Multiplying your villages

Frustrated at being short on resources? Your farms drying up from too much competition or building crannies? Always have too many things to buy when your builder is free?

Here is the solution: more villages.

"But settling takes so long!" Not true. I have been averaging a new village every week for the last month. (This is starting to sound like an informercial...).

So, here is a brief introduction to multiplying your villages. You need three things:

1. Resources: New villages should focus on main building, warehouse, granary and resource fields for the first few days. Keep the builder active. You should have enough income from an established village to keep the new village amply supplied with resources so that the builder is always busy. Thus time, not resources, are your key limiting factor. For this reason, I start with getting my main building up so that when I get to building resources, they rise even faster. A small village can grow by 50-100 pop per day if you keep the builder busy. Because the lower resource fields are better value than the higher ones, it is generally best to keep your smaller villages growing fastest. Make sure your resources never overflow. That is a total waste. If you have nothing better to do with them, then send them to me! Keeping the builder busy might be difficult if you can only log on at certain times. If this is you, then get a sitter or two and give good instructions what you want. And when you are going to go away for a few hours, then upgrade the main building (which usually takes longer than the resource fields) so that when you get back, your next builds will be even faster. When growing a small village, keep an eye on your available resources and send merchants to keep your warehouse and granary between 50 & 80% full so that you are always ready for the next build.
   
   
2. Culture points: Young players rarely think about CP (I didn't even really notice them until I had three villages), but they soon take over from resources as the primary limiting factor in your growth. Until you have enough culture points, your settlers can't go anywhere. There are two ways to get more CP: buildings and celebrations in a town hall. All buildings give a small amount of hourly CP (see here for details). Notice that some give more than others. The best buildings are academy, embassy, palace/residence and marketplace (along with workshop, trade office, town hall and treasury, though these are all more expensive). Make sure you have each of these four (academy, embassy, residence, marketplace) at least at level 1 (which costs almost nothing, takes almost no time, and yet gives the best CP return on investment) quite soon in a new village. Upgrade them from time to time. A few weeks of a slightly higher embassy really adds up.
   
   The second way of getting CP is in celebrations at a town hall. For me, this is the next priority for a village that has built a residence to level 10 and settled. For a town hall, you need to get your academy to level 10. Fortunately, this is not too expensive and will give you good CP anyway. Once you have your town hall, get it up to at least about level 5, since the first few levels give great passive CP and this will really add up over weeks. However, the goal is to have town halls in every village and every town hall to be celebrating. Those bonus CP will move you ahead in leaps and bounds. It feels like you are throwing away resources that could be spent on troops or other things, but actually you are making one of the best investments for your future growth that is available.
   
   
3. Location: Make sure you have thought about where to settle BEFORE you are getting your settlers. This decision is important and can't be undone (without a lot of expensive pain and self-mutilation). Pick a spot in the SH close to your other villages that has the resources you need most. Oases have some importance, but don't sweat them too much. Once you've picked your spot and have your three settlers, off you go and you're ready to start all over again!

PS Gaining oases comes AFTER getting a town hall with constant celebrations. The latter actually has a much better rate of return when you consider the income from new villages.