1) Large Mountain entirely surrounded by Large Mountains. Seems good at first, but it seems that the most important battles, if seiged, are early on when the city army goes out to attack the seiging army. In this scenario, would my army of archers get a big penalty for attacking up a steep mountain?

2) Mountain surrounded by hills. Defensive bonus if attacked, but perhaps not such a large penalty for attacking uphill if I sally forth?

3) Hill surrounded by plains. Defensive bonus if attacked. Ditch all Trueshot strategy and have a cavalry to sally forth.

4) Hill/Mountain surrounded by mixed terrain of hills/mountains/plains. There are many more available locations of this description and perhaps this outweighs any advantages from the above strategies where I control the terrain of the battle. Have a greater component of cavalry & infantry in the army to be able to fight on all the surrounding terrain.

What do you think?

http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/the-magical-7-food-mountain_topic4094.html

The main disadvantage in having a city surrounded by mountains, even if you are an elf, is that usually when you are being sieged you need other players to come to your aid.  Because cavalry travels so much more quickly than any other unit, cavalry units are most often what is used to relieve sieges.  Therefore people prefer to be surrounded by plains, where cavalry has an advantage, because it is much harder to defend a siege camp that is set up on a plain and therefore easier to defend against a siege there.

I'd be very interested to hear what Kumomoto has to say on this topic.  To me he is the elf who has the most experience in defending and attacking in the mountains.  I still remember some of his actions in the Valar and Consone wars.

Another thought - a bunch of elves banding together in the mountains would lessen the advantage of cavalry speed and make Trueshot seige relief more feasible.

The people who are planning the siege can coordinate among themselves when the siege will land and have troops travel long distances to arrive in a (relatively) surprise attack -- at least the square on which the siege will land is not known until it actually does so.  This means that people who are defending against a siege have less time to prepare than the attackers do, so they will be more likely to need to use cavalry for a quick response.

Sentinels are exactly equal to Trueshots in attack power/time and are greater in all categories with regard to defense power/time.  

Stalwarts had their recruitment time reduced as well such that a stalwart gives you the most attack power/time of any unit.  They will provide 25% more attack power/time over an axman.   

Usually the price of plate is significantly cheaper than chain so I've usually found that the actual adjusted cost of a Stalwart comes out to be cheaper than an equivalent number of axmen.    

A player can defend his cities with both the aid of his alliance members, and the aid of his other cities. Building a trueshot city on a mountain surrounded by plains, then, is still extremely tactically sound as it gives the actual city a major defensive bonus against attacks (115% wall defence+30% large mountain=major ouchies for attackers), and it allows any nearby cavalry to inflict several kinds of hurt on siegers.

There is a place for every single troop type in this game. You should not choose what troop to train based purely on the defensive potential of your location- otherwise nobody would ever train spearmen :P

Though even with the +5% sov bonus the defending bows would have a greater power.  

The main challenge is that many jungle squares are low on stone, which makes it hard to support infantry quarters.  You'd probably want to terraform them.