A Guide to Foundation for Beginners ( starting out)

NOTE: Don't take any of this as gospel, I certainly don't. I am sure there are better and more efficient ways of doing things. I just wanted to create a basic guide for total newbies with tips and guidance to avoid falling into common pitfalls.

STARTING TERRITORY: I would recommend picking an area that contains a portion of river or coastline, and a reasonable amount of woodland.

SETTING UP: If following the tutorial on boarding questlines, you should have a market, Berry gathering, supply depots, wood and stonecutting camps, and a sawmill. I recommend placing all these buildings a reasonable distance from housing districts: far enough away that the undesirable radius ( brown area) does not affect housing, but close enough that villagers have easy access to their workplaces. I also recommend that production buildings surround your initial food and building resource depots. Later on, when you expand, stick to this idea, keeping depots and production buildings in clusters, or hubs, that surround your main settlement. This means time is less wasted on villagers carrying items to and thro from their workplaces.

Prioritize tax collection, as you'll need income for more construction and upkeep of territory and this can catch beginners out, forcing a total restart or emergency levies at the cost of villagers happieness. Remember that the great hall and tax office can be a part of the same building, created using the sub building menu. Keep this building close by to your initial residential to decrease the distance your tax collectors have to travel to collect money. Also remember to actually set your taxation in the dedicated sub menu, in order to start producing income from your tax office.

Don't be tempted to expand too far at this stage. Long travel times can cripple production, hunger, and income.

GEARING UP FOR MIDGAME

I would consider the completion of your fortifications to mark the start of the midgame, but its up for interpretation, of course. I highly discourage rushing to fortifications. Make sure you have robust production set up first. Have your berries, meat, and fish in surplus, as well as your building resources, particularly planks. Three sawmills should suffice for now, and make sure your raw lumber supply can keep up with them. Make use of a forester camp placed near to a logging camp. Just one of this setup can carry you for a considerable time. Remember to have a dedicated area for hunting, where you are unlikely to want to expand or chop down.

In terms of food, fishing is easily one of the most efficient sources of food. Berries and fish, the main rustic food types, are more efficient than refined food types, which makes sense on a game balance and progression level, I guess. Just two or three fisher huts will produce a considerable amount of surplus, and I highly recommend making room for fish in your granary/granaries. Note that fishing spots must be inside your territory to be used by fishermen. Meat is your most valuable and efficient refined food source right now. I discourage bread production due to its space-hungry nature. If you must have another source of refined food, choose cheese production.

FORTIFICATIONS: You do not need both a wall and watchtowers for your fortifications.  I personally use both later into the game, but as of the early midgame, I would focus on one or the other. Your watch post should be built sizable enough for at least three watchmen/patrollers. You can build small watchpost buildings around your village as and when they are needed.Even if you have a wall, you still need patrollers. Light fortifications and patrol coverage are seperate needs. If you have towers, you need watchmen and patrollers. Remember to paint patrol area if your using patrollers. If your building a wall, I would recommend placing it around your housing, leaving your undesirable production hubs spaced around, just on the outside. Build plenty of gates where you think they will be needed; walls can be edited to add extra gates after construction is finished, but it's far easier to account for access now than fiddle about later. When your fortifications are complete, buildings should begin to upgrade. This is why you needed a surplus of planks. I personally prefer the tower approach, as you can control which areas upgrade in this way, rather than the entire settlement upgrading in unison upon completion of the wall and tanking your plank supplies.

And with that, you should have basic fortifications, robust supply of resources, and good happieness coverage. I highly recommend doing all of this before starting to upgrade citizens and majorly expanding your territory and built up area. There is no rush to follow questlines.

With your fish surplus, you can sell these along with meat for extra income on top of your tax income.

If you liked this post and are interested to see a guide on the rest of midgame into late game, let me know! ( sorry for the long post! If I made any glaring errors, let me know, I will be happy to ammend them!)