What's up with grain?

It is mostly the lore that prevents every place to be settled. Although the land looks healthy and settleable, there are deeper problems because of the cataclysm. This is my understanding of it at least.

I agree that there should be more info about this and would provide a better understanding why everywhere is not settleable.

If it shows grain in the tile, it should be settleable (is that even a word?)

Oddly enough... yes it is.

I think you should show the difference better in the tutorial, to get everyone along the train
Then again, if I had my will there would be a couple of several "steps" of tutorial to help either totally new players, or more hardcore gamers.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Yes, you don't even need the - between settle and able that I've been using because I thought it wasn't.

You mean one tutorial for beginners and another one for advanced techniques? Good idea.

Eventually we'll all chip in and get Heavenfall or seanw3 to start a wiki ... Stardock might even send them a new video card for doing it.

You also can't build cities in places too close to other cities.

Ah, ok. But is there any sort of guarantee where you can find settleable area's I thought that perhaps along rivers, but I've frequently come across unsettleable rivers.  

Not really. If you find grasslands far away from nearby cities, there might be some settleable tiles, but it's not guaranteed.

Settleable areas (we really need to figure out if that's a word) are somewhat random, but with restrictions. For instance, you can only build cities within a certain distance of each other (based on map size).

SD did this to limit city spam, and I think it works well. Kind of reminds me of the settlements you could capture in Age of Empires, though with more flexibility since usually there are multiple tiles open to choose between a mix of grain, essence, and materials.

Also keep in mind that cities can only be built a certain distance from other cities so sometimes an area you might otherwise be able to settle in could look un-settleable (now there's a word for ya) due to that. 

The yields are generally dynamically generated from the surrounding terrain and you are correct, rivers do have good yields around them. The yields displayed on one tile are actually the sum of the individual tile yields of all adjacent tiles. If you have played Civ it's like if you added together all the yields from the block of all 9 tiles around a city and then just displayed that in the tile.

We are also updating the tutorials for the final release, hopefully things are called out in way that make them easier to understand. There should also be some more advanced ones in the game concepts section of the Hiergamenon (which should also be more usable in the near future), they just may not have video/voice work on them.

That's awesome, Toby. Thanks for the explanation and all of the work. The last round of tutorials were great, so I imagine the new ones will only be just as good.

One general feedback for the tutorial will be to easily explain how each of those 3 areas, grain, material and essence, each impact gameplay and some of the strategies behind their use. For example, grain is desirable for Towns because they facilitate higher population which is utilized by Towns.