The big fat "HELP ME" thread

Food. Okay, so my cities can't grow without enough food, and there are no natural food resources nearby - what are my options?

I beleive you can build farms in your city, correct?

When you select a summoning spell, you need to cast it on a tile (your mouse should change to a casting cursor and when you mouse over tiles they should highlight green if the spell is castable on that tile.

Similar to Summoning, this needs to be cast on a unit on the map. There's some funkiness to casting on a stack, so you might want to break off the specific unit and move it to its own tile, cast the spell, then stick it back into your army. Your Sovereign should get an Enchantments tab next to Stats/Abilities which will show all the enchantments he's maintaining (Familiars/summons go there, too).

Find some Not much else to it than that. You should always start by one fertile land, which will let your city grow probably to level 3 or so. Once you have a few cities, you can research trade to get caravans, which greatly boost the food production in the cities they're trading between. There should also be research in the Civic tree to increase the food income from farms by a percentage, and this research is repeatable.

Check your enchantment slots. It looks like both summons and enchantments take up a slot each.

Summoning - Did you actually select somewhere to summon your familiar or press other buttons when nothing happened and (probably) canceled the cast?

Enchanting - Same thing.

Food - You'll always start near one, and you've got to make that one last until you find more.  One map food resource should be able to power up a couple of cities to level 2 initially, at least.  If you don't have any food anywhere near your starting area, and didn't delete your map seeds, then send it off to support as a bug.

NO you can only build a farm on Fertile Land.  However, there should always be a spot of fertile land near your starting point.  From there you'll have to explore to find more.  Food is a RARE and valuable resource.  However, keep in mind that with housing research it doesn't take much food to level up your city.

I can locate my screenshots - where they should be found? I have Win7-64.

Screenshots should be under "My Documents/My Games/Elemental/Screenshots". That's where a lot of important data is kept and also integral to modding.

Summoning- Also note that you must click the same tile as the caster to actually summon a creature. You do not summon them in tiles next to your characters. I don't think you can cast any spells while garrisoned within the city (couldn't in beta).

Somehow I got the game into top down mode and now I can't get it out.  Anyone know how to do that?

Edit - You can quit the game to get out of top down mode but I'd like to know if there is any other way.

Top down? Is that the cloth map? I just use the scroll wheel on my mouse, I guess.

No, not the cloth map.  Normally you are looking at the map from an angle.  I did something that put it into a top down view and can't figure out how to get back the the side angle view without quitting the game.  Scrolling all the way out goes to the cloth map but this top down view is from fairly close in and does not involve mouse scroll.

Are you talking about the City Build Zoom mode? AFAIK it gives you a top down view when you go to place buildings, but closing out of the improvement construction window is supposed to revert  the camera. I haven't used the mode in ages, though, and it might be a bug if it sticks.

You can change your view by holding down the mouse wheel and moving your mouse around.  Found it after I had to deal with the same problem as you.

Are you right over a city? It zooms to an uber-close, direct-top-down view of a city with green grid markings when you click the city's Build menu (i.e., it's showing you where you can place a new structure). Getting out of the Build menu should reset the view.

I think there's an option to disable that whole behaviour in the Options screen, if you don't like it (at work, so I can't confirm exactly where for you right now).

EDIT> Damn, double-sniped!

- Ash

Use the middle mouse button (the mouse wheel *is* a button too) in order to drag the camera.

Or is it the right button, I'm not on my home computer yet and can't recall ?

That would explain why I had to move my Sovereign out of his capital, yesterday, to cast an enchantment on the city.

What was odd, then, was that most of the city tiles were highlighted with a red color. I had to find a city tile which was highlighted green. I wonder why I couldn't cast a city enchantment on just any city tile -- within the Sovereign's casting range. 

Ok I double clicked the main city tile to get into the top down view.  Holding the mouse wheel and rotating the camera gets out of it.  Thanks for the help guys.

I haven't downloaded the non beta version yet, so maybe this is a beta bug but what tech/resources do you need to build a lumber mill. I had researched all the basic civilization tech, placed a city right next to an old growth forest, but never got the option to build a lumber mill, I'm assuming a lumber mill is different from the great mill (When you hover over an old growth forest it says to build a lumber mill to harvest) but could never build a lumber mill,......any thoughts?

I had the same issue...the number keys 1-4 cover map camera views. This is covered on page 30 of the manual.

Having a bit of a problem right of the get go. I am only able to build a market and workshop once a settlement has been built. Farm does not show up on my build selection. So, no food. This is in both campaign and random.

I hope I'm doing something really stupid.

Thanks.

My big question is...what do you do with your starting leaders? Most have no fighting skills, so exploring would be a death sentence. Do you guy stack them all together? Give them weapons? Leave anyone in the first town for some reason? Is there anything to do with them besides initial exploration and/or banding together to fight the early mobs?

I think you need to gather the resources that are required for construction. In Brad's video tutorial, he was also able to build the workshop and market straight away, but had to wait on the farm for resources to be collected.

I got it. I watched the video tutorial one more time. The farm doesn't show up in the build menu. You actually have to click on the fertile land tile to see the build farm button.

/shrug

Edit: Thanks for the help lokiju.

FOR RESOURCES OUTSIDE YOUR CITY LIMIT, CLICK ON THE RESOURCE AND SELECT THE BUILD OPTION FROM THE BOTTOM MENU (AT LEAST THAT'S HOW IT WORKED IN ONE OF THE BETA VERSIONS.

oops - sorry for caps!

That's....odd. Heh.

Had this problem myself. In order to get out of City View, right click (if you're in the building browser, right click twice). For me, this resets the camera to what I had before entering City View.

I believe you can also get food from Oasises (sp? Oasissies? Oasiss?).