Where Do I Put My City? A Guide to Real Estate

Are you saying there was only 2 squares between you? Because that is not enough space at all.

Nice, some annotations from my POV:

Rill wrote: To place a city by Tenarils, it MUST be at least 10 squares from any player not in your alliance or a confederated alliance.

 For those who don't know it, Tenaril is the name of the one-time capital teleport spell, and the 10sq exodus restriction is almost identical:  There can't be a big town popping up near to your town while you were away from keyboard for five minutes.

Rill wrote: Cities cannot be placed on resource spawn squares such as Ancient Forest, Ruined Tower, Deserted Monastery, Standing Stones, etc.

Any square with 8 or more fields of a given resource is always a special square => unusable as direct target for exodus, teleport, or settlers.

Rill wrote: food is the limiting factor in how big you can grow your population at a given tax rate.

Eating your own food while buying clay on the markets is fine, but at the moment it is more expensive than using your own clay while buying food -- only an example, some advanced buildings in fact "eat" lots of clay.

Rill wrote: A settleable square can have up to 25 resource plots

 Caveat, up to 25 means that there are squares with less plots, including 6 and 7 food plots in jungles. 

Rill wrote: Sovereignty squares can be used to increase production of basic resources.

Yes, it is actually simple, e.g., a 7 iron or 12 iron square at the maximum sov 5 yields a 7% or 12% bonus on iron production, respectively.  For sov 1 it is 1/5 of the maximum, sov 2 is 2/5, etc.  As a dwarf with only 3 iron plots in my first town I now have lots of mine shafts, with the option to change this later.

Rill wrote: This means that cow production can be sped up by 8% per level of sovereignty (the base 5% for every square and a bonus 3%), for a total of 40% increased speed at level V sovereignty.

And of course I tested that, because I had two sov 5 squares anyway for military reasons.  What a bad idea, a single sov 5 structure costs 2400 p/h of each basic resource for its say 5*5=25% bonus.  Three sov 2 structures cost only 3*300=900 p/h, but yield 3*2*5=30%.  It is also expensive (time+resources) to build sov structure levels above level 3; even demolishing this dubious idea later takes hours.  For basic resource sov structures with no hourly upkeep it's of course fine. 

Rill wrote: There are three different ways of placing a city:  1) by sending a settler to start a new city, or by moving an existing city through 2) Tenaril's Spell or 3) Exodus.

4a) Capture and exodus. 4b) Capture and stay.  Just kidding, but if it's about capture I'm sure that Rill tested it.

Rill wrote:  Please, please, please do NOT Tenaril a 5-food city onto a 7-food square!  This action ruins a perfectly serviceable 7-food square that someone else might want to use.

 If you can't hold it ruin it -- nothing wrong with that, after all this is a serious war game.