I have been playing for a day now (not continuously) and have some pretty basic questions. Would have put them in the FAQ but that seems entirely dedicated to downloading issues and people whinging about lack of invitations.
1. I have clay pits and mine them, apparently for materials. But materials do not seem to be used (and the early dev reports said that was to be the case). So what, if anything, are they there for?
2. A bunch of improvements add something to the grain total. But fields of wheat are as rare in this world as they are in Manhattan. If I don't have wheat 'attached' to the city, am I wasting time (and upkeep) building these things? Or do the nine 'city core tiles' generate 'wheat' not generic food?
3. Do things like apiaries actually exist? Yet to see one.
4. About to build my first caravan since about 1,1x in E:WoM - do they function the same (i.e. generate roads until some wolf eats them and the caravan route has to be regenerated. What a lot of fun that was!)?
5. What do people do for the couple of hundred turns between dealing with the easy baddies and generating the capability of dealing with the medium and big guys?
6. Do I need to do anything except survive? Other civs drop like flies without me even seeing them. 3 of the 6 (which includes me (of the 6, not the 3)) gone in the current game. Anyone else think that this is a design flaw of critical proportions? Sort of like #5?
7. Was putting most of the resources in areas that can't be settled a design decision? If so, was there a deeper reason than just the satisfaction of adding another frustration for the player?
8. On some maps, about 10% of the squares (only a slight exaggeration) have dragon statues; some maps don't seem to have any. On the former, are all these tied to different high level quests or the same one with just a couple of hundred chances to stumble upon it? Haven't gotten deep enough in the game to have researched the tech to find this out for myself.