by that chat window lights up after you accept a trade. If it alternated between two shades after the second trade to see a visual difference that would be cool too.
Alternately some way to queue up a bunch of trades at once before being sent to the caravan movement would be good too. Such as a button that continues all those trades and moves you to the movement screen if that's easier.
EDIT2:
The effect on advanced resources is interesting because of this fact. Because shipping is overwhelmed by production to such a large degree in basic resources, not as much trading is done on them, as well as because it's a pain to operate the sell system.
The effect on advanced resources is that because they are the resources that carry more value, they are traded to such an extent that calculations from a wonderful alliance member has shown that many of the basic goods lose value in production.
The exception are cattle products, which since you need 2 cattle to make a saddle, 1 cattle to make a leather armor, and 2 cattle to make siege blocks, the market for cattle is stupendous. In addition the commons ground, the building that produces cattle, consumes a lot of food. In Illyriad gold income from taxes is calculated by populationx4. This means that although Common Ground has a longer build time than most buildings, choosing it as your first industry is a good idea as long as the market remains the same way, which should be for the near future at the very least, long enough for everyone to get established.
You don't have to do it that way but until my post becomes common knowledge it'll be a good way to start.
Also, a good goal would be +1000 in all your basic resources but food early on. It will help fill in gaps if any of us larger players miss a shipment.
EDIT4:
Finally the solution to the problem of having little desire to trade basic resources could be solved two ways.
The easy way would be to unlimit caravans and pay them a gold upkeep like troops or diplomats.
The better way would be to do what was done historically and use alternate forms of transporation for bulk goods.
In the railroad days most shipping was either perishable goods that were highly profitable because of it (such as meat) or it was things that could be charged more for at the destination, such as machinery {advanced goods}.
The less profitable things were carried by the existing canal system by raft, boat, or barge.
A good example would be the Great Lakes of Michigan, Chicago and Detroit. In the Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin there were many Iron Mines. The railroads could ship that, or they could ship the beef from Texas and the plains in newly invented refrigerator railroad cars from Chicago out East.
They chose the Beef because for weight they were willing to pay a lot more.
This is why Detroit is home to so many automakers. The bulky resources (iron) had to be shipped by water.
Prior to this a series of canals had existed which enabled farmers to sell their goods at nearby towns, or to ship it to a port city for export if it were to go overseas.
Thus ships could stand to be introduced in the near future that can ship enormous amounts of capacity and tied to an upkeep. For the short term however it wouldn't be a bad idea to make caravans take a wage and unlimit them in my opinion, until canals and such are possible.
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Topic: Illyriad, Browser based game ! Alliance formed! (Read 1976 times)