The western side of the map in the elf lands definitely looks the best to me, somewhat inland yet along that large river they have. This way we're in land so have influence on the middle of the map as well as the north and south sides of it.

Since we want to be a massive empire with sub guilds we have to think like one. Centrally located HQ... let our sub guilds set up on islands if they wish.

Like Jet said, we are basically forced by tradition and other guilds to be the human alliance. The griefers will mostly be orcs/mahirim/alfar.

Of course, too much pre-planning is just "hype" building. The key factors that will make for the "best" city locations will be where the resources are. Why did our initial city in Shadowbane semi-suck? Cause we placed it next to nothing but mid level mobs, meanwhile WinterHaven the CoS HQ was placed next to the best spawns on the map and same for Combine's city, placed next to the swamp.

Once we are in beta we have to actually spend time researching the resources, most likely Final will have a different map from beta but we can atleast figure out what resource is the "best". As i understand it each city will only have 1 or 2 resources inside of its boarders... so lets make sure we have the 2 best ones, will it be Gold mines and Lumber resource points? or Iron mines and stone quarries? Let's not gimp ourselves from the get-go like we did in Shadowbane. Sure we will eventually have 2+ cities so at some point we should have all the resources but how quickly we get to that stage of our empire will depend on how perfectly planned our first city is.

"It's not enough to win... others have to lose."
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