Thanks a lot for forwaring the solution. The solution (adding the missing collate type 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci' in wp_config.php) worked perfectly.
I’m in the same situation as CaptainClive. Repeated the steps as well several times. Played around with defining subdomains with my hoster.
One question that I’m not sure (readiung through various posts): multisite with subdomains is not expected to create any files somwhere on the filesystem, or is it?
