So far I've done exodus with two towns, and both times the underlying terrain where the city
used to be was altered (both started on large mountains, and one became small hills while the other became plains).
I assumed the game was trying to normalize some of the anomalous terrain that exists because of how the game world used to be (when the fractal map was added, apparently towns kept their directly adjacent terrain types, even if that made things a bit silly).
So what I'm wondering is, has anyone noticed a pattern of the shifts? Does it only happen when the prior terrain is a mountain (or do people only notice when mountains suddenly disappear)? Since the immediately surrounding terrain doesn't seem to affect anything, perhaps the new terrain is just randomly determined from all the applicable terrain types for the biome and elevation? Or does the alteration not always happen?