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Chapter 1: Exploration City Sweetspots
Nutrients are your food supply. Without nutrients, your city will not grow in population. Without population growth, the city will be at a loss for workers, and without workers you can't do very much, so having a food supply is critical. Tiles that have grassy plains will produce more food than a hilly flatland, and tiles infested with xenofungus produce no food whatsoever unless the fungus is removed by terraforming. Having a city next to water is an excellent way to ensure future growth, as sea formers (units that can terraform water tiles) can plant kelp forests that are rich in nutrients. However, since sea formers are still a ways away in the early goings of the game, you should concentrate more on land tiles than water in the beginning of the game.
Minerals are required for your city, so it can produce new units and create an infrastructure. Without minerals, your city can grow in population (if it has nutrients), but can't build anything, ultimately making it all but useless. Minerals are extracted from rocks, so the more rocks you see on a tile square, the more minerals it can produce. You can turn a mineral barren tile into a mineral producing one by building certain enhancements (like mines or forests) on the square. This is called terraforming and will be covered at length in Chapter 6. Energy is used for research and supporting your labs. The more energy you produce, the faster you can evolve your city and empire with new technologies and base enhancements. The primary factor for determining a good energy tile is its elevation. The higher the tile, the more energy it will produce (especially when a solar collector is built there later in the game).
Recap With this in mind, your scout patrol should be on the lookout for regions of terrain that offer these resources. If you're not strong in all three areas, the growth and functionality of your city will be stunted. On the other hand, the power of terraforming can make even the bleakest of situations more fruitful, but this is a time-consuming process and not something you should be engaged in at the early stages of the game. Last, when creating a new city near these resources, make sure the city is within two squares of all three resources. A city only benefits from resources within that two tile radius. Everything else is beyond its reach. Remember this two tile radius when founding new cities so that you create cities that overlap and thus steal each other's resources.
Next:
Discovering Other Factions |
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