Thanks guys! I'm telling you I hardly ever recommend a game publicly like this but this one for $15 is a hidden gem steal. Get it now you will not regret it. Believe me once you start playing it is so deep you will have a million questions but check out the help file in game and the steam forums and you will find answers. Also here are some really good newb tips:
A few things I wish I'd known when I started playing this game
When your deity is materialized (as a unit operating in the game world) their spell power is the spell power number you see on the unit page and can be improved by leveling up. However, when they are dead (etherialized), then their spell power is determined solely by how many spells they have researched in a spell tree (fire, arcane, nature, etc.). You can see that info on the Deity tab at the top. To improve your etherialized deity's spell power in a spell tree, learn more spells. To improve your materialized deity's spell power, level up.
The amount of resources and gold you get in the game from your cities depends on population. The more population you have, the more city workers you get to work the city hexes.
Every time your city grows another 1000 population, you can build another civic structure there. The number of buildings you can build in your city depends entirely on how much population it has.
Population growth rate depends on enough enough excess food being grown your cities. For that reason, at the start of the game your engineer should concentrate on building farms around your city.
After you build improvements (like farms) with your engineer you can then improve them in up to 2 different ways. Some improvements have levels (like mana farms) that go from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. After building the initial improvement for 500 gold, you can then level it up but each level you build costs more.
The second way to improve them is to build roads on the improvement. This needs to be done for farms because your farms initially don't have levels like some other improvements do until you first research the appropriate civic technology and then you can level up farms as well. Once you build a road, you can widen/improve the road by building a road again on the same hex at a higher cost. Each time you build a road on a hex, you increase the number of city workers that can work that hex. THIS IS HUGE. I really wish I'd figured this out sooner as it is the key to expanding your city. Build lots of roads on farms.
The first civic structures you should build in your town are the production structures. They allow you to build following stuff faster.
Building stuff in town requires both production and resources. At first the resources your town gets per turn will be lower than your production per turn so your build speed will be capped by that.
When your units fight critters in outdoor lairs and dungeons, they get food and resources afterwards. They can only carry so much so when they get full, you need to go to the nearest city and transfer it to the city's resource and food warehouses. If that city has less resources than production per turn, then it can pull from the warehouse you just filled to max out production speed until the warehouse is empty. There are civic buildings to increase the size of warehouses.
You can build a supply wagon unit and take it with you to dungeons and lairs. When your units get full you can dump the food and resources into the supply wagon and then send it back to town to unload.
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These are the mods I recommend:
