To an extent, it is and remember, the numbers and conversions I was using were made up and not at all balanced.

However, with some of Elemental's other gameplay mechanics we can play with these things. The administrator champion? Now instead of a building production increase, it makes the conversion ratio better and reduces costs. Quest reward? Free city! (it has no costs). 

At any rate, it's an idea and as with many, is likely not to be the most suitable.

Quality strategy gaming involves decisions and choices.  There should be factors that cause those decisions and choices to have weight and substance.

City spam and empire sprawl should be a strategic element.  There should be thought involved and "costs" tied to the benefits.  That is, you get more production, more research, another spot to build units, a blocker, or a resource or whatever when you build a city.  You gain.  There should be some offsetting factors that cause you to have to think about building cities other than just "build pioneer, plunk down city, gain."  There should be a balance that leads to decision making and strategy.

Choices and decision making make for more compelling gameplay.

Look at GalCiv2.  Expansion is tied to maint costs and global morale.  If you overexpand too much you can financially cripple yourself.  If you wreck your economy you fall behind for research and production which can set you up to get spanked by the AIs.  Not good.  So you have to make decisions and you have to be thoughtful about how you expand.  (There's a bit more too it, like how fast you develop infrastructure on planets you take, traits, and more, but the basic idea is that you can't just expand without thinking a little and making strategic decisions).

The game is more interesting because it forces you to think rather than just mindly spam and expand.

I still think scaling needs to be part of the identified solution.

At it's most basic level, I like something similar to what they did in Civ4: instead of a flat maintenance cost per city (e.g -4 gold/turn for each city, for the sake of argument) the more cities you have, the more maintenance costs per city go up (e.g. zero maintenance for 1 city, 1 gold per city at 2 cities (-2 net), 2 gold per city at 3 cities (-6 net), 3 gold per city at 4 cities (-12 net), and so on).

Under a system like this you really do start to think about how to get the most productivity out of the fewest number of cities possible. And it should certainly curb city spam. You might even see people razing level 1 spam cities they built early on to address a critical resource shortage once they get more productive sites to replace them.

To put it another way, a mechanic like this builds in diminishing returns for having excessive amounts of cities (particularly marginally productive cities). Personally, I always really like diminishing returns mechanics, they tend to allow for lots of interesting choices in my opinion. I think a lot of the math in this game is too linear currently.

This.

Very well said, Voqar.

Like most everybody on here, I agree that spamming cities is bad for the game overall.  It makes micromanagement harder if you do it (you have to do it if your enemies do it) and it makes the game an unsightly mess. 

Almost everybody talked about the economic aspect of city spamming (I didn't read every single post) but there is also another aspect of city spamming. One huge reason to city spam is the fact that the more cities you have the more units you can produce at once. Mid to late game gold and resources stop being a big issue and at that point if your opponent city spammed and you didn't you are at a huge disadvantage. It doesn't matter that you have a level 5 city. If your opponent has 5-10 level 1 cities, he will out-produce you and beat you so you have to city spam as well.

Some people suggested increasing the ZOC spread speed to solve the city spam problem but this alone does not address what I described above. There needs to be other restrictions (such as certain city level or buildings required to build certain units or low level cities produce units incredibly slow compared to high level cities) to combat the city spam problem. If the balance is not so that 1 level 5 city is better than at least 5+ level 1 cities in terms of economy and unit production, people will ALWAYS city spam.

Please consider this while gathering ideas for patches.

Just to explain what I meant by a fast ZoC breaking the setting for me...

Supposedly this is a dangerous world, crawling with beasts, monsters and bandits with nary a sign of civilization.  Enter your sovereign and a couple of people.  I don't see how a tiny town is able to dominate so much land.  I'm not talking about the current rate, which I think -- for me -- is great early on especially.  I want to feel like an isolated spot of civilization and feel like every gain in resources and every advancement is a triumph.  Take the example given of far-flung resources and city-spamming all the way there just to create a ZoC to make things safer.  That doesn't make sense to a lot of people, but it's good strategy given the current mechanics.  Likewise, if ZoC expanded more quickly to cover greater areas, you'd eliminate the need for city spamming to protect the path from one resource to the other.  If those cities are gigantic and really have the population in them and the resources to control a lot of land, then great!  But if we're talking level 1, level 2, level 3...I'd say no, that doesn't make sense to me, either.  The paths to those distant resources SHOULD be dangerous.

So, perhaps I was a bit abrupt in invoking the premise of the game as a basis for game play, and certainly many people might disagree with me.  But two things I feel very little of in this game are isolation and fear, and I think the game ought to force me into experiencing both.  I want to wonder if I'm going to lose my sovereign trying to make it to another resource, to have to put guards along the path of a caravan or know there's a high chance I'll lose it.  Essentially, force me to make hard choices.  Civilized areas (towns, cities, etc) should be relatively small havens where you can rest up and feel safe.  Everywhere else -- going off to found a new settlement or simply trying to get between cities -- should be fraught with peril.  For me, then, city spamming currently provides some more resources, but it also provides increased safety.  ZoC increasing faster does the same.  I want to address the resource issue, but I also want less safety.  Hopefully my statement makes more sense in that light.

I will agree with you on the fear part. The NPC/Monsters are not aggressive enough in this game. I personally like city spamming however it should be dangerous to do. If I just send my pioneer to create a new city to get that much needed Iron resource for example without military protection then the chance of the pioneer making it to the location should be low. And if he does and a city is built then creatures should rush in and attempt to destroy it unless it is guarded and even then they should attempt to attack the city.

To me this would be the best way to limit city spawn. Because in order for that city to survive you would have to have military units guarding it. And as the game progresses the npc/monsters just keep getting stronger which means you have to build up your military forces to match which is expensive.

So your choices would be build many cities but have to maintain a bigger standing army to guard them leaving less unites to conquer the world or have fewer cities but have more resources to put in building armies to explore and conquer the world.

I thought I'd resurrect this thread to ask what people think of the new resource upkeep requirements for the money changer and the two basic research buildings? How is this affecting city spam in your games? I haven't had a chance to try 1.08 yet myself.

I'm spamming just as much, building up less.

Spamhouse

Still spamming. Like I've been saying, the food maintenance does nothing with caravan making 2-3 food easily. The Gildar cost on studies is a tiny bit better especially now that hunting isn't as profitable, but that just leads me to building merchants. And honestly, 1 gildar for 1 tech? You gotta be kidding, more studies please.

Having a city built every 5 squares is the next major issue that should be addressed.  Not only does it suck the fun out of the game, it doesn't fit with the game concept.

I would like to see it cost 3 (or so) food to start a new settlement.  This would make cities be placed for more strategically and not just have one every 5 paces. 

No, it just "seems" bad because of the lack of AI in both 1) using it for itself and 2) countering the human player' use of it.

The strategy of city spam is a common strategy that's used in every 4x game to some extent or another. It's just that the AI in this particular game (as of now) is unable to use & counter it.

Long thread is really long. I'll just toss my thoughts in here:

-New cities or pioneers need to cost more for every city you build. It should be balanced so that 5 cities is about normal, and more than that the cost starts to ramp up. The AI will STILL be ahead because it gets to cheat, but at least it will do so slower.

-Outpost vs. City. It's been mentioned before but here's my take:

A pioneer creates an outpost.

Outposts claim resources for the player, and resources within an outposts ZOC can be built on.

Outposts are capped at 10 pop.

Outposts cannot build city buidlings of any kind.

Outposts cannot produce troops.

When a player wishes to upgrade an outpost to a town, then they pay the "city" cost of the upgrade, which scales to how many cities you have.

This is way closer to what I think people expect out of a 4x game. Outposts as clearly distinguishable from actual cities. People expect a crap load of outposts since they're cheap and ultimately a defensive measure. Cities are where the real magic should happen.

I hope and pray that changes to the current set up are seriously considered. It is the single worst part of the game for me now (considering that some other things have vastly improved since 1.0)

Er, the AI is just as good if not better than the player at city-spamming. The only reason it isn't absolutely better is because it can't choose to focus on a tactic to the complete exclusion of anything else. Which players do. Which is why it's bad, for BOTH players and the AI.

Yes, this is true.  In all the games I've played, the AI spams cities like crazy.  Currently, if you don't spam cities yourself, you're going to be at a severe disadvantage.  However, if the player spams cities, it's usually a cake-walk.

I think there should be an "expansive" trait for certain AI factions, so that some will spam and others won't.

There's definitely not enough diversity, not just in AI factions but in AI sovereigns, and in diversity of AI strategy. It's like they all do exactly the same thing.

What they should've done is match an AI with one core spellbook or two, a core tactical attack plan (horses vs archers vs heavy footsoldiers .. this does not mean ignore the other non-core units) .. special units that are available to each faction that give it a plus in its core ability (whether it's magical or not makes no difference to me), and match the sovereign starting stats to match the faction's core strategy (good strenth & dexterity for archers, movement & organized for mounted-centric strategy, strength & constitution for heavy infantry, wisdom & intelligence for magic-centric, research and knowledge for the "research" centered faction, the "finance" guys should make a beeline for mint of ruvenna), etc ...

Really, in every game I have played the AI sovereigns have 15-20 cities.  It is ridiculous how many cities they build.

Well, only reason why I HATE city spam in EWoM is that I have to conquer all these cities, and its annoying. If I start war past turn 200, I end up with TONS of unneeded, poorly placed and poorly developed cities from AI.

I have to admit that i haven't gone through the tech tree too much as i am still getting use to the game, but i have been following the thread. One simple game mechanic that could be altered is the speed at which buildings and troops are manufactured.

an outpost could build a few buildings, perhaps 3, which the intent is to be used with defensive items like walls. Probably a limit of one resource building magic, matts or gold producing building etc.

lv 1 city - building restrictions removed, 1 production point per turn.

lv 2 city - 2 production points per turn.

lv 3 city - 3 production points per turn.

lv 4 city - 4 production points per turn.

lv 5 city - 5 production points per turn.

maybe some tech is able to turn the outpost into a special structure (defensive fort, magic aura producer upgrade to push out zoc, sniper type tower to attack enemies within a given range)

so instead we give an engineer type of function to this unit and one option of the engineer is to build the outpost which can grow into a other things city, fort etc

edit *- this way a lv 5 city builds something 5 times faster.*

edit #2 * perhaps some way to "salt the earth" so no city can be built that are for a time*

I think the amount of cities should be tied to your channeler's level...   Your supposed to have to channel energy to bring life back to the land to make cities in the lore so why not make them connected in the game...This would also make adventuring more worthwhile so you can level up to make new cities to grab resources.  You would get your starting city and then be able to create another one every 3 levels. You could have a trait of city planner that would let a channeler increase it to every 2nd level for those who still want to use spamming as a strategy.  Monster loot will probably have to be increased again to make this work.