Hello, If you're reading this then thank you for giving me your attention as i help you (A likely new or confused player) understand the game and take advantage of the mechanics and features in order to give you the best start in this city building simulator/town management game.

Obviously location is very important for what you'll be doing, it will dictate the resources you'll find as well as their abundance so allow me to explain a few things i taught myself about the map and the different terrains and resources.

Once you start a new game you will be allowed to choose your name and a few other stats, For the sake of this guide i will just assume you're going by default settings (not changing anything).
First you'll want to understand the importance of "Fertility", As simply as i can put it it is the overall average fertility of the location your mouse cursor is on, choosing to be near a forest or a body of water will increase fertility while being near mountains and deserts will lower fertility, The more fertility there is the more productive your farms will be and food will be your most desired resource through almost the entirety of the game regardless of where you're at.

Mountains offer many advantages though such as an abundance of stone and the possibility of caves and other resources that i will get into shortly, one advantage i strongly urge you to take is the fact that mountains can cut off possible entry points to your village, in some cases they can cut off almost half the map, You'll understand how good that is later in this guide.

Forests are of course a greatly desired terrain for the abundance of wood the map will contain.

Different bodies of water dictate what you'll get, Rivers are going to cut through the edges of the map and do aid farming by making fertility skyrocket, Oceans and inland seas however have beaches and thus make you have no fertility directly beside the water, However this does not remove the fertility bonus at all, In fact it gives about the same amount of fertility bonus in the same amount of land as rivers, Both previously mentioned types of water bodies also provide ample opportunities for fishing so if you want an agricultural community then go for it.

Me personally i like the combination of mountains and forests.

The abundance of building materials certainly help and so for the sake of this guide i'll continue as if you've chosen the same set up i have, One important thing to note is that its best if you have more coal and iron deposits, Preferably close to each other, I'll explain later in this guide.

So by this point you're about to place your throne room somewhere on the map, As i mentioned previously its best to have extra iron and coal deposits, As far as i'm aware you will always have at least one coal and one iron deposit somewhere on the map regardless of the deposits in your region, Its best to place your throne room in throwing distance of your iron and coal deposits and of course be near a lot of fertile ground.

Now your going to want to start heavily on food production, for now let's focus on farms and hunting.
first, start with fruit farms, early on this is going to be your second most productive food building but it's still a priority. if your near a body of water then feel free to place it along the edge for optimal fertility (Note that "Sweet water" is fresh water and increases fertility while oceans do not)
A 10 X 25 farm plot is best at this point.

Also something good to do is to gather edible plants around you, things like vegetables and fruit are best.

While your people are building the farm start working on a small warehouse, then fill it with your starting supplies and set it to accept fruit, wood, stone, livestock, rations, clothing, meat, leather, cotton and eggs. With that warehouse set up you'll now need to focus on housing.
Housing at this point doesn't need to be fancy, a single longhouse is enough.

Now lets get to the backbone of your early game food production, Hunting will be easy and straightforward so lets set up a hunting building, it doesn't need to be large so it should be easy and quick to build.

Now with food production under control let's focus on our surroundings, its important to have an idea for what you want to do and how to build your settlement. Previously i said you'd want to be close to coal and iron deposits, the reason is because those two resources are probably the most important mid-late game resources you'll need, so eye out your local deposits and make a mental note that the area around them is for industry. But for now stone and wood is your bread and butter so eyes on what's important for now.
You'll want to build up your population to at least 100 before doing anything new, and the way to do that is through immigration, and that means your people will need to be happy.

Immigration happens when people have a happiness of over 80%, this means providing services, food and good accommodations for your people, and while im sure lots of people want fancy clothes and a super nice home, basics are important, so lets start with a well and an eatery.

Ahh but lets not forget the Janitor, after all it wouldn't be good for anyone if every able bodied person is stuck repairing your home and well, so lets put one down too.

By this point you'd have run out of building resources, don't worry about cutting down huge swathes of trees, they regrow quite fast, but keep an eye on your stone, unless you've got a stone mine around then there's only soo much stone to go around,

Assuming you've followed the first part of this guide, you're at the point where you want immigrants to join you, this is achieved by looking at the right side of the screen and selecting a race to allow to immigrate, simply right click on any race (It's best to select your starting race) and click the plus button on the right under Auto. This increases in increments of 25 so it should be easy to handle.

With some fresh labour joining you its time to increase food production, Go ahead and copy your 1st fruit farm and place the 2nd farm plot next to your 1st plot with a 1 block gap in between, Once that's done feel free to dig a canal in between the 2 farms. Canals increase food yield by a large margin, on a small scale like this it won't add much but in the larger scale it is impressive indeed, However the amount of canals you can dig depends on the "Water Table" which is basically how much water is in the ground, of course living next to a river means lots of water table, but living next to a mountain means water is more scarce. The water table resource can be increased by removing water on the map.

Now we should focus on giving people some proper houses, which race you chose to start with will depict which house is best, most races enjoy privacy but the Garthimi enjoy communal living rather than privacy, also its best to keep your houses close to where people work, if the house is too far away then people won't live in there.

While growing your population its best to limit yourself to your food production, more people = more mouths to feed after all. so lets focus on simply building up our population first and foremost.
once you get about 50 people then we can look at the key to unlocking the interesting stuff, The Laboratory is a labor intensive building but is critical to your success, and while im sure its enticing to build a massive laboratory, smaller is better.

With a laboratory set up we should focus on what's important, and of course that's making sure people are happy and safe, so the technology you should get first and foremost is the Lavatories, the Speaker, Makeshift Weapons, and the Tailor (keep in mind that this is a guide, not a tutorial, make your own decisions). These techs will be the first stepping stones to a better society.

Lets start with the Speaker, everyone enjoys the speaker and its a low cost way of fulfilling a need so its an easy choice. Next is the Lavatories, but to build that we need to build a carpenter first, so lets start with a small carpenter building, while this is building lets add furniture to what's stored in the warehouse. Once the carpenter is done then start on the lavatories building.

Next the tailor should be built, this will give a use for the leather that's been building up from your hunter, and will provide some much needed clothing to your people.

During all of this you shouldn't be neglecting your food production, Food is king in this game and should always be on your mind when expanding.

Eventually you'll grow large enough to allow bandits to attack you so you'll want an army ready to defend yourself, and that means building a training grounds, In the upper left of your screen you'll see a bar with a sword icon, clicking on that will bring up the military menu, By default the game will try to train an army of 200 soldiers made up of your starting species, this is very unnecessary for your first threat, so lets cut down the number of desired troops to 50, lets also give them 1 or 2 levels of melee training.

Ahh but a soldier cannot fight without a weapon, well the Makeshift Weapons tech allows the carpenter to make weapons out of wood and stone, so lets set the carpenter to do that while also adding weapons to the warehouse, with that done it's only a matter of time until every soldier has a weapon to defend against bandits.

Your army will obviously be very important throughout the game, but what type of army you get is determined by your population and your available resources, having a large population but not many resources means that its looking like your army is going to be a poorly equipped one that relies on number more than anything, the opposite is also true as having a small population with extensive resources means a small yet well equipped army.

The amount of training they get determines their overall effectiveness, more training = better soldiers, but also requires them to spend more time training. This means finding a balance that works for you, don't try to follow a narrow path, follow the path that's best for you.

In the words of Napoleon Bonaparte "An army marches on its stomach" so before you even think of conquering the world your going to need to afford to supply your army, the Army Supply Depot is what you'll need to do this. An army needs up to 6 different products to sustain itself of which i'll break down into "Core Supplies" and "Equipment".

Core Supplies are supplies that every soldier uses when in an army, and Equipment is what that division is equipped with, Running out of Equipment will reduce the combat effectiveness of the army and running out of Core Supplies will lead to soldiers deserting from your army.

The Core Supplies are as follows: Ration packs, Clothing, Alcohol
The Equipment are : Weapons, Armour, Bows

An Army Supply Depot can only hold one type of supply, so you'll need multiple depots to maintain a decent sized army, the larger and more equipped your army is, the more depots you'll need to maintain it. This can be a deceptive drain on your resources to be careful, even with a city of 12 thousand people and 3 thousand slaves i could barely sustain an army of 4 thousand, and that's with virtually everyone being devoted to supporting it, so to support an army taking 1 fifth of your population you'll need to devote at least 3 quarters of your city to supplying it. although keep in mind that for that example i was using a very well trained and decently equipped army, so a poorly equipped horde of peasants should be easier to handle, but the resource drain only happens when the divisions are in an army on the map.

One more thing, an Army on the map increases loyalty in the region its located in, so breaking up your army into smaller armies to maintain control over your territory has some reasonable logic to it, afterall eventually you can only survive on taxes from those regions you've conquered.

Eventually your going to have to interact with the economy, if not to buy resources your lacking then to sell resources you've got excessive amounts of to afford more slaves.

So, what should you do, well obviously, by mid-game your going to realize that you've got one or more resources that are quite valuable, or a source of resources that can lead to good profits.
Exploiting these resources and selling them as export will give you some money, which will make your people happy and give you the ability to either buy resources your lacking or to buy slaves when the slaver arrives.

The value of a resource depends on global supply, the more available a resource is the cheaper it becomes, and likewise being the sole exporter of a product really drives up the price, although its virtually impossible for that 2nd scenario to occur it really helps understanding how flexible the economy is.

Raw resources and food are obviously cheap and plentiful, everyone can gather wood, stone and food. refined resources such as cut stone, metal, and cloth are not nearly as plentiful and thus are much more valuable in the economy. But the Truly valuable items are the finished products, items such as Livestock, Furniture, Weapons, Armour, Tools, Jewelry, Clothing. These items are expensive because everyone wants and needs them and they're very resource and labor intensive, so if you want to become a very wealthy empire then try to specialize in one or two of these industries, although keep in mind that you'll likely need to source the materials locally or through taxes, and keep in mind that every region can provide different resources in taxes, so eye your neighbouring regions carefully and plan what industry your going to do.

One more thing to wrap up this guide, Slavery, a controversial topic for most and something that people won't be comfortable with in this game to be sure, however it doesn't need to be viewed as a bad feature to avoid, i tend to use it to bolster my population. Just buy or gather slaves, free them and suddenly the freed slaves are now members of your society, able to work and fight for you just like anyone else. Although this does come with a drawback, people won't like loosing a cheap labour force and having less food available to them, so don't release a large amount of slaves at once otherwise loyalty will drop very quickly and you'd have a riot that can result in hundreds or even thousands of hostile people killing and destroying everything in your city, it happened to me multiple times and i'm warning you to do this tactic sparingly.

I just want to thank you for reading my guide, I hope it helped you navigate the potentially confusing and sometimes frustrating features and mechanics of this City building/Town Management game, If you want to leave feedback fell free to leave a comment down below, If you enjoyed this guide or found it helpful throw a good rating at it and how about a like, I intend to update this guide with more info as the game get developed as well as what info you want to add, I will respond o questions as i see them in the comments or in the discussion tabs below so don't hesitate to leave an honest opinion.