Most enjoyable game ever!

I believe you. Might test it myself.

Interesting, may try that myself tomorrow after release.

That's certainly one way to go.

How did you compensate the lack of outposts??

I had the spell that placed them but I did not really use it until I had cleared out monsters. The AI produced pioneers when it had the money and we are eventually all about even now in outposts. They are just not all over the place...

That sounds intriguing. I've never been one to care much for city building spam in games.

Hmm... did you also increase the cost of your spell to 150? (triple)

Because if you did not, you just had a very asymmetrical game.  It's a single player game, so you can do anything you enjoy, but it is not a balancing solution if the game is only fun if you have a way to make outposts that is denied to the AI.  300 is a lot of production.

No need. 50 mana a few times is a lot if you dont have outposts everywhere...

Isn't ICS a staple in TBS?  In civ, you gotta keep building cities, galciv, you gotta keep coloizing worlds, heck even in MOM, the godfather of mythical TBS you had some ICS going on.

expand or die.  Whats so bad with pioneer spam?  I feel that people complaining about that might complain that you have to research technology.  I don't see whats wrong with a TBS that forces you to expand while also forcing you to reserach technology, etc.  I mean, in Chess you are forced to move one piece at a time, but this doesn't kill the strategy in my mind.

Or another way to look at it, withut law and order, where is thine strategy?  To have infinite choice is to invite chaos.  That entity that the space marines had a huge thousands of years long civil war over.

I know people hate seeing positive comments about Civ5, but I liked the fact that you could have a viable victory strategy in that game that only required building 1-3 cities. 

There is nothing wrong with having building cities be an important part of a TBS game. However, I personally feel that too often games make the importance of doing that outweigh the importance of other features in the game (i.e. research - per your example). I never like that the person who expands the fastest often has tremendous inherent advantages over other players, despite the fact that the other players may be much better at different aspects of the game. I don't think it's a positive sign when the first thing most people think of when starting a new game is "I have to rush out colonizing units and build more cities/worlds/etc.". A game should provide various ways of going about building an empire rather than being forced to push out and build more cities. That's just my personal opinion though.

I liked that too

Sincerely
~ Kongdej