I must say I was unbelievably frustrated by the flat out lack of information offered about this section. It needs more!
Let me outline some things that I did that worked out great for me.
Pre stage: Get to level 6. Don't even worry about level 3, focus on getting to level 6. It's silly that this is backwards, as scouting is largely based off of Settlement Management. A suggestion, unlock these at the same level! When you are at level 6, speak to the Hearth Stone
The first stage to getting a good economy is maximizing your morale.
- Defeat bosses and avoid casualties (defeating overlords gives you insanely high morale bonuses)
- Build a well (You have to enter the settlement management tab Look for it when you are under your strategic map, it's in the top right corner!)
- Make sure every single person has a house!
- Make sure you are making enough food to sustain your population (The food number will be BLUE if you are making more)
The second stage is gaining a population to work with. The bigger your population, the more you can do in one turn. You might want to do this step before some of the steps listed in the first stage. You need 200 time units available to 'recruit' another person to a city. You can find people in two different places, to my knowledge.
- At windmills. This is the fastest way to recruit, as there is often more than one person at a windmill, and you can quickly reach them.
- At the Stones found underground. There has always been a person at those stones when I've checked.
The third stage is creating the production facilities to have your population work. At this point, look at your population and see their traits. Highlight each trait to get an understanding of that character. Keep in mind characters who have traits that improve a resource. This will increase your production by A LOT if they are working at their proper facility. When they finally come out with switching the essence (that is you?) to a new character, I would suggest a terrible and painful ending for every character with a useless trait (
)
- Build enough farms if you haven't already. Remember, just enough to get it to blue.
- Use your workers to collect material from the Settlement Management area. You can actually select a character with time units and have them clear a granite or tree icon from your grid, and it also gives you resources. This is not explained! This does take red conscious shards.
- When you have enough for a woodcutter's workplace or granite quarry, build one. Then build the other. NOTE, they take A LOT. You will have to burn though a few turns to get these. You could also go out and farm them, if you're a masochist of sorts.
- Make sure that ALL workers are at 0 (or as close to 0 as they can be) before ending a turn. This ensures maximum efficiency per turn (which as of now is really only an issue if you're short on blue shards).
- Personally, I get 4 of each woodcutter's workplace and quarry, and 2 of each lumber mill and stonecutting.
- A warehouse increases output!
The fourth stage involves scouting out the area around you and finding resource nodes. When you find one, go to that area and kill the boss. When you do, that area becomes 'unlocked, and will now provide you with more supply. The catch, it only works with areas that are three squares away from your own (I don't know if this applies diagonally or not, I haven't had the opportunity to try)
You also have the option to secure concious shards. My advice is not to do it unless you are REALLY hurting for those shards (a queue to go out and adventure, really) or you are trying to draw monsters to level quickly.
