🧭 Exploration & Settlement
Before you build anything, you have to know what you are standing on. This page covers the map itself – how to read terrain, what Natural Wonders and Discoveries are worth, how to run your Scouts, and how to choose the ground your empire will sit on for the rest of the game.
Settlement placement is the most permanent decision in Civilization VII. Buildings can be overbuilt and armies rebuilt, but a Settlement founded on the wrong tile is wrong for all three Ages.
Reading the map
Every tile carries three things that matter: terrain (the base type – Grassland, Plains, Desert, Tundra, Snow, and their Hills variants), features sitting on top of it (Forest, Jungle, Marsh, Floodplains, Reef), and sometimes a Resource. Together they decide the tile's yields, its defensive value, and what you are allowed to build there.
Three properties are worth internalizing early, because they cut across everything else:
- Rough terrain costs extra Movement and grants defensive bonuses. Hills and vegetation slow armies and protect whoever is standing on them. See Resolving a battle.
- Mountains cannot be built on or crossed by most units, but they are a powerful adjacency source for Culture and Happiness buildings. A mountain range is not wasted land – it is a wall on one side and a yield engine on the other.
- Coast and Navigable Rivers are adjacency sources for Food and Gold buildings, allow water Buildings, and open naval movement. Navigable Rivers in particular let ships travel inland.
What the map has, it keeps. Resource generation is consistent between Ages: a Resource absent from your map in Antiquity will not appear later, and one that is there will not vanish for an Age and return. Two rules soften that – every map is guaranteed at least 3 different Coastal Resources, and each Age transition introduces at least one Resource new to that Age.
🏔️ Natural Wonders
Natural Wonders are placed by the map generator, not built. They confer benefits both for discovering them and for settling near them, and their yields increase as the Ages progress – a Natural Wonder claimed in Antiquity is worth more in Modern than it was when you took it.
They pay out in three different shapes, which is why they vary so much in value:
| Shape | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Tile yields | The Wonder tile itself produces | Gullfoss – +6 Food per Age |
| Adjacent-tile bonuses | Surrounding tiles gain yields | Gullfoss – +1 Culture and Production to adjacent Rural tiles |
| Settlement-wide bonuses | Every qualifying tile in the Settlement gains | Grand Canyon – +1 Science on all Flat Terrain in that Settlement |
A few examples of the range: Grand Canyon gives +2 Culture and +4 Happiness per Age plus that settlement-wide Science; Great Barrier Reef gives +2 Food, Happiness, and Science per Age plus +2 Science on adjacent Marine tiles.
Natural Wonders are also adjacency sources for Culture and Happiness buildings, exactly like Mountains – so a Wonder inside your borders is worth building around, not just working. See The adjacency system.
Natural Wonder tiles cannot be built on, and some span several tiles. Settling right on top of one can eat a meaningful share of your buildable land inside the 3-tile border limit. Settle so the Wonder sits inside your borders but off your urban core – you want to work it and build next to it, not lose your city center's best tiles to it.
🔍 Scouts and Discoveries
Scouts are civilian units, not military ones – a real change from previous games. That has practical consequences: a Scout can share a tile with a friendly military unit and travel safely inside an army, but it cannot attack, and it can be attacked.
What makes them worth building:
- They ignore Movement penalties from Rough, Vegetated, and Wet terrain – they cross the ground that slows everyone else.
- They can Auto-Explore, which is genuinely fine for early map reveal and costs you no attention.
- Two special actions, Lookout and Search, see over obstacles that would otherwise block sight. Both consume all remaining Movement, so use them at the end of a move, not the start.
- Search finds Discoveries at double the Scout's normal Sight range – the single best reason to build a dedicated Scout rather than exploring with a Warrior.
Discoveries (the goody huts of this game) are scattered across the map at the start. Move any unit onto one and a Narrative Event fires, usually offering a choice of rewards – yields, free units, sometimes Great Works. Some options carry a cost, such as paying resources or taking damage.
Three things worth knowing about them:
- They are contested. Only units belonging to civilizations can collect them; Independent Powers walk past them. Everyone is racing for the same huts.
- Their value scales with the Age, but their impact does not. A Discovery is worth more raw yield later, yet it matters far more in Antiquity, when a free unit or a burst of Food genuinely changes your trajectory. Collect them early.
- Some are only reachable later. Certain Discoveries spawn on islands that require deeper Ocean travel, which means they wait for the Exploration Age. Shipwrecks heal the naval unit that finds them.
Early Scouts pay for themselves several times over: they find Discoveries before your rivals, locate Natural Wonders for your second and third settlements, and reveal which neighbors you have before you need to care. Build two when you can, send them in opposite directions, and let Auto-Explore do the work while you focus on your capital.
Where to settle
Weigh five things, roughly in this order:
- Fresh Water – close to mandatory early; see below.
- Resources within 3 tiles – count them, because ordinary border growth stops there.
- Adjacency terrain – Mountains and Natural Wonders feed Culture and Happiness buildings; Coast and Navigable Rivers feed Food and Gold buildings. A site with none of these caps your city's ceiling permanently.
- Defensibility – hills and river crossings are free Combat Strength for the whole game. A high-yield city that falls to the first invader yields nothing. See Defensive strategy.
- Disaster exposure – floodplains and active volcanoes carry a repair bill and a fertility bonus. Know which you are signing up for. See Crises & Natural Disasters.
💧 Fresh Water
A Settlement without Fresh Water takes a −5 Happiness penalty, and there is no building, policy, or technology that fixes it later. The decision is made permanently at the moment you found.
A Settlement has Fresh Water if its City Center is on a River or Wet Terrain, or is adjacent to Wet Terrain, a Navigable River, a Lake, or one of two Natural Wonders – Gullfoss or Iguazú Falls. Use the Fresh Water lens before founding rather than judging by eye.
Two traps: Coast does not count – the system is binary, with no partial credit for being seaside – and it keys off the City Center tile, not your borders, so a river three tiles away does nothing.
It bites hardest in Antiquity, when Happiness is scarce and Celebrations depend on it. By the Exploration Age you have enough Happiness buildings and Policies to absorb a −5, so a dry site is a legitimate choice later. See Happiness, Governments & Celebrations.
Settling too far apart leaves permanently unusable gaps between your cities, while settling too close means two Settlements competing for the same tiles. Aim to have borders meet rather than overlap deeply – you want coverage, not duplication.
How far a settlement reaches
How much land a Settlement can ever work is fixed by one hard limit and one growth rule.
A Settlement's borders can expand no further than 3 hexes from its City Center, and no building, policy, or Wonder extends that. If a Resource sits 4 tiles away, ordinary growth will never reach it – found another Settlement closer instead. Two Modern civilizations are the exception: America and Nepal have unique units that claim ground out to 5 tiles – see below.
The Radial Ruler lens draws the 3-tile and 6-tile rings directly on the map – turn it on before you commit a Settler, and use it to check a Wonder's radius.
Within that radius, borders grow through improvement rather than time. When a growth event assigns a citizen to improve a tile, that tile is claimed along with the unowned tiles around it, up to the 3-hex limit. Growth is also contiguous: you can only expand onto tiles adjacent to ones you already hold, working outward from the center.
Two more things worth knowing. Tile ownership is permanent – once claimed, a tile cannot be lost or traded away, so a tile taken early is yours for the rest of the game. And specialized Towns stop growing – see Choosing a Town Focus – which means they also stop claiming ground.
Reaching a specific Resource
To pull a particular Resource inside your borders – a Gold deposit, Horses, Iron – work outward toward it deliberately:
- Count the tiles first. From the City Center, is it within 3 hexes? If not, ordinary growth cannot reach it; settle closer or use one of the Modern exceptions below.
- Grow toward it, not around it. At each growth event, improve the tile that steps in that direction. Growth is contiguous, so a detour costs you a whole growth cycle.
- Remember the claim radius. Improving a tile also claims the unowned tiles around it, so you often capture a Resource one step before you expect to.
- Don't specialize that Town yet. Choosing a Town Focus halts growth, which halts border expansion. Reach the Resource first, then specialize.
👑 Leaders & civilizations that bend the rules of exploration
If reading the land is the part you enjoy, these picks change what the map is worth to you. Scout with your leader or civilization ability in mind: the terrain that matters depends on who you brought and which Age they appear in.
If you want the map to pay you
| Pick | What changes |
|---|---|
| 👑 Isabella | +100 Gold per Age for every Natural Wonder she discovers – doubled in Distant Lands – plus +50% tile yields from Natural Wonders for each Natural Wonder in her empire. The only pick that turns sightseeing into an economy |
| 👑 Ibn Battuta | Built around movement and discovery, with a Wildcard Attribute that lets you follow whatever the map offers |
| ⛵ Hawai'i | Works Ocean tiles no other civilization can touch, turning open water from a wall into workable land |
If you want to claim ground faster
| Pick | What changes |
|---|---|
| 🏭 America | The Prospector reaches an unowned Land Resource up to 5 tiles beyond your radius, claiming and improving a path of tiles back to the Settlement |
| 🏭 Nepal | The Sherpa claims Mountains within 5 tiles of a Settlement, while Nepal's Warehouses apply to Mountain Terrain at +1 Gold and +1 Happiness maintenance |
| 🏺 Carthage | Every Merchant or Colonist you train or purchase comes with a second one free |
| 🏺 Rome | A free Infantry Unit in every new Town you found – expansion that defends itself |
If you want to settle unusual ground
| Pick | What changes |
|---|---|
| 👑 Pachacuti | +1 Food adjacency for Mountains on all Buildings, −2 Maintenance for Specialists next to Mountains (+1 if they are not), and every City converts 10% of its Food into Production |
| 🏭 Russia | Tundra becomes productive – +1 Science on Quarters in Cities in Tundra, and +1 Production on Farms in Towns in Tundra |
| ⛵ Spain | +2 Food, Gold, and Production in Settlements adjacent to Coast or following your own Religion – +4 of each if both, doubled in Distant Lands; +15% Gold toward Town conversion, or +30% in Distant Lands |
| ⛵ Norman | +5 Combat Strength for Land Units and Fortified Districts adjacent to Coast, plus +25 HP on Fortified Districts – a coastline you can hold and fight from |