I don't think penalizing the player for wanting to make cities is the right way to go about it. Already, city growth is averaged across the entiraty of the kingdom, limited by its presteige. Having further limitations would remove the desire to build a multi-city archetype.

In my experiance, the more memorable TBS games I ever recall playing involved 5-10 cities. Not too much that the management becomes overbearly, yet enough that you always feel you have something else to do. I can see with FE, and in inclusion of heros, that 10 cities may be too many as you may have too much to do. However, 4-7 should be obtainable.

Now that said, I don't think it should be EASILY obtainable. I really like the concept of 'cataclysm' where most of the landscape is ravaged. A player should be willing and eager to build settlements whereever possible in order to struggle and rebuild your once powerful civilization. Sometimes a good plot of land is guarded by a monster that you have to defeat. Other times, you have to deal with the warping of the land (like with the wildlands). I think there should be other times too where technology and/or magical spells should enable you to build in some locations that normally weren't open to you at the beginning of the game.

In the end, the current game I'm playing (see game 4 of my thread) has just founded it's 8th city and it's BY FAR the most enjoyable game yet (of the 4 I've played) . In fact, the most frustrating part of the game is that the cities aren't leveling fast enough because the growth is spread out. Completely against the feel of the game, imo, cause I'm suceeding to rebuild my lost empire and I'm being punished for it. I would figure that, out of the ashes of a cataclymic world, people would flock to the banner of the hero who is bringing order to chaos. (and that said, I feel that the utopia that was given me at this start was quite a fluke and well beyond the normal expections of the starting locations...)

Anyways, just my view...

Another balance idea:

Have each settler cost twice as much as the previous one.

Or have each settler cost twice as much for each city + settlers you control. (so if you take cities settlers are more expensive)

This ensures people who are behind can catch up easier and people who are ahead can make hard decisions if they want to expand or explore.

Mike.

I agree that the early settler spam phase doesn't fit with the game history of struggling to rebuild civilisation, nor do I find it very fun because rapid settling has to take precedence over all other options early game (if you are going to optimise your play).

There are lots of possible solutions but I fear very, very few good ones. This is one of the main challenges which the Civilization games have battled through their evolution. In Civ 3 they tried corruption which was disasterous, the end result was that building as many small cities as possible was optimal. In Civ 5 they have global happiness (with each new city reducing happiness and negative global happiness hurting your whole empire) and culture costs growing rapidly by number of cities. The scaling culture costs sort of work (though in an unfun way, it mainly just means that cultural victories are only possible with small empires) but the global happiness sucks because of its boolean nature (+1 happiness everything is cool, -1 happiness and your whole empire stops growing, there is no thoughtful trade off happening here).

Civ 4 on the other hand nailed it by having carefully balanced maintenance costs for each extra city. Rapid expansion without first building a strong economy is akin to suicide because the maintenance fees will swallow every penny you have leaving you with no research and rapidly falling behind the other civilizations. Conversely if you expand appropriately, making sure you can afford it, and manage to defend your new cities, over time the extra production and wealth from the new cities will increasingly outweigh the maintenance costs.

This is how it should be IMO. Building new cities should be an investment with a fairly substantial short term cost but a big long term pay off if you can manage to defend them and didn't overdo it by settling too much too early.

Having said that I'm not sure the Civ 4 maintenance model would work verbatim in FE. In Civ 4 producing more gold means reducing your research and reducing your research means falling behind, so having to pay maintenance per city has a big impact. Whereas in FE gold is just one of a number of resources and it doesn't drive research or mana so it isn't as crucial.

If Stardock can come up with an equivalent model which achieves the same goals as the Civ 4 one, is reasonably simple and fits in with the mechanics of FE then my hat is off to them!

I agree 100%, a settlement that is small shouldn't really benefit you and should be a drain on your resources. Right now, there is no disadvantage to founding cities on every spot of land that you can find. 

Simple math shows that more cities = better. Lets say a faction has 6 prestige. If that faction has 8 cities, the whole factionwide population gain per turn is 8. If that faction has 2 cities, the population gain is 6. The only downside is that your cities may not be a higher level, but I'm not convinced the city level up advantages outweigh the massive amounts of production, research and gold you are going to get from having the extra cities (especially when the research leads you to get ways to boost the growth quite easily). 

Right now, if a player sees a 3/3/0 spot to settle, there is no reason not to. "I'll just make it a town and boost my factionwide farm output." It's not a choice, it's a no-brainer.