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!
Profile of the Newb
Okay - I'm in the process of trying to do an Exo-Tenaril, actually as some of the people who have posted on this thread may know from GC, I have been trying to do this for some time.
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.
The Newbs Dilemma
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")
The Blunder
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!
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