Colonies distribution

So much talk about a guide I wrote up years ago, makes me feel special.

Ya you can survive with 0 military for a very long time using warehouse protection. For the average raider who sees 0 military and attacks blindly, if they keep pulling 0 resources from you sooner or later they are going to just ignore you. But I'd leave 1 fire ship in every port and 1 spearman in every town. This doesn't leave you at 0 military and it causes the pillager to waste more time and resources dealing with them to get that 0 resources.

(added town setup)
My own build as a pure builder is:
wine - 7
stone - 3
crystal - 1
sulfur - 1

The extra wine towns benefits in multiple ways.
Extra towns on wine island = making use of 1 islands mine/mill for donations
Wine towns don't need wine shipped to them, potential freeing up ships to do other things
Defensively, you can wait out someone trying to blockade you because you don't need to supply those towns with wine.
Use ambrosia to convert extra wine into other resources as needed

When I was more active a lot of the wine was converted to crystal for experiments, but now I'm more in gold stockpile mode.

Agreed on leaving a spearman (behind a wall) and one ship in a town does make you a little more defended. (I'll personally attest that I'll often only ever initiate one attack on someone when I don't get anything.)

Though with your setup, if you didn't have ambro, what would you have? You are a Master Carpenter so I figure your opinions hold some weight on this matter.

For a builder strat, if I had to do it over again without ambrosia? Hmm... probably
4 wine towns
6 stone
1 crystal
1 sulfur


You'd be bottle-necked on crystal and sulfur for upgrading GR's, but you could possibly get some trades going for them. I think you only need 3 wine towns, but wine is more useful and towards end game you'd be happier with the forth wine town and not a second crystal town.

If you wanted a more balanced game you could go 4/4/2/2, but I have more patience then the average human being so I'd personally opt for the above listed 4/6/1/1.

i think

2 wine

6 stone

2 crystal

2 sulfer

this is what I'm working towards on my alpha

i also have a 0 MS town on alpha it is protected with godly protection so no one can attack me

I'm on a marble island and i use that to trade for everything else

This is a very interesting question as I myself have been thinking about it for ages, ever since I started expanding my colonies to 3. Currently, I'm having 6 colonies: 2 Marble towns, 2 Wine towns, 1 Crystal town and 1 Sulfur town. My plan is to have the next one (the seventh town) on a Marble island because I'm in need of the said resource.

In my humble opinion, the 4/4/2/2 option is worth considering as it will balance your preferrence over any other resources. Of course, it also depends on your style of play; if you are a fighter, having many sulfur towns will be an absolute advantage in winning a war or simply some battles. I assume the others have discussed that matter many times and somewhat come to a final answer, even before I made this post (sorry, I'm too lazy to turn each page to see the comments).

Granted, I have 12 towns, they will be 2 Crystal, 2 Sulfur, 3 Wine and 5 Marble.

*high five Kaleg*

This is what I call "Great minds think alike". :D