Oh... crap, I forgot about farms.  Thanks, I'll go give it a new try now.

I tried building a farm a,d yes, it helped me a lot. But can they only be built on fertile land? There aren't much of that around...

And btw, I don't know how much food there are in this game, but it doesn't matter. I want options. If I want a coastal town that focuses on fishing, I should be a ble to have one. We can have ship anyway, so why not use the ocean to more than transport? If that means there'll be too much food in the game, the game needs to be rebalanced.

Thanks, it's much easier now. I did get a different unexpected problem, though. I had just started the game, and not more than twenty turns later, a horde of ten spiders charged directly into my town and destroyed it. And that's on Normal? I have never found more than six spiders together before, and these didn't even look for my town. They knew exactly where it was. Weird.

That's the improved creature AI at work.

If you leave them alone and let them wander the wilds they'll slowly group together and become a bigger and bigger threat.

What I do to deal with it is make it a very very high priority to get some defensive units in my capital as quickly as I can. Not so fast that you completely halt your growth though.

For most early stuff two peasants with spears will do fine. Upgrade them with some armor when you get it and they can hold off most creatures for quite some time.

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Guess I need it after sending six people into a fight with three settlers. Not one of my people hit the settlers even once. Not one. The settlers missed a lot too, but easily wiped out my arm. Including the hero. Which isn't a surprise, as he left his spellbook at home or something. The only spell he had was a fireball he can't use because I didn't have fire shrines.

Oh, as for fertile land, what do I do if there aren't any? I found two spots near my home town. That's twice as many as usual. After exploring the rest of the map, I didn't find any more fertile land what so ever. Oh, and another thing. If I only have three factions including my own on the biggest map, how come at least one of them always insist on starting his faction right next to mine? When my home town reached level 3 (I think; I need 250 people) my borders were literally touching his.

Well, based on my weight gain, I think I found your food.

That man looks.... so happy

   A couple of good ideas above, but heres a few more.

• 2 of the simplest ways to get gilder is to steal all the notable locations from your enemies territory... takes some serious tech research though to keep up with the AI's notable location lvl.
• And to discover as many of the factions in game, so that you have a large base with which to use the trade option for declaring war for gilder between those factions.
• The only other 'simple' way I can think of is to make sure your map starts with 2 (or better yet) or 3 food resources near your capitol.

• Another option is to quickly get your city to lvl 2 & select Random Gaurdian Unit. The unit you want to get at city lvl 2 is the Thug; he has 8 dmg with 3 armor & npc's do not retaliate when he attacks. If you go to tactical battle with him and make sure he parks himself on a +10def tile then even a stack of 20 spiders & wolves (with 40-60 hp each) will uselly not be able to bring him down. I play on ridiculous & I find with the city lvl 2 unit reward Thug & the lvl 3 city unit reward Young Ogre; your city is impervious to npc's for a long while. 1,000 of spiders & wolves will not be able to bring those 2 units down so long as you do not auto resolve battles. Allways stack them up on those defensive tiles. An alternative spot is the small 3 square zone inside your towns walls in the tactical map. You can safely protect a weak unarmored hero there with those 2 units. Currently if you do so, some of the npc's attacking will not attack the Thug & Ogre, instead they wait for an oppertunity to attack the unarmored unit hiding.

  WEll hope this helped, have fun & good luck. Cheers dude.

I'm having a really hard time with money, not food in the first 40 or 50 turns.

My city will be producing a pitiful 0.3 gildar per turn restricting the rate at which my kingdom can grow. Any suggestions (other than finding a goldmine)?

research Level 3 goodie huts.  they pop 50-400 gold.

• In my latest game of 1.1 I've noticed that the amounts for each faction varries more than before; maybe I'm just imaging things, but it's the 1st time I've seen declarations of war rangeing from 100 to 800 in early game. (season 1-50)
• Yarp; under the current AI structure it is too exploitable. Be a trip if we could put the heads of there fallen spouses' & children on pikes for added flare during diplomatic relations.
• As mentioned in some other threads; if they included taking dynastic prisoners that would really add some more options to diplomacy.