Where you can build
Every node on the map carries a single value that decides what it can host. It is called building quality, and once you can read it, half the guesswork of placing a settlement disappears.
The six answers
A node's quality is one of:
| Quality | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Nothing | No building and no flag |
| Flag | A flag only |
| Mine | A mine, and nothing else |
| Hut | Small buildings, and a flag |
| House | Medium and small buildings |
| Castle | Anything that is not a mine or a harbour |
| Harbour | A castle-sized site that also accepts a harbour |
The ordering is a ladder with one exception: a site of a given quality accepts anything that needs that quality or less, so a castle site will happily take a woodcutter's hut. The exception is mines. A mine site accepts only mines, and no mine can be built anywhere else — mountain nodes are not "better" than house nodes, they are a different thing entirely.
What lowers a node
Quality is not stored once and forgotten; it is recomputed from the world around a node whenever that world changes. The things that push it down are the ones you would expect from the original: rising or falling ground between a node and its neighbours, terrain that cannot be built on, proximity to another building or to a flag, trees and granite standing in the way, roads already crossing the node, and whether the site's own flag position — its south-east neighbour — is free. Every building needs that flag, and the game places it for you.
Ownership matters too, and it is checked last. A node only builds at all if it and its neighbours are yours, and a site whose flag point falls outside your border drops to flag-only — so the edge of your territory is always softer than it looks.
Reading the map instead of guessing
Turn on the construction aid and the map draws every node's quality directly on the ground, as the small icons the original used. This is the fastest way to plan a settlement: castles and houses cluster where the ground is flat, mines trace the mountain ridges, and the flag-only nodes show you the road corridors before you have laid a single one.
While you are dragging a road, the cursor also shows a slope arrow for each step. Flat is free; steep costs your carriers time forever. A road that looks two nodes shorter on the map can easily be slower in practice.
Planning order that works
- Find the castle sites first. They are scarce, and the buildings that need them — farms, fortresses, pig farms, temples — are the ones you will regret squeezing in late.
- Then the mountains. Mines cannot move, and the food chain that feeds them is long.
- Fill in with huts. Woodcutters, foresters, quarries, fisheries and barracks all fit on hut sites and have plenty of choices.
- Leave road corridors. Every building you place lowers the quality of the nodes around it. A settlement packed at maximum density is a settlement whose roads have to go the long way round.
Cost is the other half
Quality says where; the site's bill says whether. Every building costs boards and stones, delivered to the site before anyone plans or builds it. Small huts are cheap, castles are not, and a site with no road to a warehouse is a site that will sit unbuilt however good its ground is. The encyclopedia lists the exact cost and ground requirement for every building in the game.