Things to consider when placing a settlement.

[Redrobes]

You might like a little experiment I did a while back:

https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=11689

tho I think it could be done a lot better by somebody with better code...

[waldronate]

A market sim needs to track three major items: resources, demands, and transport costs. High demand will increase the range at which resources will be developed. Rich resources will increase the market range of that resource when it goes into development. Transport costs will affect overall range of everything. The classic game version involves giving the user control over production units and letting them manually set up trade networks among the demand centers and resources. The high-level planning game version abstracts away individual production units and give the user control over costs of transport networks (roads, ships, rails, and so on) and production node (farms, mines, towns, and so on) placement. The resources in both cases are largely fixed by the generation system and the user is forced to adapt to that. The premise of tech trees is that each advancement reduces the cost of some constraint and the same applies to racial modifiers. There are many, many dimensions for modeling and implementation here.