At the moment, I'm pretty sure this is linked to something about nearest settlement size, and possibly other variables like prestige. It's very vexing that the UI is no help in understanding how and when something like an expensive Shrill Hive goes from being useless to being linked.

Oi, you've got a lot packed up in that short statement. I was a junior bug wrangler for a few years and I still often think about how resolving a bug By Design can be a serious mistake.

Re the general point of your OP, I have to generally agree. So far, Elemental seems to have gained only modest ground in the wall-to-wall-towns problem, and there's nothing in the diplomacy UI to indicate that I can have much hope of being a strong player without going the massive-turf-massive-forces-massive-everything route. That situation can more or less work for me aesthetically for GalCiv2, but if super-science can't help you get around massive-might-makes-right, shouldn't you at least be able to escape with the right magic?

This is one of my pet pursuits -- small but puissant kingdoms being competitive, using magic to offset size.  There was a lot of discussion of this goal pre- and during beta.

Release took a big step back from this, removing the increasing cost per city constraint on city-spamming.  No explanation for it, either (I've looked, did I miss it?  Please to link or point me in the direction if so).

Still, in both 1.06 and now 1.07 I've been trying this strategy.  Large map, 5 fallen foes, second-hardest difficulty.  Trying to maximize champion recruitment and imbuing, then using summoned critters, instead of recruiting normal units.

So far modest success, but there are significant obstacles.  Basically, it's a numbers game -- the more cities, the more buildings to add technology and spell research points, gold income, materials, etc.  Without numbers, research is slow, gold is scarce, and it's hard to afford champs.  On the other hand, not having a lot of cities reduces gold/materials needed for buildings.  And frankly, there's only a few spells worth researching (a long range tac spell like lightning, and an AoE tac spell like chain lightning, then the strategic summoning spells, and a few city-buffing spells), so the need for a lot of spell research points is minimized.  Same for tech research points too.  (I'm viewing the lack of useful spells as a plus here )

In my current 1.07 game I restarted ~10 times and got a great starting location -- gold mine (and a second appeared not too long after), lost library, and a fertile lands (with a second in city lvl 4 range).  First wandering champ was a female (Sov is male) with the dominate trait (hugely powerful, and passes on to female progeny).  A second city nearby has a beehive, oasis, orchard, lost library, and close by a refugee camp and an ore mine.

That's an exceptionally great start, and has enabled a small empire attempt.  It shouldn't be necessary to have such a great start for this strategy to be viable.

If brad doesn't want a 'small empire' strategy to be viable and if city-spamming isn't intended to be a main part of a viable strategy, then I wish he'd say so.  Otherwise, there's some work to be done to enable it.

I agree with the OP. The whole might-is-right thing is kinda annoying. Simply because my military is smaller than everyone else on the board, they take it upon themselves to dislike me and sooner or later declare war..Only to be crushed anytime they invade. I had the computer once send a stack of 6 armies, each exceeding 800 battle rating. I teleported in with my daughter (who had 88 essence at birth..she was like the Brolly of my faction) and watched as spell after spell was flung at them, utterly destroying their faces. Then suddenly..the AI (Altar..it is always Altar who are the biggest assholes in-game, at least for me) had a power rating closer to my own. They liked me a little more then, as I no longer needed to pay 200,000 gildar for peace. Yeah, 200,000. That's what my actual power rating should have been! Human players should get a bonus to our perceived power rating(PR), as we'll always be able to do more with less than the AI. So if the AI has say..500 PR, and the human player has roughly the same size army, his/her PR should be a bit higher, so the AI knows not to go in and get it's butt kicked.

It would also be ideal if the computer would not ALWAYS, ALWAYS attempt to win via massive armies..Why not come across a diplomatic AI? That'd be awesome.

I always play with the grid on; it's what the devs mean by a "tile" that I'm not exactly clear about. Is it one movement square, a 2x2 grid like larger improvements take up, or one of the bigger grid regions that are always visible on the cloth map regardless of whether gridlines are enabled?

But to try getting back to kyogre's reason for the thread, I have always wanted the game to have some form of 'offiical village' settlement form that gets built directly on a resource, maybe draws a small population from your nearest normal settlement (or from the general surroundings), and needs a garrison to protect it when it's away from your strong areas.

Building a "tiny village" just to make resource connections clutters the UI and contributes to making cities in general feel more like chores and less like unique, important parts of a given game. Building something that didn't show up in that 'tree' on the left and didn't play an economic role beyond resource extraction would be fine for me, though.

Would like an option that would have your adviser pop up and say- Sire-  That resource is to far form a city to produce from. Do you still want to build the facilities?   - Yes , -No  option 

This would keep you from wasting the building cost, when you could not make use of the resource. 

A large part of the problem here is how the computer calculates point values for armies.  I had a game not that long ago where I couldn't expand much, but had the resources I needed to effectively build my empire.  One of my early conquests was one of the independent factions, netting me an Ogre Village.  I put a small garrison of Ogres in each of my cities for basic defense (one unit -a three ogre group- experienced), but two groups of Ogres with a casting Champion along with some summons.  On paper, the AI opponent fencing me in had a higher overall army score.  In actuality, I outclassed anything he could send my way.  I would have liked to have been able to negotiate with him for safe passage and focus my attention on someone a little farther out, but because of the variance in perceived army value this was an impossible feat.

My proposal is this:  keep track of the win/loss ratio of a given army and have it affect the AI's perception of it's strength.  Have it also keep track of the difference between the attacker and defender's army value to modify perceived strength.  If I'm cruising around with a small army that never looses and comes out on top repeatedly against a supposedly superior force, this should put me in a better position to negotiate with other factions.

Balancing small kingdoms would indeed be ideal but as we all know its easier said than done. I had some ideas that if implemented could add some minor advantages to being a small kingdom, and I think it wouldn't require any kind of overhaul. I made a thread on it and it probably just got lost in the sea of threads that pop everyday, here is the link in case you want to see it https://forums.elementalgame.com/388971.

If you dont feel like reading that, my idea was simple. Have a counter that adds up all the research points you have done up to the current turn and use this counter for extra bonuses.

Example: Doing 2 Tech Points per turn. After 10 turns the counter totals 20 right? So lets say that when you reach 20 points you are granted with a temporary research increase in a city as a bonus.

Ok now my idea that would help small kindgoms was that this internal counter depended on your number of cities in order to get these bonuses, So if I had 1 city I would get the first bonus when I got 20 points. But if I had 5 cities I would need 100 points. These are just random numbers but I hope I get the idea across. These bonuses could be many things, but I think the idea would be cool and it would help out smaller kingdoms and not penalize large kingdoms as much.

Edt: Forgot to mention that this idea could apply to Arcane Knowledge or Gildar production as well. Heck anything that has numbers could use this.

i don't think it should ever be an advantage not to expand. however, i think the relationship needs to be far less linear. currently there is little to separate starting cities from those developed at a later point, besides time and (you'd expect) better location.

personally, i think the removal of a lot of the persentage bonus buildings would help, and replacing them with a greaterdependence on trade, and some more base production buildings (ie, upgrading your workshop to produce more materials at level 2, using the same tile) and more one per civ buildings that you only build in your capital. i think of fantasy settings like the forgotten relams, where factions are essentially city states and satellite towns exist to control resources rather than as centres of population. your capital should be the last building to fall, and it's ability to be fairly autonomous, train decent troops on it's own and great defences should make your civilizations final battle the most epic of the game, not the least.

I don't know how it was back in the beta, since I never took part in it, but generally I dislike any kind of mechanism which limits expansion in a stupid way. With stupid way I mean scenarios like exponental rising 'administration costs', illogical limits like 'we cannot have more than three cities, because... well, because!' or ridiculous expensive settler units like 'Milord, this settler is the same you trained yesterday, but he costs us five times more'.

Of course, free expansion leads to super-empires spanning across a whole continent, having an output of resources and armies without competition, but isn't that a viable strategy to pursue? There are reasons why big empires don't last more than a few hundred of years.

I think the problem is how the AI is evaluating its chances against the player. There is this variable telling you and him how strong someone is and if his overall strength surpasses yours, you can count on it that he declares war on you... a war he is most likely to lose. But that number is wrong, if you see it this way: what are the chances that a super-empire can mobilize its whole army instantly and crushing someone with it? Usually those empires are prone to sudden attacks and need time to strike back. They have the benefit of resources, but the disadvantige of having many troops bound as garrison in their many cities.

So how about a variable consisting of a proportion of cities to troops, combined with a value of wins/losses in battles with a certain rating (maybe battles with a combat rating of 300 vs. 300 or above...) to determine a faction's real strength? That would consider the factors of garrison troops in favor of small kingdoms, keep expansion (or 'city-spamming') still an option and allow for more diplomacy, since the overall size wouldn't be the measure of all things anymore. And the AI wouldn't keep thinking of his own garrison troops as an available offensive force.

What do you think? Is that something in the right direction?

Back when this was being hotly discussed there was a suggestion along the lines of a 'sauron template' -- Sauron had a certain amount of power, and he chose to invest it in certain ways (like the Ring).  Doing so diminished his personal power, it didn't add the Ring's to what he already had.  So, a zero-sum game.

The original concept for elemental had something like this -- essence was the 'power' and it had to be invested to create a city.  If a Sov created a lot of cities, that reduced his/her personal power.  A Sov that only had a few cities had more personal power.  Thus there was a balance between the large and small empires -- the large had relatively many cities but the sov had relatively little personal power to cast with, and the small had relatively few cities but relatively great personal power to cast with.

I think that would be a workable solution, and a fun one to play out.

Problem is that the 'essence to create cities' thing was removed, plus the 'increasing cost for subsequent cities', with nothing added to penalize city-spamming.  The rationale behind this escapes me, given that limiting city-spamming was often mentioned as a goal.

The thing though is that you can build a city towards a resource to claim it. The 4 tile limit is to the closest city tile not to the closest city center. So if you have a banana city with the starting square at one end and a string of buildings to the other, a resource can be 4 tiles away from -any- of those squares.

While the popup would be nice... I think it would be better if the game were just clearer about what is needed to link it up. Otherwise people will assume that a resource could -never- be linked up in such a case without a new city.

As far as the original topic, I agree with ealinnara. Using escalating costs does not usually work very well. Once you get over the critical hurdle, the costs become meaningless. If I'm a decent sized empire or larger, 700 gildar is chump change. It doesn't do much to stop me from expanding. If I'm a small empire, then it hurts me a lot because my resources are much more limited.