Your first city is a Village of 200 inhabitants, which population will increase every season. All inhabitants belong to the race you selected when newplayering. The first good harvesting building has also been automatically constructed for you and you have a little supply available. Now is the time to have a look at the building and unit tree. See how every building and unit you may want to construct needs ressources, a varying amount of the five available goods, and some production.
Goods are gathered in each city storage rooms every season. The amount and nature of harvested goods depends on the already present buildings. For instance the Timberhouse will allow Wood production, whereas the TrapperHouse helps to gather Leather. Harvesting building come in Standard, Large, and also Huge size, each one producing more. The large-size harvesting building is available to any race in its realm of origin. At last, huge-size one is furthermore restricted to the Dwarves in inner Mountain provinces only.
Production and supply depends essentially of the size of the city, but the province profile in also taken into account. You get the most production in inner mountains and the most supply in inner plains.
The Merchant's Guild is the main commercial partner of a player. Every city can trade with the local market. The Guild ensure delivery and collection of goods for free, but make a 50% margin with buy/sell prices ratio. Goods are automatically sold to the guild during the new season from a city storage if there's no more room left.
Harvesting buildings add to the storage capacity of a town for a specific good. You can also build a generic Warehouse.
You won't buy cheap goods that are producted far away at your local market. Why not go and fetch them in their home realm ? Build the marketplace and train a couple of Caravans, then send them at the other side of the disc to buy those exotic goods cheaper. Beware of pirates on the road though; have them wait inside markets rather than on roads or have some military units escort them.
Having built the marketplace, you'll be able to register trade offers at the local market so that other players can send their Caravans to your city to trade goods. You can't neither sell more expensive nor buy cheaper than the local market, but Caravans usually make better business trading with cities than the Guild.
Every city has a taxe rate per inhabitants. Every season, the balance of your advisor will go into your treasure room in Greystar. However, high taxes are the best way to make the inhabitants unhappy, whereas low taxes will give you additional supply to spend on units.
Population increasing every season, your Village will soon grow into a Large Village and become a moderate-size Town, and with a lot more time a Large City. Population growth max between 1000 and 2000 inhabitants, but there is no actual limit to the amount of inhabitants a Large City can reach, beside time and end of age of course.
As said before, the more people you have in town, the more production is available. But keeping a single city makes you vulnerable to military attacks by other players, and won't allow you to win. Train a settler to extends your empire to other horizons.
You can found a new city anywhere in the home realm of the settler but also in any frontier province of an adjacent realm to the home one. For instance, Humans can settle in all the western side of the Mountains and in Lethan Valley. Settlers may also be used to transfer 100 inhabitants from one city to an existing city of the same race.
When you have at least 2 cities, think about having at least a Caravan to transfer goods between them when necessary.