A city is your foothold on the world. It produces a steady, generalist baseline of resources on its own, houses your population, and projects the claim that turns open land into territory you can build on.
Founding a city
You found a city on dry land, near ground you already hold. A fresh city arrives with a small population and a starter stock of resources, enough to get moving and start claiming the tiles around it.
A generalist baseline
Even with no buildings at all, every city produces a small trickle of every resource. That baseline is enough to keep an empire alive; specialized districts are how you produce far more of any one thing.
Territory
A city controls the tiles within its reach, and that reach grows as you develop the city. Where two cities’ claims would overlap, the closer city wins the tile, so how you space your cities decides how much land you actually control.
Why it matters
Cities are the anchors of everything else. Where you place them decides which resources you can reach, how much land you can build out, and where your borders press against rival empires.
This article reflects the game in active development and will change as systems evolve.