Great guide Vanerin!

On the item of sieging, I am not sure that will work. You will need exodus researched in your capital, and sieging a town with it already researched will not help your capital. And as Rill said, you don't need it in the other town.

Damn Vanerin, now all the newbies in T? will ask for it ... AGAIN :-)

Good guide, thanks :-)

To clarify.

I don't understand what you mean, since doing siege research will not transfer a Tenaril spell.  You could siege down the first city in order to transfer the spell, but in that case one should build to 450 population to the first city, plant the second and get someone to siege down the first.  No particular research in the first city is necessary.  However, most newer players are rather attached to their cities and probably would rather not have them sieged down -- a fact that is easy to lose sight of as a vet with multiple cities.

Oops.  My bad.  Despite what Van's guide suggests, I was assuming that you'd want to move your larger city to a mountain, or do this:

1:  Research siege and Exodus

2:  Siege 0 pop city of suspended player with exodus (Or any player with exodus if you take the time to research war machines)  

3:  Exodus city 1 to 7 food square

4:  Exodus city 2 wherever

5:  Tenaril city one

Essentially, it means that your bigger city gets to tenaril instead of your little one, but it takes longer to do because you have to research siege encampment as well as exodus (About a week longer, if you do it as quickly as possible)  

However, rules do change in Illy from time to time, so I suggest you contact GM Luna for confirmation of the current status of this rule.

I did "terraforming" using second account two times but none of those was on mountain as I don’t really think town on mountain is that big help... When someone is sieging your town it has almost no importance if you are on mountain or not. And if you are, there is bigger chance there are mountains around and so siege camp will be on mountains.

But back to terraforming… first time I did it using exodus method and then I realized it is possible to do it without exodusing and therefore with much less resources (when using second account).

--

So what I did is that on second account I settled 2nd town on 7 food square - after making first town 450 pop (using right buildings that can be really cheap).

After that I destroyed (siege-razed) 450 pop capital town on that second account and so new little 7 food town become capital and was able to tenaril his 7 food where I wanted...

For tl;dr just goto "The Blunder" section - or read after I pasted from "The Permanent Location". I tried to make this as concise as possible, but I'm just so baffled now that I decided to put as much information as possible to give people a better understanding of my problem with relocation! 

I've been playing for about a month, and always thought that being patient and waiting to get my res plots and capital reasonably developed while working towards being able to research Exodus tech was what I wanted to do. As a newcomer the concept of the Tenaril spell seemed very intuitive and straight-forward when I first found out about it. I almost just looked for an empty and sparsely populated corner of The Wastes and was ready to use the spell at 450pop when I was able to start my 2nd city.

My capital was spawned in Tor Carrock and it's extremely crowded here and I've always hated it being constantly bumped and what not... Being a newb and not really understanding the more complex aspects of the game, at that time all I really wanted to do was go somewhere to start a nice empire where all my towns would be fairly close to each other and I would be able to claim a bunch of territory without getting in the way of others.  Eventually I hoped to become "Grand Archon of the North" or something like that one day and surprising people by having been able to succeed where no one else seemed to want to move or settle to. 

That all changed a few days later after having learned about Exodus, and reading the newb guides on relocation and real estate. I realized that just instantly using my Tenaril to move my capital off somewhere so that I could found my 2nd city ASAP within close distance was probably not worth the convenience, considering I hate my capital's 5w5c3i7s5f dwarven configuration in addition to not having the extra food that Exo would provide. So I decided to carry on developing my capital - working towards exodus tech when possible, and establishing a firm base in the meantime to one day bring with me. Saving my settler for the day when I finally finished researching Exodus.

Well as it worked out, for various reasons I totally underestimated the time it would take to simply build up my storehouse and warehouse to be able to even research exodus... here is where my blunder began.

First let me say that yes, I have read the other guides on exodus and tenarils on this forum... many times, in addition to the great newb guides by Talica and Mannanan. I am quite literate, have been playing strategy games and the suchlike for 15 years. I've also played other games similar to this when they first started coming out years ago (travian, evony) and because of their popularity and many attempts by other developers to reproduce this I had a mindset coming into this that Illy would be quite similar. I got bored of those games a long time ago and never thought I'd get into them again until reading about Illy a few months back. I'd thought that Illy did sound different and maybe it would be, then when I read a vague article about the trade update to the game a month back decided to give it a go. 

Well... as it turned out, yes, Illy really really actually was different and wonderfully complicated, but still because of my background it took me some time to fully grasp just how complicated the game could get. I knew what I wanted to do, but quickly learned (like many others) that building an empire means way more than just attacking/plundering/farming/etc.. and scattering settlers about a huge grid. I say all this because I want you to know how this mistake happened - that I didn't just skim through the guides, or didn't bother to research/learn the game, or that the guides were bad. 

So the problem was that because Illy offered the opportunity for me to actually claim some land and form a real, tangible, visible kingdom in a meaningful location this was very important to me, but going about this was way more complicated than I thought it'd be. After learning about Exodus, Tenarils, and Exo-Tenaril as ways to get me the hell out of the Tor Carrock newb ring I formulated "Plan A" (otherwise known as "relocation blunder #1")

Plan A was to simply.. 1.) find a 7 food plot someplace far away where I'd want to start my empire and send my settler to found a city on it 2.) Select the new settlement as soon as it was founded and click "exodus to this location" 3.) Once my people were done traveling my new capital would now be where the previous new settlement was - causing my original location to just go back to being empty leaving me with just my same city as it was in Tor Carrock in my new home. 4.) send another settler somewhere nearby in my new homeland to create my second city properly and go from there. 5.) keep my Tenaril's spell of teleportation for a rainy day or in case of some kind of catastrophic mistake later on in the game. End of story, happily ever after way out in the middle of nowhere to start my empire.

Obviously Plan A fails for various reasons, primarily because when using Exodus I later learned that the 2 cities would basically just "switch spots" and I'd always be stuck with a town at my original location in Tor Carrock. This seems like a strange concept to me... like "why do they switch places if just 1 city is moving...?".  Still though, the point is it still counts towards my city count and would bug me having this strange outpost in Tor Carrock for the rest of the game. 

Plan B then came into play, which was just the traditional exo-tenaril technique, which was to exodus to my 7 food plot, then use tenarils to send my capital where I wanted - pretty much as laid out in this guide... except now after reading this one and talking to Rill in GC yesterday I fear I'm getting things wrong once again... After finding out that I'd been saving my settler for weeks (I'm at like 1,300 pop now) while slowly creeping towards being able to research the tech for Exodus, I was devastated to realize that I'd wasted weeks of time that I could have been building up my research and res plots on my temporary city :( 

So today I've now just founded my 2nd city that will eventually become my capital when I finish researching the tech and started building. But there's a problem... By the sounds of this guide I am now totally baffled once again on just how this exodus works and I seem to find a different answer each time.

The inherently confusing nature of Exodus to a newb in comparison to the simplicity of Tenarils, as well as the frequent interchangeability of these 2 terms by mis-informed people in GC and elsewhere is how I got things mixed up. Although this guide and the others on relocation are all very well written, make good sense, and are easy to understand - the sheer volume of information on Tenarils, Exodus, and Exo-Tenaril has also contributed to all this confusion. The irony is that all of these guides are all meant to explain things more clearly to newbs like me, and yet each one confuses me in a different way every time I read one. 

This guide was great and reinforced my decision to found my 2nd city today and start to develop it... Until I came to "The Permanent Location" section and am once again confounded by what the hell I'm trying to do, and how I'm supposed to do this. In particular it's this that has me worried:

The Permanent Location

This spot will be where exodus lands. So you will want to look at the resource distribution, surrounding terrain, food dolmens, good neighbors (both player and faction), and all that other good stuff. And since you will be using exodus, this spot can not be within 10 squares a non-confed/ally player.

Whatttt? I thought that I was using Tenaril's to go to my final destination, and that Exodus was only being used as a means to get my capital on my 7 food plot "temporary home"?? Everything seemed to make perfect sense up until this point. I really like the "3 Locations" notion that made it seem like what I was doing was correct and easy to understand. Right now though my understanding of leaving the newb ring by using exo-tenaril has totally collapsed once again, where am I going wrong? And yes I have read the whole guide even after the permanent location section and it just feels like there's this huge gap of something that I'm just missing somehow... Please tell me that I'm just mis-interpreting this or mis-reading the guide, because in helping me to identify all of my errors in trying to understand this concept I think it will really really really really help others to understand where they are going wrong and just what exactly it is about all this that makes it seem like learning quantum mechanics. 

Thank you all for your time and help!

1) Under no circumstances will two cities ever "switch places."  Ever.  Not once.  You can only move a city from the square it is on to a different square that does not have a city on it.  

2) There are two ways to move cities from the square they are on to completely empty squares

a.  Tenaril  

This spell is immediate and moves your capital city from its current square to an empty square, carrying underlying resource plots with it.  It can only be used once per account and only on your capital.  Nothing inside your city is changed when you use this spell; only the location of the city is changed.  All accounts are "born" with one Tenaril spell, which can be used anytime after new player protection is up.  A 5-food SQUARE can be made into a 7-food SQUARE using Tenaril IF the Tenaril'd city is a 7-food city.

b.  Exodus

Exodus can be used on any city that has researched the Exodus technology.  (A level 20 warehouse is required to study Exodus.)  The city will acquire the resource plots of the square the city lands on, losing plots and gaining others if the new square is configured differently.  A 5-food CITY can be made into a 7-food CITY using Exodus IF the square to which the city is Exodused has 7 food plots.

Every player must have a capital city somewhere on the map at all times; I suspect this is because it is a "key" piece of information in the game database.  For this reason, if the capital city is Exodused, the largest of the remaining cities becomes the capital city.  This change to the capital city is permanent, unless the "new" capital is also Exodused (or lost to siege), in which case the next largest city will become the capital.  When the capital city is Exodused and the capital status reverts to the largest stationary city, the ability to Tenaril, if not yet used, transfers to the new capital city.

Here's a side-by-side comparison

you never stop to amaze me, rill. 

1.) Exodus my capital off to somewhere far away where I want to end up with my capital to an empty 7 food square. ( I don't want to Tenaril it now as a 5 food)

2.) Spend weeks again researching up Exodus tech on my new blunder city I just settled, and then use exodus on to move it nearer to my capital's location eventually.

And basically that's my only choice right now correct? So would it be reasonable for me to just Tenaril my capital (along with it's 5 food) to the general region I decide to move to so that when I do exodus to a vacant 7 food square I don't spend weeks traveling at 5sq/sec? Presuming I decide to move to say... The Wastes or somewhere along the edges of the map?

I guess the only other use Tenarils has for me at this point would be to save it for later in case for some odd reason I changed my mind and wanted to teleport my capital to the opposite side of the map... seems unlikely I'd ever want to do that though, but in a few years... who knows. 

Thank you so much for all of your help today and yesterday Rill. When you wrote "clear your mind completely" my headache went away instantly, then changed to heartache after realizing what I've now done. I thought it was so incredibly strange when I was persuaded weeks ago that to exodus you could only make another city that you had the capital by moving to/on it and making the old capital the 2nd city. Made no sense at first, but then I somehow managed to convince myself that they were right and I was just mis-reading/interpreting the guides.  :(

I can see now why there is so much effort to clarify this topic and how someone could just decide to rage quit after doing something so catastrophically moronic as I have done. My first reaction was "oh god, I'll just abandon the whole damn thing and start over "properly"..", but then after reading your explanation I realize I can at least correct the error... in time.

I should add that to the list.

Me too!! A nice big shiny one 

very well put together :)

anyone wanna come play on my magical mountains? ;)