This is actually a great system because it will give uniqueness and specialty to each city.

No city will be the same and there won't be any one city to rule them all.

In my opinion, this issue does NOT make city building lame.

However, it would be nice to allow more tiles for the capital to distinguish it from the other cities.

When changing the capital, extra tiles will also have to go.

Perhaps, "area of influence" can be defined for the city and enable harvesting for any resource within that area.

(For example, in civilization 4, you can harvest any resources that are in the 21 blocks around the city.)

This will address 2nd and 3rd issues - no snake tailing and unnecessary city building.

Also, prohibiting other party from building a city within your "area of influence" would address the 2nd issue - douchebag syndrom.

Note: "area of influece" is not the same as "cultural influence".

(unless you want it to be, in which case, it will trigger city flopping :D)

Specialized buildings, such as farm, pasture, mine and etc, would be nice, with proper research of course.

This way player doesn't have to

It would be nice to have "garrison" option for the specialized buildings or allow units to have "camp out" or "fortify" option.

Meh. nothing is perfect.

Love it. it would be a nice feature like in Total War where the city gets extra benefit when the governor is present.

Also, not all heroes should excel in magic and might. Some heroes should excel in governing and research.

However, I don't think it should be mandatory.

Don't be sad, this is beta in action. I mean, it's not like we're a month before release. People like the direction, there's just some tweaks to make.

 

I think there's some neat things you could do with this idea, but I've got some concerns.

- How random is the "governor" stat on a family member? It would be unfortunate to go one game with 300 turns before you can raise a settlement to city due to an unhappy RNG.

- Having a major city in the core of your empire suddenly flip factions because the governor died would seem kind of odd. Maybe if you can't appoint a suitable governor, the city should suffer penalties due to mismanagement until you can (with the penalty size proportional to just how far off the governor is from what is required). If you can lose cities this way, I can't see people putting their important governors anywhere near combat.

- Reassigning governors could get tedious without a good UI.

That said, I really like how this emphasizes heroes and family members as important things for your civilization itself and not just to be married off. Prestige could be affected, a new settlement being led by the legendary Lord Bob who just defeated two legions is probably going to draw more people then one founded by Uncle Dave the senile.
 
 

Love it. What kind of range would you be able to use?
 

Strictly speaking a "colony" under that system could be an outpost that can't grow, but that doesn't offer the same possibilities that the governor system does.

Anyway, as I was saying, don't be sad. This is exactly how the beta process is supposed to work, and good ideas came out of it.

I like the new direction that Elemental's graphics are going in.  

Ah, I first want to say, thank you for acknowledging those problems so openly. That's why I love StarDock.

Let's see what your idea would solve:

Doesn't solve it.

Does with low level governours.

Does with the ability to build harvest buildings afar.

Does, with level limit on governours.

Does, with limit on number of governours.

Five out of four, pretty good I'd say.

I really like it that you'd need a governour for every city, it would really help in preserving wilderness and empty areas on the map.

I don't like that, since it could give a city in the middle of your kingdom to another player just by the bad luck of losing a heroe. Imho a city without a suitable governour should just become unrulable, ie. you can't do anything with it and don't gain anything from it till you can send a new proconsul. But it would still count as your territory and the soldiers there would still be under your command (different chain of command). Only after a longer time of not getting any replacement ruler, a city should be able to either declare independency (become neutral) or join another faction if they've an appropriate ruler to send and only if that other faction is close by.

So a player has a chance to easily get one's city back but if you don't act, you'll lose it eventually for good.

Imho watchtowers should also be allowed to be built at a certain range (4-5 big tiles), harbours (1 big tile away only), castles (if there are any) to protect mountain passes for example and to station troops (2-3 big tiles).

Then move some soldiers over there and station them yourselves if you think it's important enough.

Disagree heavily with that. If you want stuff outside your city defended, then move some soldiers there for protection. Having unprotected stuff outside of cities would make raiding a viable mechanic instead of just assaults on cities.

-------------------------------

Now to go wild on the succession system for a moment. When a faction surrenders, how about cities with sons and daughters of other sovereigns as rulers go to their parents factions, instead of having the whole defeated faction surrender as a whole?

So instead of, oh, faction B surrender to faction A, here faction A, get 5 new cities.

It would be like, faction B surrenders. Faction A gets 2 cities governed by grandsons of faction A's sovereign while faction C gets one city ruled by the grand-grand daughter of the sovereign of faction C and 2 cities would go neutral, since they were governed by heroes who had no allegiance to anybody special.

While the idea says its possible for governors to be out adventuring, i don't think anyone would actually dare do that. If a hostile nation spotted a hero whos main focus is governorship instead of combat i am pretty sure they would put some serious effort into killing him since it would cripple his city. If a player has more then a few high level governors assassinated then it pretty much cripples his whole nation since there are fewer cities and each is more important.

Giving a city a bonus just for having one of these heroes in it also creates a problem unless you cap the number possible. You could have 5 governors all running their cities from a distance while they all sit in one city which turbo charges that one city.

This also might be a problem if one nation takes a large amount of land or cities from another nation. Would do they do with the cities they captured? they probably don't have spare governors who are high enough level to put in them unless you give out lots of govs, and if there are lots of govs, it lets folks spam cities. And if you grab a bunch of free land, do you have to just sit on it and wait for more high level govs to be able to build cities on it? Sure, you could build settlements, but those sound pretty pointless if your goal is to make some major manufacturing zones.

A possible solution to this would be to make governors and heroes a completely separate unit. Perhaps there could be a special building(Sovereign's Institute of Bureaucracy and Red Tape) you can only build in your capital that, at great expense, can produce governors. Otherwise, you can't control the number of govs available to you and they become a painful bottleneck if your nations situation changes quickly.

How about, you can control a city by force by stationing enough military units there even without a governour.

So, if you're a rapidly expanding empire you need to have enough military to control your conquest till the bureucrative has catched up. Military controlled cities would of course have high production and prestige penalties which would make them very costly, but they'd be yours still.

As for the amount of governours, it should imho be mostly tied to your dynasty. The more sons and daughters, nephews, grandchildren, etc. you have the more governours you have so you get naturally more of them over time. You could also get hired heroes and professionals at some significant costs (and rarely) too.

If you want to expand your empire without governeurs, send your military then to establish and control very costly outposts. This would smooth out any short term lacks of governeurs while making uncontrolled city spam and conquest a very costly thing indeed. Which sounds good to me.

The reason why it doesn't work is, you don't need essence to build cities. You need essence to make land fertile. But fertile land spreads by itself after you've build a city and then the following cities around it are just free of any essence cost.

My initial reaction is a big negative for the governors idea, at least as described.  No offense meant, Boogie, but I think you totally missed Sid's point.  It sounds complex and non-intuitive and would be very hard to describe to new players, as I think is evidenced by the amount of confusion in the replies already in this thread. 

Something similar could work but I think it should be a lot simpler, like say a hero could either be an adventurer/war leader or a governor but not both, and have every city be inherently small and only expandable to greater size when a governor is assigned and when assigned they disappear from the map and are absorbed into the city.  This idea of linking a unit to a city but not requiring them to be present in the city but then when they die weird things happen to the city makes me do a big "huh?"

On the other hand I am 100% behind the resource tapping idea which I feel is intuitive.  Have it so a little road is auto-drawn from the city to the improvement so you know what city it's tied to, and I assume you could actually defend them you'd just have to move a unit onto the tile itself.  The only thing that doesn't make sense to me is that the max distance you can tap scales up with the level of the city?  A hard cap or an inverse scale seems more logical.

Well, it's a random map generator, it always exists the posibility of those things happening (or getting the horrible map where everything is a wasteland...). It should be easier to change those things in the generator than add a new whole mechanic to fix the problem.

I have some sympathy with this view. I kinda a feel I am uncomfortable with some aspects of the idea for compulsory governors. * requiring * a governor for every city? I kind of think it is too restrictive. I especially don't like the idea of losing your city to a neighbour if you lose the governor and no one suitable is available.

I actually find the whole resources in cities bit to be really annoying.  Really, who builds a city on a mine, or a farm?  The miners and farmers might live in the city, but the mines and farms are on the outskirts, not main street.

I'd rather most, or all, raw resources were of a different mold, built and worked by the nearest city, with the transportation requirements increasing the work load.  You could build them inside your city by encompassing them, but they wouldn't be a build location for it.  Not part of the normal system, while requiring sufficient workers housed in the city.

Don't know if I like the governing part though.  A bonus sounds good, but requiring a hero for city growth doesn't.  I'm not going to be popping out cities all over the place once I have something else to do with essence, don't really see the problem there.  I'm thinking heroes would need to be common enough that they aren't really special.  Otherwise you've just shot the hell out of one end of the spectrum.  The guy with all those cities also has a lot of useless heroes that can't do anything, making the guy with the massive channeler and an army of heroes all the more powerful.

I like the overall idea.  It certainly raises issues, but I think they are addressble.  I think I'd allow the Sov to govern a small number of cities by himself, to at least level 3, if not higher (and obviously something that you can increase when picking Sov abilities.  It would need to be almost trivial to get level 2 governors, and not too difficult to get level 3 and 4.

If something like this is done I would also try to reduce the importance that houses currently have, so that governing ability becomes a limit more so than housing.  Besides, building houses are pretty boring.  I want to build the interesting stuff.

I'm in the minority that believes nothing should be able to built outside of cites with the possible exception of military forts/watchtowers.  Any resource harvesting type of building requires lots of labor and those people need a place to live, people couldn't really commute that far to work in the past.  Some sort of high-end research later in the game might allow for it, but it probably wouldn't matter nearly as much then.

I'm also in favor of static city walls.  Once built walls shouldn't just automatically grow when the city expands, you should have to build more walls around new tiles.  I'm not sure how to manage that though.  Perhaps when built you can build walls bigger than the city's current size.

Well, I've got a fun idea to throw into the mix...

If a hero is governing a city, the city gets benefits based on the heroes exploits.

Basically, once you get high enough on the adventuring tree, there would be a monument dedicated to that hero in the city.  For instance:

Billy the Ranger has completed numerous wilderness quests and has managed to capture all manners of unique animals.  His monument gives bonuses to all rangers and animal tamers trained in the city...

Samuel the Sorcerer has completed all kinds of special magical quests and has procured many powerful magical artifacts during his career.  His monument gives bonuses to magic based city production.

Ricky the City Razer and Freaking Lunatic has burned a dozen cities and even slaughtered farmer Joe and his entire family after farmer Joe sneezed.  His monument scares the shit out of people, and every person in the city is very, very well behaved.

When the hero dies, the monument can no longer grow in bonuses, but remains in the city unless a new hero governs the city.

There has been no new dire....

OH!  You're talking about the sweet building blocks and children's toys mod that boogie installed!

But that doesn't really line up with what really happens. Farming settlements don't become cities, because farming takes up so much land that the village could never grow that big, plus there's only so many jobs to go around.

The idea that there's an iron deposit or bees in an area and therefore a huge city will spring up there just doesn't match reality. Cities draw resources in from the smaller places that gather, and are fueled by commerce & industry.

For lack of a better word, "dynamic" walls that move as the city does are a gameplay convenience. Having to rebuild new walls constantly is more realistic, but it's also very very annoying after you've done it for a while.

They set up mining encampments nearby and traveled back and forth when there were enough miners to entertain, or took stores with them directly to the site for individual operations.  The supply train carried the fruits of their labor into the nearest town, and carried their food supply to the site on the return trip.

The way it is now, the only way we work mines is by having a full blown city right there.

I would have to disagree. I'd say getting a level 5 would be quite lucky Or extremely difficult and not always possible, very difficult to get a level 4, and level 3's aren't as difficult but are still quite rare (on average 2 or 3 per game/ for each player). Meanwhile, level 0 and level 1 can be quite prolific, with 50% or so heroes/ect having a level 1 or 0, meanwhile most others have a level 2 governing skill. Add to that giving the Sovereign the ability to control 3 cities up to level 3 governing (and of course having massive bonuses for being stationed in one of those cities comparable or greater than a level 5 governing hero).

I say this because 3 - 5 cities seems about normal, and any more seems to approach city spam. 10 cities or so is definitely at the "Boring" factor unless there is something really unique, and they are really far apart, but say, 10 cities all on one large peninsula is rather pointless and boring ... say have 1 city on the peninsula, another city across the bay, another one on a southern Island, and another right north of the peninsula, maybe another on another continent, or further into the mainland. Meanwhile 10 or 20 of the smaller size 1 (or 0) cities to gather resources, and such. I agree with being able to build resource gathering Improvements outside of the Citywalls, and I also agree that it should ONLY be Resource gathering improvements. (well, maybe a Wonder, or some special bell-tower/ training facility ... but those are important enough you would want to defend them I think ... Like a Great Lighthouse could be build on the water if its within 5 tiles of the city, or something. Also I think Cities "close" to the water should be able to build a port directly on the water even if its buildings don't otherwise reach the water.

A level 3 city should be relatively normal, 3 from your sov + 2 or 3 others to get 5 or 6 of these cities. ALmost everyone will have cities of this size, and they will be your basic "large city". Of course, you could get unlucky and only have 3 of such cities ... but then thats probably because it wasn't something you were focusing on. A size 4 city would be due to significant investment in training your heroes in the realm of Governance. Once you get such a Champion, you can truly have a "grand" city.

A level 5 city should be truly rare ... certainly not all players will have one, and no-one will have more than one (other than conquest). Maybe 3 or 4 such champions could exist in a game of 20 players. These would create the truly Awesome cities of Legend that are the Envy of the World. Think Rome or Moscow (for the setting). Or modern Beijing, Tokyo, or New York.

in the summary, you would need quite a few champions to find someone at least 2, you'd actualy have to try educating your people to get a rank 3 governor, all others are rank 0 and 1. You would have to really invest in Governor's Schooling or somesuch to get any rank 4s, or to get even One lucrative rank 5. I'd say it should be near impossible (but not hard capped) to get more than one rank 5 in a game.

With the Caveat that a Sovereign, on average, can Govern 3 cities at rank 3. possibly 2 rank 3 cities for smaller maps, and 4 rank 3 cities for larger maps. And of course, you can probably invest soveriegn points to make him a better governor. I would say max alloted advancement points for Governing would give your Sovereign dominion over one rank 5 and two rank 4s. Less than that would have one rank 5 and two rank 3s, reduce points further and you get one rank 4 and two rank 3s. No points and u get default of 3 rank 3 cities. You could also choose to get additional rank 2 cities, and pay extra points to upgrade those additional 2s to threes. The soverign should not be able to advance his governing skill once the game starts ... unless its at the cost of not being able to advance his combat/magical skills.

Mining towns have been around for ages. Anything that allows them to exist, without having them grow into massive super metropolises is good.

I don't like the idea of tying up my hero units that I should be using to go fight, explore and adventure by having them just sit there in a town so that it can actually be developed.

You had to do something similar in Rome: Total War and I disliked it there too.  I like the idea of having governors with stats that level up and such but I don't like the idea of having the governors be capable of combat (which forces you to pick and choose).

The rest of it sounds good though.  But why not just handle resources similar to how they were handled in Civ3?  If they were in your territory and had a road connected to them you could harvest them otherwise you sent a worker (not a settler) there to establish a colony (which was just a tile improvment that let you use the resource as if it was in your territory, it still needed a road connecting it).

There is a much easier solution than the governor system. But there are some things I like about the governor system which wouldn't be covered in my "simple" solution. (As I developed my idea, I came to realize that governor's still have an important role.)

The problem with my simple solution is that it is NOT easy to explain, but it would not be hard to code and it would not require anything from the players (they would need to understand the mechanic, but they would not need to DO anything in game.

My solution is a formula that actually makes gameplay sense.

The formula is that there is a COST of some kind associated with the number of tiles BORDERING a city, and that cost (whether mana, gold, or whatever) is offset by the number of tiles that are actually in the city.

A couple of examples to illustrate. 'C' represents a city tile and 'B' Represents a border tile.

BBB            BBBBB             BBBBBB

BCB           BCCCB             BCCCCB

BBB           BCCCB             BCBBBB

                BCCCB             BCB

                BBBBB              BCBBBB

                                       BCCCCB

                                       BBBBBB

Notice how city 1 at far left, starts out with only one tile (I know they don't start that small but for simplicity I pared things down). 1 city tile and 8 border tiles. thus many smaller cities are less efficient than fewer large cities.

City 2 in the middle has 9 city tiles and 16 border tiles. Obviously a much more favorable ratio.

City 3 on the left shows both the ability but also the cost of "snaking". 11 city tiles, 28 border tiles. only 2 more city tiles than city 2, but 12 more border tiles.

This concept makes sense, as snaking causes you "city wall" or in other words the points that need defending to go up. Building your city in a square shape is the most efficient, and the larger it gets also increases the efficiency. A city of 10 x 10 tiles would have 100 city squares and only 44 border tiles. At the other extreme, a "snake city" 100 tiles long would have 206 border tiles! So this gives the player a choice - is it better to snake out to that resource, or better to just build an outpost?

Also, using this, cities could still grow in tiles as before, but there is no reason to cap them. this could be explained in the Lore that once a city reaches a certain size and has a certain amount of "healed" land that it begins to VERY SLOWLY spread on its own.

Let's look at Boogie's five concerns:

1. Building a city, and suddenly running out of tiles with no way to get more.

 

2. Plopping down an outpost to harvest a resource 4 tiles from another city.

 

3. Forcing the player Snaking a trail of small improvements over to

 

4. Easily growing and reaching new city levels, where all outposts will eventually become huge cities.

 

and

 

5. Even though it costs Essence to make land livable, city spam is still completely viable in Elemental.

1. Solved. There is no reason to hard cap the number of tiles that could be in a city.

2. Solved. You now have the option of snaking but at a cost. This provides a meaningful choice for the player.

3 Solved, Same as #2.

4. Not really solved, in fact this approach favors large cities. Maybe my idea and the governot idea could be merged, and this would be the area where needing governor's would really help. In fact, it will also factor into balancing between problem #2 and problem #3 as well. So the governors should still definitely be in, imho.

5. Solved big time. There will still be motivation to expand, but city spamming a bunch of settlements early on is not going to be doable, as the small settlements are the LEAST efficient, bottom line you will not be able to maintain all of your borders, you will run out of money/soldiers or whatever and the outposts will collapse.

p.s. I alos like the idea that "standalone" improvement can be built away from the hub, and the distance is based on the tier level of the city - nice!

also, maybe "unlimited tiles" would only be available to a top level governator....

My 2 cents

City Succession

Borrow ideas from the Total War games. Once a city's governor dies, allow any hero/family member to take over. If their governing level is lower than the respective city size, just add penalties to population growth, resource harvesting, prestige, ect...I really don't like the idea of the city simply switching sides. If there is no hero/family available to take over, than an AI governor with lvl 0 governing takes over, and the player loses direct control of the city. The player can regain direct control once they find a hero/family member to take over. Also allow players to marry off daughters to the AI governors which effectively makes them family members and allows the player to have control of the city again. Maybe the marriage also increases the governor’s governing level (marrying into nobility increases his legitimacy).

City Spam

The governing levels and creation of resource improvements outside of city limits will go a long way to prevent city spam, but its doesn’t take out the advantage of creating a ton of cities all over the place in TBS games.... more cities = more money & stuff.

Looking at the ancient world (and even today to a large extent) having a lot of big cities all over the place just wasn't viable. Even in places like Egypt that had huge populations (for back then) had Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south as the main cities. Most of the other cities were just tiny villages set up only to take advantage of the Niles rich fertile land. In other words, there were only a few huge cities per region with a lot of smaller villages surrounding them to take advantage of resources (resource improvements), and I think most here agree is how we want Elemental to be like.

How to accomplish this? Again looking back to real world examples, commerce and trade (not resources) was/is the main reason why a few cities balloon up in population while the rest around it keep their relatively small population growth. It wasn't very effective to have a bunch of large cities acting as commerce/trade center. It was/is much more efficient to have one place acting a hub where the surrounding areas can gather in order to conduct business, and will consequentially sky rocket its population.

It’s a player’s job then to decide which city will act as this hub. They could do this by creating a “Regional Commerce Center” building (RCC for short), which marks it as this regional hub. The RCC will increase the city’s population growth substantially (possibly as well as income, prestige, ect..). However, all surrounding cites, let’s say within 10-30 tiles for now), will have a decrease in population growth, since the populations will now gravitate towards the RCC city. Let’s assume for now, that normally Elemental's population growth is rather low to begin with, which will prompt a player to quickly create a RCC. However, creating a city within the range of another RCC city will only lower the bonuses granted by either RCC building, and further decreases the population growth of the villages caught in the crossfire. Alternatively, this could act a sound strategy against an opponent. Build a RCC within the range of a rival’s RCC city in order to compete with them for population.

Put it all together and what do we get?

With the proposed Regional Commerce Center system, creating more cities within the range of a city with a RCC holds ZERO advantage, other than to take advantage and protect a resource within that region. Creating more cities within the range of a RCC city, won’t increase the bonuses granted by the RCC building. Combine this with governing levels, resource improvements outside of city limits and robust city succession rules and we’ll have a rather realistic and organic system to reduce city spam.

I'm hoping for a system where each family member/hired hero has some base set of stats, including governorship, which can be increased in a variety of ways. If a hero spends his days leading armies and winning battles, you should be able to increase his combat and army related skills. If a hero spends his days governing a city, sat in his Town Hall or whatever, his governing skills should go up. This would allow you to produce good governors, at the cost of leaving them sat in a city not adventuring or anything.

Oo that's interesting. It could be a related trait to governing, maybe called "Prestige." The more prestigious the governor, the more he can affect the actual prestige of the city he governs. The prestige trait could go up (and down?) based on his/her achievements, on or off the battlefield. 

Good idea! And perhaps cities with governors with no ties to other kingdoms could join a nearby faction that they were on very good terms with, regardless of their dynastic connections.

But the essence mechanic does work - it makes settlement rushing much less effective (or rather, it makes it a trade-off). It doesn't prevent city-spamming throughout the game, though, because habitable land spreads so by mid-game or so you can usually found cities without having to spend any essence. 

Yes, people would probably start to specialize their heroes to an extent... I don't see that as a problem, though. Particularly if a city gets a bonus if its governor is in town, that would strongly encourage players to keep the governors of their larger cities stay in their cities (a bonus to a small city is not going to be as meaningful as a bonus in a large city, after all). To me, this is a positive aspect of the idea!

Um, no. That is not what he said. A city would get a bonus from having its own governor in town. A hero with 5 Governing sitting in a town that he is not governor of would provide no bonus to the town.

I like this! It also makes you think twice about integrating all the cities you conquer - you might be better off razing some of those cities. It'd make consuming another nation through warfare an expensive and difficult process, making it harder for a warmongering nation to just wash over the land. Basically, any city without a governor would be out of your control until you install a new governor unless you place it under martial law.

Meh. I don't see all that much confusion - mostly just people curious as to details that Boogie didn't go into, and how to solve some of the problems with the idea. Saying a feature is unintuitive, confusing and complex based on a (literally) hastily scribbled description made on a Sunday afternoon is jumping the gun. Once details are nailed down I think this idea could be explained very easily and very concisely...

I like this, too! It'd definitely make the very beginning of the game a little less of a hassle and emphasize how badass your sovereign is.

I like what I read boogie

A couple of my own thoughts to add:

First, if the governor dies, the town should automaticly put a temporary leader in play. Maybe it takes time for this governor to be elected (with the town being unproductive while this happens), perhaps he'll only be able to hold control for X turns before a revolt, or he could possibly turn the city over to a neighboring nation if there is overwhelming influence.  Further, governors wouldn't nessecarily need to be special units, but if they are not, they lack the power and benefits a more heroic leader would bring. A default governor could perhaps only ever have a city of level 3, or is easily corrupted and/or killed.

Secondly, it might be interesting if the tile limit was a soft limitation rather then a hard one.  Essentially the maximium tiles listed would represent how large the city can be under its current governor without any inherient drawbacks. Should you place more tiles then this optimal number, the city's prosperity would degrade.  Eventually if a city grew too large, or a powerful governor is suddenly replaced by a lesser one, the city could collapse under its own weight and fall into ruin.  On the flip side, a town much smaller then its max number of tiles should have its prosperity increase accordingly.  It'd be interesting to see in action I think, and would let players push the limits of their societies or play it safe based on their preference.

Slightly related to my second point, you could also give the players sovereign a leadership score that indicates the number of cities he can control effectively.  It wouldn't stop you from city spamming, but if you over step what you can control by too many cities, corruption would be a big issue.  I have a fondness of limits that can be ignored, albeit at a cost.

Mostly like the governor stuff, except for the possible flipping on governor death.

I agree with some others that you should be able to assign a governor that is lower level in this case, but just give the city some severe penalties. If you find that there's no one to govern a certain city, you can have it go independant. Either you lose direct control of it until you assign a new governor, or it could become it's own 1-city "kingdom", until you (or someone else) takes it by force.

One other thing that sort of bothers me, what happens when you take over an enemy's city and don't have a governor of high enough level to control it? Are we going to go on a razing frenzy? I plan on playing the goblin like faction, so it fits... but yea. Wars are going to cause the destruction of many many towns.

The magic will allow you to raise new land, right?  Or make previously unbuildable land habitable?  It sounds like there will be ways to get more tiles, whether by terraforming magic (with direct analogues in GC2) or by bringing in a better governor to develop a high-priority settlement/building growth buildings/whatever mechanism exists in the city-building for increasing city size.

A minimum distance between cities that forbids new foundings if they'd be within that radius seems like a good idea.

I don't see anything wrong with snaking.  Small towns in the real world often grow along a principal street.  From what I've heard of Elemental's building system, it won't be a case of snake towns having cheap trash buildings with no value except as stepping stones to resources, but rather, a resource-oriented town will build a civic skeleton that can be upgraded into usefulness when necessary -- perhaps in preference to starting a new settlement.  Also, snaking will give intermediate towns distinctive shapes.  And if a player needs more civic buildings, then filling out a snake town's undeveloped areas could be an alternative to founding a new town.

Civ has handled this with capping mechanisms.  If necessary, perhaps the one-shot Essence cost for the land to be revived could be turned into an ongoing Essence commitment for the land to be sustained.  E.g., a given hero has a number of Essence points to distribute between cities which is determined by an associated skill or attribute or level.  Let's say a hero has 300 town-sustaining capacity, which can be provided to a single giant city, or to two major cities, or to one major city and several small towns which serve as forts and mines, and so on.  This capacity might also come with a maximum number of different cities.  Exceeding either will force the player to allocate dying land which cripples existing cities until the limit is expanded or the holdings are diminished.
 

In practice, this sounds a lot like the outpost/real city divide.  Pigsley there is going to limit whatever city he manages to being a tiny settlement only as important as its single purpose.  Re-assigning a better governor to develop an outpost will reduce your safety net of qualified governors and could lead to the loss of a city.

What mechanisms are already in place to determine city growth?
 

These things together sound like they could be a problem for hero use.  This system would reward players for keeping their heroes in their cities instead of campaigning with them -- both to get the bonus, and because losing a hero could result in losing a city.  I don't want to stick my commanders in the back of the base Starcraft-style.
 

Yeah, this way the snake or the blob still have the advantage of city walls.  Put me down in the dynamic city walls camp, BTW.  I want a bonus for making a contiguous city and I don't want to futz around with walls on a tile-by-tile basis every few turns.

I have no idea what went wrong with my quote fields here.

You do realize that cities are actually the highest rank for a settlement, right?

Your argument loses all sense when you replace "City" with "outpost"