7 Food Mountain

The 7 Food Mountain:



In Illyriad, food is the most important basic resource. Although you need the other 4 types of basic resources to build buildings, food is the most important because without food, your city cannot grow. In addition, clay pits, quarries, lumberjacks and iron mine produce more basic resources p/h than a farmyard of the same size. In fact, a lvl 19 quarry (for instance) produces more stone per hour than a lvl 20 farmyard. When you also consider that only the military and troop upkeep buildings, the Foreign Office, the magic buildings and the Chancery of Estates require basic resources per hour to keep going, whereas every single building needs at least some food to run- food is definitely the most important resource. And you can’t have no food in a town, either- when you run out of food in a town, your buildings de-level until your food production reachs the positive. So yeah, it is an extremely good idea if you want to have a city of 25k pop, or even more, to be on a 6 or 7 food spot. The prevailing wisdom is that 7 is better, so I will use that in this guide.



But there is another thing to consider. All of the 7 food spots that have 25 resource spots in total are on plains (there are some jungle spots with 7 food squares, but they don’t seem to have very good spreads of the other basic resources). And plains are the least easily defended spot- cavalry, the unit with the highest attack and speed in the game, rule on plains. The most easily defended spot is a mountain, where archers and spearmen- the best defenders in the game- get bonuses and attackers are severely penalised. The problem is, most large mountains are 5 food spots, or even 3 food spots. One must then choose between the two options. It would be good, of course, if you could combine the two options.



But actually, you can.



For your second city only, you can get your city on a 7 food mountain. To do so, you must do the following things:



1. Build up your first city, but don’t build past lvl 12 except for the storehouse. Build your storehouse to lvl 15, research the Inventory Management Technology and build a Warehouse. Build that Warehouse up to lvl 20 and research Exodus

2. Meanwhile, settle your second city on a 7 food square. Think hard about what you want the city to specialise in- if you want your city to be a cavalry city, for instance, don’t settle on a spot with only 3 clay pits, or slightly less importantly 3 lumberjacks. Cavalry Parade Grounds require clay and wood p/h, so you don’t want to lose production of the two most important basic resources for you. Check for the hourly requirements of each building to decide where to settle. For more information, look elsewhere in this thread.

3. Once you have settled, exodus your first city. Bear in mind the same instructions for your second city as your first- but for this one, also remember to consider the quality of the squares around the city. Try to settle in Northern Lucerna/South Ragallon/ North west Mal Motsha, near the main hub, and try to settle with a square nearby which has a very high number of food squares for sovereignty- 15 or 16 would be excellent.

4. Once your city is exodusing, your second city has become your capital. Now, use your Tenaril spell to move to a large mountain, with the same qualities mentioned in point 3. You now have a capital with 7 food squares on a mountain, and a large second city on a 7 food square plot.

5. You can then make an alt, do this whole process again, capture the 7 Food Mountain- rinse and repeat. As long as you abandon the alt each time you do this, it’s inside the terms of the T&C. I will leave the question of how beneficial or otherwise this process is, compared to the investment in time, down to you.



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