1.1 Need to slow the game down

i am at a loss for words.  you want to slow down this already boringly slow paced game?  is this a sarcastic post? 

if there was ever anything exciting to do in this game i would agree with you.  but there isn't.  ever.  what is the point of dragging out the boredom?

I think the OP makes good points.  Pacing could use some tweaking, though I generally prefer soft caps to hard (so would prefer some other method than using level caps on cities, for example).

I'm not sure if I agree with the original post, but I do think there are serious pacing issues with the current game. For instance population growth is way too fast and spell research is pointless to invest even a single city in speccing arcane research since once you get up a few monasteries or have an arcane improvement you are on the fast track to learning a new spell every other season until you are working on level 10 spell level research for lolz. Possibly cutting down on the effect prestige has and reworking charisma may help with preventing cities from growing too fast. Arcane research and Tech research is way too slow early game and way too fast mid game. Odd thing is I notice cities grow way too fast early game but for some reason late game they don't seem to grow at all without prestige. Thankfully you can just abuse a single champion to charisma spec and just have him sit on a city to get a city level upgrade each turn.

  Is the above working as intended?

Turn pacing seems ok at best for me until around turn 350. at season 350ish I'm the smartest strongest kingdom and everyone is still researching old useless stuff that they can't even use or want to use. I have little else to research and things are becomming boring and tedious. (I've stopped 2 games one at season 412 and the other at turn 343 because of this)

 I feel like I had to rush to get as many cities as possible (Because of Zone of Influence, and the AI wants to be a land hog) so I could venture out into the land (So i'm not blocked into just my Zone) and do a very limited number of tedious quests and notables that offer little reward. (No EXP for completing a quest? Ack!)

We need a Fast Expansion Stopper, and right there will slow things down. I mentioned this on another thread but I think governing should be a Tech and the more you focus on it the more cities you can build, but you'll need to research it... Which takes time, which will slow city spams, and maybe make the AI think of placing more valueable cities, rather than a ton of weak ones.

Disclaimer: I play exclusively on huge maps on epic speed. So all commentary are based on that.

To me, it feels like there are two difference paces at work.

The first is the meta-game (how you win). This seems very slow (and mostly about right).  By turn 150, I've got an idea of what's going on, how I want to proceed, etc.

The second though is the day-to-day game (what you're doing from turn to turn). And here, the game is -very- fast. In one of my current games, by turn 125, I'm fully expanded (barring war) at 4 cities who have nothing left to build (spamming buildings aside). By comparison, on a huge map at marathon speed in Civ 5, this 'nothing to do but hit end turn' stage doesn't hit (for excessive periods of time) doesn't hit until within a few hundred turns to the end of the game. As well, by turn 125 in such a game, I've generally barely gotten started serious expansion; generally, I'm still at 1 city and working to make it mostly profitable in some fashion. 

The result with these two dramatically different pacings is that you quickly ramp up in the early game and them rapidly plateau to how the game will be settled in the end-game. Any sense of mid-game (and thus uncertainty) is gone very quickly.

Playing on normal speed I find myself just hitting next turn with nothing to do quite alot already.

Maybie I should turn up the speed 

In any case I think that this is all very subjective, some people find it too fast and others find it too slow.

Are you sure you're playing 1.1?  I've not seen any resource heavy maps unless they were custom..  A random game..  I don't see those kind of numbers.  So, I'd have to disagree with the OP here.

One grain of thought may be to make warfare take longer to research.  I'm also disagreeing on the war staff.  It's not given for free at the start of the game, you have to research several techs to get access. 

My take on resources is scarce (rare) and their strategic value, must be WAI.

I will say that I think a lot of good points about pacing have been brought up in this thread, and I understand what the OP is trying to get at. Elemental is a game which tries to do a lot and in some ways succeeds at bring together a bunch of interesting game play elements. The big issue here however is that the design seems to revolve around a very specific type of growth pattern, which is ultimately the least likely to exist for most players. That is, a couple of large cities and a bunch of small outpost type cities. If one looks at the various city improvements in 1.1, the vast majority of improvements are 1 or more per city, yet the vast majority of these only require a level 3 or lower city. Higher level improvements tend to be 1 per faction or 1 per game, resulting in a steep drop off for the number of buildings most can actually build. So the player ends up hitting a point where most of his new cities are simply building a bunch of level 1 and 2 buildings which cause their income to skyrocket very quickly. At this point, the player now has enough materials to make vast armies which simply devastate the unprepared AI. The best way to pace the game better would simply be to firstly add a bunch of high level expensive improvements, and secondly, force greater trade offs for new levels of buildings. Consider the fact that you research a house and instantly you get a huge bonus to your pop caps with no real trade off. If instead, Houses were in some ways worse than 2 huts, say 2 food for 19 storage, the player would be force to make a real choice between leveling his city quickly or saving tiles for other buildings.

very good points there kenata.

I have to admit I tend to have no cities below level 5 in the late game (i only play on large maps) and I have such a high resource income that it's impossible to spend it all.

For example in my last game I finished with 15,000 gold and that was after buying all my champions a full set of heavy plate, the charms, accessories and a sword of wrath each so I could go do the quest of mastery.

Food is the only limiting resource.

Or to put a finer point on it, food is the only limiting resource unless the map generator screws you and you dont get a single metal deposit .

But as far as I can tell there's no incentive to have smaller cities, absolutely none. SO I just build cities to the point where I have enough food for each to reach level 5.

 Completely agree

After reading all these responses, one thing I have yet to see spoken of or mentioned is the intent of game length by SD.  Now, say the intent of SD was to have a game last about 5 hours, or 300 turns.  Based on the speed of progress through techs this seems appropriate.  Now of course, if pacing seems far to fast, wouldn't going about creating a tech system similar to civ, and maybe making a separate research system for magic?  Say, libraries give you tech points to speed up development in techs, and studies of the arcane allow for unlocking of magics.  Also, instead of limiting cities by population and tile size, go about specializing and requiring understanding of lost knowledge to improve cities.  So, one has to research smithing in order to obtain the knowledge to build metal armors.

This would also allow for some interesting compilations as well.  Such as imbue weapons, they can be manufactured for whole armies, such as fire or air.  Ah, but in order to do this, one would have to have control of said shards.

Just my 2 cents.

Change the tech pacing in the options to "EPIC" the game is slowed down.

I defidently agreee, you can basically conquer the game wiht 3or4 maybe 5 cities on the ridiculous setting. and i dont know about you guys but i can basically unlock every tech within the first 2hrs tops of playing the game, im not saying i wana drag the game out to take 12hrs to do anything but thats why we have the pace option for dif people who like differnt gaming style but on the second slowest setting, it goes threw way to fast, i would def agree this needs quite a bit of work, (More techs by like 5x in my opinion) but the AI should def take top priority, but pacing techs and ai should defidently be at teh top of the list for this coming patch . (i hope the do a-z releases daily again that was kinda fun "if you dont like pplaying wiht bugs DONT DOWNLOAD THEM" but back to the main subject'. they def need to extend / expand the game pacing techs and def figure out what there gonna do with this armor weapons magic thing, its sad in 10 turns going from armor thats 2-3 for torso to 10-20+ armor and 15-20dmg weapons to 50+ damage weapons in such a short amount of time. then you can just rhomper stomper yoru way threw every civ left on the map with a few good me , i dont even fell like i need to research partys "Unit groups" anymore, cause as lonng as my defense outmatches there attack u just hit auto battle and you always win " givin a small margin of failure if your low on health and atk/def is exactly equal but 90% of the time as long as u have a lil more then 10-20hp your not gonna lose.

AND PLEASEEEEE PLEASE make a combat animation speed option for tactical battles, or a quickmove option that nulls the animations . i think i read your gonna compile say all 5 attakcs into one attck to save time but still you need a 1-5x speed changer with quick move there to , taht would be frigin awesome! . *can you swear on these forums? i know on the crimecraft forum im in with strip clubs drugs and killing with gangs you cant say the word hell without getting a repremand , whats this world comign to, wich btw is 18+ MA game like wtf is that shit*

Brad seems to have always been for fast pacing. In the dev journals he has many times mentioned that the pacing should let the player do something interesting every single turn. From the start I was kind of afraid that it would mean the game was working on steroids. It doesn't feel fun when you get a new spell every two turns and research all techs in a couple of hours. This kind of pacing kills the epicness of the game.

And there is also people that complains when they do lose turns without doing stuff (forced 5 materials on game start as example).

Oh when we were young!

https://forums.elementalgame.com/329473

I think the idea the OP is looking for was referred to as Camp 1

I don't know about everyone else, but it makes me a little sad to read these early dev. journals. To see how big the ideas were, initially, and how it has subsequently turned out.

It's like seeing your kid get straight A's all through grade school, then drop out of high school and get a job at McDonalds. 

And back then folks used words like "EPIC".

Now folks use words like OOM & CTD.

Hahahahahahaha.  Very true.

It seriously worked like that at one point?

What the HELL happend?

The devs had a discussion between them.

Brad said that the community wanted camp 2.

Never actually did get Camp 1 in game. (I was squarely in Camp 1, btw)

IIRC, the community was overwhelmingly in support of Camp 1, SD tested a bit internally, then came out and said it wasn't fun and did Camp 2.

In my experience, Brad has a tendency to project his opinions as what's best for the game or as what the community wants.