Someone help me with essence? It doesn't appear to exist.

Unfortunately, your city only acquires the Grain, Material and Essence materials on the exact tile you place the city.  No matter how many resources are in the other tiles your city encompasses through border expansions, your city cannot use any of those other resources, only those of the starting tile.  If your starting tile contains no essence, then unless your faction can build the Enchanting pool, your city will never have essence.

essence is the bottom blue number when settling.  Use a spell out of your spell book to put it to use.  If your founding city has it that is.  If your first city does not you may want to start a new game Ctrl-N until you get one.  Will help you figure it out.

oh, ok thanks.  I was thinking it was like civ5 where I would get whatever is within my influence.

Its only the exact tile where you place your city.  Huh, kinda odd.  I suppose I should start over and pay attention to that tile only, lol.

One of the options for your conclave city (the magic and research specialized city) at level three is to add an essence to the city. the other two are increases in research ability while idle with the third option for lesser research bonus with scrolls available.

EDIT: You don't need essence to choose to make your settlement into conclave at level 2

Only getting resources from the single tile you settle on is counter intuitive.

Snyder49 it makes sense if you think of it this way. I think I remember it right.

The numbers stated on a tile shows the total of that tile and the eight surrounding tiles grain,materials and essence letting you know what a city built on that tile would get.

They also put a limited the titles available to be settled to 2+ grain.

Nakisisa

I wouldn't call it counter intuitive, I would call it different.  If you've played Civ or similar games, then, yeah, you expect yield to work if the city boarder goes over it, but there's no other reason to expect it that way, and once you understand how it works, it does change the way you look at city placement.

Does the tutorial mention this?  I did see it mention it, but probably wasn't paying that close attention.

The tutorial already has the city built when it is started.  The subject could have been covered inside one of the movies.

The manual states it on p. 53 under "Valid City Locations".

I would, because you would naturally expect a city to be able to benefit from all resources within its borders.  However, I can also understand the reasoning behind how it works in Fallen Enchantress.  Unfortunately, it does make selecting a new city location rather less interesting because there's little reason not to pick the one tile with the largest numbers.

It's not actually what is going on, the score the tile is telling you is the sum of all the adjoining tiles.  So when you see a tile that says 4/3/2, it is adding up all the tiles around it to get that number.

^ This.  It's not counter-intuitive - it's just different from Civ.  It's especially more useful in that with outposts and an especially varying ZoC for each city after upgrade and levels - it actually makes the most sense.

Also, it's not always about the biggest numbers - it usually is, but Essence, i think, is more important than the other two.  a 3/2/3 city is IMHO, better than a 4/4/1 city.  Especially if there is a clay pit nearby that will up the 3/2/3 materials. Also, sometimes you might concede a 4/3/2 city for a 3/3/2 city if it means that one tile difference will let you place another city nearby (meaning taking the one higher number will place it in such as way as to remove ALL the nearby possible fertile land.)

However, I will concede that the vast majority of the time, there isn't much of a choice

I often sacrifice essence for materials, forests or riverside. While 1 essence can boost material by casting Enchanted Hammer, forests and riverside provide more bonus, imho.

It depends - essence has a geometric increase properties.  So 1 essence isn't really all that great, but 2 essence is, because the same spell will often get you better increases (enchanted hammers is NOT one of those spells).  Meditation, for example, gives +1 mana per essence.   Taking advantage of multiples of those spells (and there are several - Propaganda comes to mind) and having cities with more essence (and scrying pools!) I feel is far more important in resource development rather than the stagnant or linear growth of grain or materials.  It certainly allows for much more customization

Agreed, I'd even go so far as to say it's better than the Civ method. Instead of having to add numbers together a la Civ, all the math is already done for you.

I've heard this stated a number of times, but it does not seem to actually be the case given the odd spread of tile resources.  I think I will take screenshots to show how it doesn't seem possible this is the case.

The problem with this is you don't have any numbers to add up. Those other squares are all totals too. Once you throw rounding in there, it's kind of a crap shoot trying to dig down to original numbers.

That can't be.  If it's the sum of surrounding tiles than how can a tile surrounded by several 1 essence tiles only have 1 essence itself?

This is what I was thinking. I assume its only using the 4 squares immediately adjacent.. and not diagonal squares.

It's not surrounded by 1 essences tiles, it is surround by tiles whose surrounding tiles TOTAL 1 essence.

Because those are all totals of 9 tiles. If one tile and another tile are adjacent toa  shrine, they both get 1 essence from it.

I noticed this after a couple of games, it's easy to see with essence and materials to some extent. A city that lands between an elemental shard AND a crystal crag will wind up with 3 essence. Any tile that touches both of those tiles will have 3 essence availible.

To notice it with materials take a look at areas around forests. You'll notice all the tiles that are adjacent to forests have more materials than tiles that are not.

I think you're just misunderstanding the numbers here. We are NOT adding up the displayed numbers. We are adding up a hidden resource value for the nine tiles a city would draw resources from if placed in that spot. So each displayed number is a sum of the hidden resource values around it NOT THE OTHER SUMS.

EDIT: Please correct me if I'm wrong about the 9 tiles, it may well be 5 in a cross shape.

really 9 tiles and the majority of spots are 2 3 or 4, How many 5 6 7 and 8s have you seen.. I have a hard time believing its 9 tiles and not 5..

This is one of my issues.. hidden mechanics are almost as bad as random ones... both of which are abundant in FE. But I digress.

So like I was saying, it's really not intuitive.

Playing your first game of any civ style, you wouldn't know either that you could add all those areas together, so that's not really intuitive either. We have just been programmed with that method for 20+ years now. Neither is really intuitive nor non-intuitive. They are just two different methods. As long as you know the answer, who really cares?

Does the tutorial give a concrete answer that the square you are on is your total? If it doesn't, then I'd say that is a problem and the tutorial needs to be modified. If it the tutorial does spell this out, then I say, nothing to see here, move along.

lets say the base tile tield on fertile ground is 2/2. Then it checks the hidden numbers (which would be decimal points) to figure out if there is enough essence to add one point.

world resources add more to tiles: these are approximations off the top of my head.

shards bump essence up to 2.

rivers add 1 grain

clay adds 1 materials

iron adds 2

forest adds 1

grain, orchard, apiary add 2 

not sure about dragon locations, i think they give 3 essence

crystal adds 1 essence

the location with the powerful ogre (i think ogre shaman - has about 40 attack) gives 3 essence when you kill him

so if you are on a spot next to a grain, iron mine, crystal, and a shard you will get +2 grain, +3 materials, +3 essence for a total of 4/5/3 tile yield.

That is pretty much the basics, i might be off a number or two on the grains.