Why is city spamming bad?

 Its not bad, I just don't like having to do so in order to win.

Because there is no downside, too easy too powerful, and the world per lore is supposed to be broken, it should be difficult to start up cities.

also, the AI is not aggressive enough, bandits should be about 1000% more rabid

but then again, i just dont like massive amounts of cities, just my opinion but they should be rare and you should fight hard to keep them

I think they ought to limit the amounts of cities you can build or make them really really expensive.

BUT... then I would create a sort of unit that can go out and "exploit" a resource that falls outside of your influence.  This would make these resources heavily fought over. 

In the end, city spam happens to control resources.. so make controlling of resources possible through something other than cities. 

I'm with tamides on this one. It's a personal preference, of course, but I know that for me anyway, conquering 40 AI cities after I've defeated the faction's main army is more work than fun. Also, like tamides said, I don't think it fits with the lore. And, to top it off... I ususally can't think of 40 good city names, haha.

As for a reason for why it's bad to city spam, I don't think  there is one in the sense you mean. There is no downside because you can found an outpost for no food cost, and let's be honest, and outpost is pretty much as good as a level 2 town. I would personally prefer some sort of mechanic that makes the decision of whether to found another city harder. For example, I wouldn't mind if a plain old outpost used one unit of food.

Mostly - WOM is not intended to be played with more than 5-6 cities.

This is quite obvious when you look at the city list screen.
There isn't one? Well, that's my point. There is no way to get an overview about which of your 60 cities is producing metal, which are putting out gold...
All you have is that one scrolling bar which is scrolling erratically, too, because a part of the icons blocks mousewheel operation.

In 4X games like GalCiv there is a colony screen where you can display and sort them all. This one is meant to be played with many colonies.

I think the devs want to avoid the classic "spreadsheet look" so there may not be such a city list screen.
But in that case, the game should be balanced so that it works with a small number of cities...

what annoys me is that in the early game i have to build my cities in really awkward annoying narrow spots between the coast and forests (which i can only remove at 1 tile every 15 turns with blistering sands) and such like, just so that i can get the resources within their area of influence at the start of the game. the worst of these is the starting settlement which MUST be within two tiles of the starting fertile land, just so that you can get enough food to ever expand. however, once i get to the mid game and i'm running out of space and my influence is big enough i start to wish i had chosen a location with more space.

i can't really see how to fix these problems without increasing starting influence, or forcing the player's hand into only a few eligible (but generally better) spots. honestly, it's enough to make me long for fixed settlements and province based play.

alborrelli: In the end, city spam happens to control resources.. so make controlling of resources possible through something other than cities.

This is a good solution, and if you add that caravans are needed to extract the flow of resources, and if caravans was massive moving fortresses, then yipeeee

"City spam" means that building a lot of cities gives you a significant advantage over players who didn't do the same.

The emphasis of the city spam strategy is more on amount and less on quality or location.

Specific to Elemental:

Most cities depend on resources, so the best you can get with a randomly located city is only the buildings that give a static amount of resources (+1 gildar from merchant, etc.). That is not a lot, but it can be a big boost without any libraries around.

You will probably not upgrade such a city with houses, so it will not waste food or cost any upkeep.

On the down side, cities will need protection, which usually costs more than what the random city can provide.

Furthermore, cities too close to one another, can block the ability to expend. So spamming near a good city doesn't seem like a good idea.

Bottom line, I don't think city spam is such a big problem in Elemental because of city's specialty and the need for space, but it still needs to be tested.

I don't think anyone has a problem with a couple of cities "out in the wild" (not next to resources), I certainly don't. The problem is when you're putting up lvl1 cities EVERYWHERE including inside your own influence, because each one gives +1 tech, arcane, mats, gildar and generates a caravan that gives bonus to food. At that point you have a ton of tiny little outpost that does basically nothing except making the empire tree a complete mess.

Edit: if you are smart about your city location, the building space isn't a problem at all. Basically you spam one city to one side of the large city and build the other way. If you do it with this method, the large city's influence will "protect" the little cities from most random mobs as well as secure their caravan routes.

How about the increase prices for builbings? 100 one city,200 two cities,300 three cities.... I think it was a great idea when it was in the beta

Or including administration costs for cities. I have never seen any administration cost for anything in my games yet..

There's no real downside as such beyond the cost for the pioneers and of course the necessity for city defence. Conversely there's no real upside either. You're looking at building seventeen cities with arcane labs to beat a single developed city with an ancient temple. Of course if you have the time, resources and opportunity knock yourself out.

 Champion spam would probably be a better strategy. You still get the 1 resource generation, but you can also load them up with Lord hammers and legendary plate which makes defending them far easier

It's not bad, it's actually a logical thing to do given the current mechanics, assuming you can spare the resources. 

The reason it needs to be changed is because it's boring and not fun.

Because it looks stupid having every square inch of land covered in city tiles. The AI puts cities so close together that they end up touching each other by the time they hit level 4. Back when we were all discussing city placement, everyone, including the devs, thought that cities should be spread out and that they should be important and valuable. The inspiration for this was all the fantasy and rpg games where you're questing in a kingdom or empire. Those kingdoms and empires would often only have one or two Major cities while the rest were small villages or outposts. Think about the old school Final Fantasy games, like Final Fantasy 3 on the Super Nintendo. How many Major cities were there? How far apart were they from each other? Often you needed the air-ship to travel from city to city because they were so far apart.

The way things are set up in game now, the AI and players both spam out cities. We also end up building every single building in Every city. That's not good either. It really de-values the cities. None of the cities seem different from one another with the exception of a city that might be near a magic shard. It just seems really bland and generic and I know that's not the feeling the devs wanted to achieve.

To really make cities matter we need to be able to Specialize our cities. Just like in Gal Civ 2 when players specialized planets for certain tasks we should be doing the same thing in Elemental with our cities. Some cities should specialize in certain tasks based on what resources are attached to those cities. Cities with metal deposits attached to them should concentrate on mining and making weapons and armor. Cities with food resources attached should specialize in growing food for feeding your growing empire. Cities with magic nodes should specialize in in research. This places a much Greater Value on cities. If you loose a primary city that's bringing in the majority of a needed resource for your kingdom could end up crippling you, and That's how it Should be. As it stands now if you loose a city, unless that city has a rare resource attached to it's ZOC, it's no big deal if you loose one because your other cities do all the same stuff the city you lost did. Does that make sense? Not really, not to me anyway.

Strategy is the most important reason of course, but the second most important reason why city spamming is bad is simply aesthetics. When you play any type of fantasy game or a rpg are there cities everywhere on the world map? No. Why not? Because if there were it would look stupid. Look at how the campaign map for Elemental is laid out. The cities are spread out from one another. The cities have a better feel to them because they aren't spammed all over the place like they end up being in a sand box game.

It's really not a complicated fix here either. All that needs to be done to reduce city spam is to increase the rate of the ZOC spread. This will mean more resources get attached to one city which makes that city far more important and valuable in the game, as it should be. They don't need to re-balance incomes or food production or anything like that. Just increase the rate of spread for ZOC and city spam in Elemental would be a thing of the past and the maps once settled by kingdoms or empires would look a Lot Better IMO.

See how close those cities are to one another? A army can walk from one city to another in two turns, maybe three, less if there are roads connecting them. It doesn't lend its-self well to the feeling of a "Mighty Empire" or "Powerful Kingdom". When I laid out those 3 cities, IF I had wanted to snake them out, by the time they all reach level 5 they would be touching each other. In the end the Entire Map turns out to be one large super city...which looks pretty stupid. Also, that's actually Spread Out....you should see the AI cities on the same map. The AI literally builds cities as close together as possible if there are resources close together that it wants. If the AI builds a city next to a iron deposit, and there's a crystal deposit four tiles away, instead of waiting for the ZOC to spread out to get the crystal resource, it goes and builds another city.....four tiles away from the lest city....It's like it's programmed to spam cities every few steps and it ends up looking really lousy and Not looking like the inspiration behind the game design.

Making the ZOC spread out faster could fix these issues very easily with a very limited amount of effort. I really hope they take this into account for the next patch or at least soon, because it makes the world pale in comparison to what it should look like. A lot of effort was put into getting the specific look Elemental has, and it's a good look. The maps are beautiful and have a painted quality that's very pleasing to the eye, but when you spam out cities everywhere it takes a lot away from the look of the world and the maps.

Speaking as someone who very much enjoyed the one city challenge of Civ 4, I hope city spaming gets balanced by the time my copy arrives. Having several generic cities just doesn't feel right to me. I'm used to forging a nation trough highly productive and advanced, but few cities. Quality over quantity.

The AI spams the cities as crazy as long as it has food to support hem. The AI assuems it is better to have 10 lvl 2 cities then to have 3 lvl 4 and 1 lvl 5. This reminds me of the unssucessfull Firakxis try to limit the city spam by economic means... and they failed miserable with the AI unable to develop adequately under such restrictments. That's why the gave huge bonuses to the AI even at the medium difficulty levels (although Firaxis clamed at those levels the AI and the human player are equal). The result was the city spamming resctriction worked only for the humans but the AI proceeded to spam cities in every possible spot and defended his last measly city with 60+ units altough it wouldn'yt able to support more then 5-6 units.

You wouldn't build a market in a city that didn't have a mine or a palace or something, would you?

I actually dislike the recent 4X trend of only requiring you to build a small handful of cities.  Back in Civilization 1 and 2, it was a lot of fun to take your armies and conquer all of the enemy cities, it felt more epic that way, like you were slowly whittling down the enemy empire one city at a time.

In a game like Civ 4, you only need to take out a few cities and you've won the game.  It's also dumb how the cities make no geographic sense in Civ 4.  For example, the city of Madrid takes up the entire peninsula of Spain.  This feels pretty lame to me.

Ideally I'd like to see Elemental have a few major cities and lots of minor villages or outposts, but I want to see them spread out more.

Yes, and considering it always builds a city (or houses) regardless of having food or not...

Without the city spam, every AI city would get enough houses to get to level 5. Easy enough if you don't need food to build houses.

So in a rather sick way it's a good thing the AI spams cities because proximity is the only limitation to how built up a given AI city can be.

The way I see it:

1. Each new city adds to micromanagement. Many people don't like excessive micromanagement.

2. No-brainers (choices that are much better than anything else) are bad in games, since a computer game at its core is about choice. Choice is the only part unique to games, it's not present in books or movies. More interesting games are often about making interesting choices. This should especially be the case in strategy games.

3. Flavour. The concrete desert we have today is only possible because of high technologies. Elemental is largely loosely based on medieval ages, which lacked them. For me, and probably for other people as well, it's more thrilling to fantasize about a world where you have to struggle to survive. A world which is a wild, unknown, mysterious, dangerous place unlike the one we have. From what you're saying it sounds like the world in Elemental is easy to tame.

I think that is exactly the reason why city spam should be removed from Elemental. As suggested in this thread https://forums.elementalgame.com/396409 only the Sovereign should be able to create fertile land with a spell, that should have a maintenance cost and the other food ressources should be removed.

But they aren't really cities...are they? They are outposts. 12 guys in a tent (a la Brokeback mountain) exploiting the resource, we just have the ability to develop a city around them.

It is true actually, because the market increases income, even from taxes. You don't need to have a gold mine or anything in order for a market to increase a cities income. It increases the income anyway. I've been playing this since Beta and see the mechanics behind it first hand. As it stands now everything gets built in practically every city. The AI does it too.

Well, why not just make a city list screen rather than limit it to 5-6 cities?  See, there are a lot of us who actually like to build little outposts for flavor and to use as forts or choke-points.  I was playing last night on a continent with a narrow neck of land between the two.  I built forts at the choke-point and stationed my troops there.

I guess we could call it Settlement spamming. You are correct, in my current game I have no cities, just bunch of villages, towns, and outposts.

That is a great idea.  It also goes to something that is near and dear to my heart; that of cities being necessary to win.  I've always been a fan of the "going Gandalf" route of victory being just as valid as building an army a la traditional 4X games. 

A spell that locks a resource to you, no matter where it is (but you have to stand on the resource to cast it) would be a way to do this.

It also solves the problem of "I need to research up the magic tree" to go Gandalf, but without cities to generate research, I can't do that.  Cities are a liability in some ways, they can be attacked, or convinced to change sides.  If you're a lone (massively powerful) channeler with no cities, that liability is removed.