Resource nodes

Horse pasture

A horse pasture is a strategic resource: its yield is small, its value is the door it opens. With no horse pasture inside your territory the Raider cannot enter a queue — the engine rejects the command with an explicit reason.

The map owes you one

Horse pastures and Iron deposit are the rarest two node kinds on the board; their worth is not in their yield but in the door they open. In exchange the map generator makes a promise: at least 1 horse pasture is built within 6 hexes of every start, and the fairness check measures that independently (Map and terrain). No seed leaves you without Raiders.

The promise is about reach, not ownership: the node sits inside that ring but need not sit inside your territory — to work it you either found a city out there or buy the tile. The range is deliberately half the minimum distance between starts, so the tile guaranteed to you can never be closer to a rival's start than to yours.

The prerequisite is empire-wide

The rule never asks which city. If any of your cities has a horse pasture in its region, you may build the Raider in every city. One pasture unlocks your whole cavalry; a second one grants no new ability, only extra income.

Losing it does not empty the queue

If the pasture's tile leaves your territory — a rival founded a closer city, bought the tile, or captured the city — a queued Raider is not deleted: the item stays in the queue and production simply does not flow into it. The city panel says so in words. The turn you take the land back, the item continues from where it stopped; the stored production is never burned.

What to do

• Look for pastures while lifting the fog: the Scout is the cheapest tool for that job.
• If a pasture sits just outside your border, buying the tile (Territory and score) is the fastest way to pull it in.
• Reaching a distant pasture usually means founding a city next to it. The rival AI does the same and walks more eagerly toward a resource it is missing (The AI opponent).

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.