The world will be auto generated, and then cleaned up by SBS so every server will have a unique geography. Part of that creation process will involve auto creation of towns and citizens to populate those towns. So in a way things will be placed automatically. The part where it is not automatic is where players choose existing settlements in game to take over as mayor. This is where you may or may not want to talk with the counts to choose which county you'll pick a town in. If you want to serve a PC count I'd set that up ahead of time. If you want to serve an NPC count you can just pick an unclaimed town in an NPC controlled county and go from there. If you want to grab a town in a specific place regardless of who the count it....Well best of luck in not accidentally ticking off a PC count.

You only need 2-3 hours to run a town as a mayor. I am going to run an inn/tavern in with the rest of my time and maybe do some gathering/farming.

As Katnadin said, towns are auto-generated and then you can add to them later. It may be good to make friends with people in a kingdom for land selection because I think it is more likely that PC kingdoms will be stable as opposed to NPC kingdoms where I've seen people already trying to start wars.

If you do go Mayor, Magistrate is actually worth the additional 250 that you put into it. If you look at the additional EP, the villa, the alpha access, and the sparks it adds up.

Posted By DrTank09 at 11:36 PM - Mon Mar 13 2017

If you do go Mayor, Magistrate is actually worth the additional 250 that you put into it. If you look at the additional EP, the villa, the alpha access, and the sparks it adds up.

Agreed, it is one the cases where you'd get more bang for your buck vs just buying ep directly with the extra money.

I'd maybe go for the Proprietor tier. It sounds like you want to craft/sell and perhaps run a guild of some sort? Maybe buy Proprietor and some extra EP for a guild house. Everyone could just choose a town to belong to - or perhaps one of your former guild mates wants to mayor instead? Running a guild, mayoring, crafting, and selling might be too much.

If I were you I'd definitely go for mayor at least, magistrate if you really want alpha 1 access. Bear in mind that alpha 1 is going to be mostly testing, not gameplay, so choose it only if you're sold on the game. As for how many people it takes to run a town, it's just you at minimum. The towns are designed to be self-sufficient, populated with NPCs, so that when the aristocracy and nobility take over they won't have to start from scratch. Any of your friends or former guildmates will step in for one of those NPCs.

The pledge packages changed once since kickstarter and I'm pretty sure they aren't going to change significantly again. Any time something like that is tweaked it causes a stink in the community and gives SBS a headache so it would have to be a pretty significant circumstance to prompt that change. Also, when it comes to meeting potential Counts, Dukes, and Kings you can hop by their various Discords for a chat or just hover in the background and see what they're about. Most people with banners will have a link as well as many pages in the recruitment thread. You'll probably want to look for a kingdom, then a duchy in that kingdom, then a county in that duchy. Keep in mind that the kingdoms are specific to each server, so someone on NA-E won't be able to play with someone on NA-W. Good luck and welcome to CoE!

Thanks to all for the good input. I pledged for Mayor for the moment, maybe ill go for Magistrat a bit later, still not sure and it will depend a bit if / how many friends want to play the game as well.

Now the search for a County / Duchy / Kingdom begins :)

Yeah, I'm doing the same thing, I paid for my town, and plan to upgrade to magistrate when I have the money.