I had an idea during the original Elemental beta regarding city building, which I still think is really cool because it discourages snaking and makes the city building much deeper:
Imagine if instead of having certain higher-level buildings come through research, they'd be created through good building placement!
Let's say we have four war-related quarter-tile buildings (let's just call them barracks, stable, training grounds and war council). On their own, they give their usual individual bonuses, but when placed adjacent to each other in one whole tile, they'd morph together to form a whole-tile "war district" which gives all the ordinary individual bonuses plus extra efficiency bonuses, and possibly access to a new trait for use when designing soldiers (or whatever unique thing you might dream up). Same thing with market districts, industrial districts, magic districts and so on. Imagine Stormwind in WoW if you've ever been there.
Imagine how much richer and more realistic the city building would be. An alchemist would have his shop next to the enchanter, the school would be next to the library and so on. At the same time, it reduces the number of buildings by instead of having one "barracks" and one "war district" (or "war college" as they may be called a.t.m.), the barracks would become a part of the war district, which in turn reduces the amount of buildings available for snaking without removing content.
I might be biased since I came up with the idea, but I can't really find any negatives in it. The argument that it limits variation by forcing the player to place certain buildings a certain way is not really a good counter argument to me, since for example placing stables and barracks on each side of a city is completely unrealistic (at the moment, I just sort of plunk out buildings wherever they fit, with no regard to realism), and any real city would strive towards creating districts like these; and the bonuses they'd give in-game would very realistically portray the bonuses that a real district would give, due to giving more efficient co-operation between buildings which depend on each other. Furthermore, the player wouldn't be forced to build like this, he could still snake and ignore the bonuses; and that would only increase variation in city types rather than decrease it, in my opinion. Have an efficient city, or have a strategic city. Your choice.
