I just want to say what whatever else we can do with our essence had damn well better be good enough to make a city-spamming player with an army in the thousands seriously reconsider his decisions.

Though I'm a bit afraid to see what it might be if it is.

Maybe we could forge the One Ring, imbuing it with our essence.

I do believe, long ago, they mentioned being able to imbue our heroes with our essence, making them very powerful.  Dunno if that's still the case though.

The essence of a dozen citys, all packed into one hero? that would be like a cheesy kung fu movie where the hero lolPWNs everyone.

Govenors? I can certainly see a use for them. I would prefer they just be AI controlled units needed to be able to run my cities at full capacity and for, say, every additional 3-5K pop.(pick a #) growth in a city and additional Govenor be required, with a ssalary cost taken from the cities coffers to maintain said cities max. growth potential/output.

Outlying camps is brilliant. I would ask, politely, that Farms (wheat), or specialty crop areas (Orchards), be able to be expanded, strickly the resource though, by use of Essence (at reduced levels to that of city creation) with additional huts and perhaps some minor defensive structures, provided to keep Pop. requirements equitable. The bigger the farm, the more farmers needed to harvest and tend to said farm.

A Mine, that is strictly built for the ore therein would tend to have a restrictive Pop. component built in, unless more than one tunnel is active at a time.

not sure if posted, but divide the map into countys or whatever and set the amount of citys to one per county and each city could support 4 towns and outposts.

It occured to me that one other way of limiting city spam would be to limit population growth.  After all, it's not a city without people. 

Population growth in Elemental still seems a bit funky at this point, especially growth that happens by attracting the natives.  If there are benefits to having large cities (which there probably should be) then spamming small cities might mean it takes a very long time for them to grow larger.  In most games having more cities grows overall population faster, we can tweak that.  If attracting the natives is to be a primary source of people, then population growth could be less tied to how many cities you have and be based more on how much land you control.  Those are related of course, but not directly.  There will still be incentive to expand, but it could be beneficial to maximise space between cities, rather than minimizing it.

So simple. And yet it would instantly fix everything. If the countys can be generated in a reasonable manner then it fixes everything.

One of my ideas was to make food scarcer. Your population should in theory be limited by what you can feed. If you can't get enough people to turn every settlement into a huge city, then the problem largely goes away on its own because building a new outpost is taking food away from somewhere else. (Of course, it also makes fertile land resources EXTREMELY valuable.)

What about a design philosophy that says you won't be able to use all the resources on the map because of your limited number of cities, and you have to pick a subset of resources to exploit out of the resources you get?  In the long term, you might be able to eke out another city, but in the short term, if you want a new resource you have to fight for it.

I continue to believe that a low city cap is crucial to making cities interesting without making them a chore (particularly in the endgame).

Now this idea I like.  It's not a pain in the ass abstract that makes no logical sense and blows up game mechanics for other things, causing endless exploitation of the breaks and ruining diversity of choice.

It takes a couple other states to feed New York.  Want a megopolis?  Feed it.  Want lots of cities?  Take over enough territory to feed them.  No "well I might be attacked by a dragon and I can't stand losing infrastructure so it just has to be guarded by stone walls and a standing army!" arguments are required either.

The problem with footprints though is that you can end up in odd sitations where citys clearly should not matter to each other, but the footprint blocks the city from being built.

Perhaps instead of a fixed footprint, there is an average distance between citys you need to maintain. This way you can put the citys very close together if you need to, but you must put the next couple of cites way out from everything else. That way you can stack them in when you need to, but it also forces you to keep lots of open ground in your nation.

Maybe too complex. The footprint idea seemed to work well AoW, even if you did end up in odd situations every now and then.

I have to agree. Its the most elegant suggestion so far, and the end effect is the same as many others. Nothing wrong in borrowing what has worked in past and expanding on it.

I can see food footprints interacting interestingly with the resource system.  Presumably the biggest cities will need access to plains, but certain resources will only be found in the mountains.  Perhaps you can get horses in your metropolis, but you'll need a tiny mountain town for your iron.

Now, there's an idea, Cerevox!

Let's say I want 5 cities, and I want them close for defensive purposes.  They all have a point score associated with them; following psychloak's idea of having a certain number of tiles that must be allocated to each city to "feed" it.  I have to have a vast ring around my "quint-cities" area that's providing the resources, so I need to set up the infrastructure around them.  If a city is within another city's working radius, both city's growth rate is hampered.  And it costs more essence to put cities closer together than it does to spread them out.  The more closely packed, the more area around must be reserved for "feeding", the slower the individual cities grow, and the more essence it took to set them up. To me, that's a great "guns v. butter" choice; close cities for defense at the cost of spread out cities for resources, growth, and essence.

And both those cities will be competing for the same land, so building more cities only serves to have smaller cities. This should help to solve the dilemma that Boogiebac brought up with healing the land. Sure more healed land means more cities, but if you want a huge city with all the perks, you'll need to build less cities to support it.

Governors

I'm on the fence about this one.  They seem like added complexity without, necessarily, added fun.  I'm convinceable, though.

Preventing City Spam

City spam could be controlled for the same reason ancient civilizations conquered more than settled: it's cheaper.  Expensive as armies are, a successful offensive war could be very profitable for the conqueror.  Creating, and upgrading, cities should be a serious investment.  I like the Essence expenditure to get things going.  I think it should take considerable material resources (gold, wood, stone, food) to get a city to increase level.

Prevening Snaking

The solution of "undefended resource gatherers" is excellent.  It also has a dash of realism: outlying farms and settlements were invariably more vulnerable than the towns and cities that protected them (or nominally protected them).

Something which might  work: Level 0 settlements (outposts) can be placed on top of resources within X tiles of a city.  I liked someone's earlier idea that the "area of control" could be based on city level, though I'd add terrain to the equation.  However, they can't ever get any bigger, unless the tile is evenually outright absorbed into the city.  Outposts don't get walls, can't have governors, can't recruit, and--if on Barren land--consume food from the "host" city.  They can house garrisons to maintain order and stave off bandits, but without a proper fortress...perhaps allow them to become fortresses at considerable cost.

Thoughts?

I actually like the food-print idea. Seems elegant & logical. And I hate city spam.

Perhaps some cities could ship thier food and even commercial produce to other ones, and help to support the growth of "important" cities.

I just believe that all cities should be like they are in fantasy. having like multiple massive metropolises is absurd, and not even very fun. A great empire should have a few, but every kingdom shouldn't be lined with them. City spam isn't the issue so much as productive city spam is.

By the way, I see folks referring to the "+3 resource radius" of a city for undefended resources.  I may have read it wrong, but I thought Boogiemac's original idea was to have that radius increase with the size of the settlement.  +1 for a village, to +5 for a city.  The food ring should extend out considerably past that, maybe 2x the radius?

You are right about the "resource ring" expanding in range with the size of the city. However, I think that food is considered a resource, and thus it would be within that same range, not twice as far. (In fact Boogiebac specifically used the farm in his example).

The food footprint could be seperate from farms, similar to how it is in Civ.

Im sure most of you know this, but just so we are all on the same page....in Civ, all tiles produce food, even the undeveloped ones. It all depends on their land type with more food in grasslands, but zero food from deserts. Building a farm on the tile increase how much food was produced. Special crop resources (wheat, corn ect..) were scattered throughout the map, and building a farm on it would give you access to that crop (plus a lot of food). This is similar to how the current farms act in elemental.

So the food footprint could extend 2x or more the radius, but building a farm on an actual crop resource would be limited to what Boogiebac mentioned. The rest of the land within the cities food footprint can be tapped for basic food resources (if available..wasteland would give you nothing). This can be visually marked on the map by making the land look like its been argiculturally developed ..similar to the TW games once you develop a region agriculturally.

Yeah, my proposal was to have it be separate from harvesting resources.  It's just a method for determining how big a city can grow based on the terrain in its region and whether or not it has to share that terrain with other cities.  The idea is to address both city spam and city size issues with a single, natural approach.

Im thinking with food footprints and the fact that cities are not regularted to just one tile, there would be less concern about placing a bunch of cities close to each other. They all would draw and compete from similar footprints, effectively castrating each other. It would be a waste of space too, since you'll now have redundant duplicate forts taking up valuable tiles.

Even so, I could see placing them close to each other useful for defensive purposes. (My main concern is how the AI would handle it.)

You will still need a way to transport excess food from farm towns, to these hungry larger cities. In a past dev journal, I beileve the concessus in how ot move resources around the map was to use the "merchant option", which  was a mix of one option that was similar to civ's automatic transfer of resources and another one that had every resource act as an item that the player had to manual move between cities (similar to Civ4:colonization). 

So here is my suggestion

Simply add 4 options in the city managment on how to handle excess food. The options are as follows:

"Sell to local markets" which will continue to increase local population.

"Store food" which will halt population growth and save the food for a latter day

"Import food" This will flag your city as one that will accept food from other connecting settlements. Maybe have a slider for varying levels of import priority incase you want a particular city to recieve goods over another. "Import food" can be choosen along side either "store food" or "sell to local markets" options

"Export food" This will send the excess food to connecting cities that are flagged as food importers

Lets say for example you have CityA that needs food. Its connected by road to FarmTownA.  FarmTownA is also connected to FarmTownB thats located even farther out from CityA. The FarmTownA will set its food excess option as "export food" and so will FarmTownB. CityA will set it as "Import Food" and "Sell to local markets". FarmTownaA exports its excess food, but only CityA is flagged as importing, so all of FarmTownA's food goes to CityA. FarmTownB tries to export its food, but its only connected to FarmTownA and its not flagged as importing. The player noticed this, and then clicks on FarmTownA's option to "import food". Excess food from FarmTownB is exported to FarmTownA. Since FarmTownA is also an exporter, all the food from FarmTownB goes directly throuhg FarmTownA and into CityA. A player can have a detailed network of food trading but with minimal micromangment once it is set up.

I don't like food-prints. It's just too abstract, and use a different layer than the one we already have.

What are the causes of city-spam ?

• More roads, and then more resources
• More population, then more units to build
• More population, then more research points
• More population, then more gold
• To get improvements (forest, mine, shard, farm, etc.)

Tapping improvements doesn't resolve the other points. Let's discuss each point at a time, with bearing in mind the BoogiBac quote from sid meier : "Simple system with interesting relations"

• Roads : More caravans = more resources. Maybe limit the available roads to only connecting town of at least level 2(village), and get a bonus from bigger cities. Now you get 10% of the city resources. It could be 5% X city level, thus connecting level 5 cities would get caravans of 25%. If you have more interest in bigger cities then you will avoid to spam lesser cities.
  
• Population : units to build. Give an edge to bigger cities. At the moment two cities with 50 population and 50 population have the same possibilities of training as a city of 100 units. How to give an edge to the 100 population city ? At the moment, bigger cities will "replenish" population faster, and if they are bigger you'll have probably more barracks, thus improving training time. Maybe it's enough. No need to change. But if you want to give an additionnal edge, then you can say that a bigger city will have "better" instructors, then give a little more HP to units from bigger cities. For instance 3HP X city level. That's a little bonus, but it can do the difference early on.
• More population, more research points : Each turn, a city might give you a little bonus in research. Some kind of "Owww.. We accidentally found something". Bigger cities, more chance to get something by accident. So a simple thing : each turn, a city has a (city level) chance to get (city level) more research points. So bigger cities means better chance to get a better reward. Instead of 5 level 1 cities you better have a level 5 city.
  
• Reverse thinking : instead of getting better results, getting harsher results with lesser cities. There is an interesting game mechanic in "advanced civilization", the boardgame. If you have 4 cities you take 4 cards of resources. 5 cities ? 5 cards. It seems that you get better things ? No. Because resources can also be civil war/volcano/flood/disease/pirates and the like. So. the more cities you have, better chance to get negative events. We could use other systems : the chance of getting bad quests (like peasants revolt, a peasant that claim he has power, etc.) should be higher with more cities. More chance to get a magical problem if you have more cities. More chance to get a "bastard" if there is so many little towns where they don't even know your face
• Gold : If you use the first idea I had, then you will get more gold from bigger cities (better %age from high level cities) Moreover, some buildings shouldn't be buildable with a low level town (a bank shouldn't be built on an outpost)
• Get improvements : the idea of "you can tap improvements within a certain radius of the town" is something good. Level 3 governor would let you tap an improvement within 3 tiles from your city borders.

How using other system effectively ? I really like the "a building has a city level requirement". Outpost should only be able to build mundane things like houses, (no estates), mines, farms, lumbermill and that's all. But ! A good governor could reduce the needed level of buildings.

For instance a governor could get bonus from diplomacy resqearch or quest research or magic research. you could research available perks for governors :

• "Adventurers friend" (adventure research path) would let a city build inns earlier than allowed. If an inn is a level 2 building (meaning you need a city level 2 to build it), a city with an "adventurer's friend" could build it in a level 1 town.
  
• "Xenophilic" (diplomacy resea&rch path) would let a city build embassies earlier. If embassy is a level 3 building, then a "xenophilic" could build embassy in level 2 cities
• "Archmage" would let city build magical pit, schools earlier
• etc. You get the idea

One last thing about city growing. I don't like being stuck with a city that has not enough population to level up, and no more place to build. But it's a paradox : to build more, ... I need to level up. But too level up I need to build more.

So I propose one thing : you can always build houses (not estates) and farms, even if you don't have tiles available. SO if you want a big big big big city you can with a loooooot of houses, but special buildings would still be limited by the city level.

Last : a civilization research should allow our cities to get to any level we want. Even 40 tiles isn't enough if one day I need a 41th tile. Or a dynasty system : the higher level of a city would be the sum of governors level (and you can add more governors to a city with better research in the diplomatic research). you have a governor of level 2, you can only have a level 2 city. But ! If you add 2 more sub-govbernors of level 1, then you can get the city to level 2 + 1 + 1 = 4. Research 'diplomatic ? Civilization ? the two ?) could unlock more slots for governors and sub governors.

A city that has a higher level than the overall level of every governors would get a malus in trade, higher chance to separate (civil war for the win !) and a lesser birth rate due to the overall sadness of citizens.

Thanks for reading