Let me see whether I am understanding you. If you cannot win the game by holding 1/3 of the land the others sides have, and having no more than 1/2 the production facilities, and wasting your mana on resource gathering, and starting wars of aggression without having the AIs gank up on you.... it's not a 4x game? 

Well, I guess I would not know how to start answering this... except that I will say that at the difficulties you seem to play, I could probably win just by rolling up the AI with heroes.

Please don't make any changes to this, it's fine.  I already feel too much has been done to curb city spam, we are limited by distance and arable land already.  It's enough.

I dislike the way Civilization penalises you for expanding. That's one of the Xs in the 4X and having game mechanics working against it seems unnatural, at least aside from natural stuff like the actual production costs/monster danger.

Sure, I wouldn't mind having some faction traits that made it more worthwhile to have fewer cities (there was a faction in Ffh I believe that could only build 3 or 4 cities but got a lot of bonuses and they grew larger etc..). 

But that can be accomplished by adding factions/faction traits etc, which I'm sure will happen anyway. No need for more game mechanics that punish expansion.

Holding land with 3 cities isn't a problem.. That is what you have outposts for (and the resources )

But relying on a few mega cities should be a viable strategy... 

I understand you like to play the game your way.. But there should be other ways too.. Right now it's this way or the highway..

I'm still not sure, what you consider spam. How many cities are okay and when are they considered too many?

I'm currently playing standard Yithril on challenging/challenging difficulty. It is turn 98 and I have six cities. The sixth one has been settled last turn, and number 5 about ten turns ago. I have ten outposts and am currently considered the second most powerful player (which is going to change as soon as I start my troop production). The most dangerous monster I had to kill were a Bone Ogre (guarding the location of my fortress), an Obsidian Golem (guarding the location of my 5th city) who almost killed my champion, and a River Slag.

Is this already spam?

And heres your issue. No no one said it was wrong. We simply said there should be other VIABLE strategies. Its not wrong.. whats wrong is that we HAVE to  do the same to compete. The fact that if you don't spam your own pioneers means you WILL be weaker and you WILL lose against the AI who is doing it.

3 cities isn't a problem to hold land... but you aren't going to be able to do anything BUT hold your land because the AI is going to dogpile you.

Normal, large map, epic speed 6-8 AI. Quests off, sparse monsters.

I've told you my settings like 10 times now it seems.

But i'm sure you have some min/maxed sov that will just run through them all at the start to prove me wrong eh? SOOO the other option is to just rush them with a min maxed sov.

You just said that NOT SPAMMING takes almost all viable strategies off the table yet you continue to argue that it doesn't.

You know what.. sure.. you're grand master of FE and if people don't play your way we suck. The game is just perfect made to force you into spamming cities for all but 1 strategy which requires a min maxed Sov. I'm glad they made a game just for you and to hell with the rest of us right?

If you have to MIN/MAX to win on normal the game is just great and functional.. its us that are the problem, we just aren't properly min/maxing for normal.

 We should have known that in order to win on NORMAL we would have to min max our nations/sovs or spam pioneers.

I'm going to disagree to the point that city spam is the only viable strategy,  At least on settings below challenging anyway.  (I suspect on the higher setting it is likely the only consistantly viable strategy to win.)

I've seen the AI in my games (usually on challenging or normal) do very well with only 3~4 cities, you can keep your power rating high enough to fend off the AI from declaring war and focus on either a research or quest based victory. Really the number of units you need to fend off the AI hordes isnt' that high. There really is 3 paths I've used to victory.

1.  level up your Champ/Sov, get cool equipment, and challenge the Epic quests.  

2. Research up and build a stack of doom

3. expand resources with leveling etc and overpower the AI through conquest.

based on Tuidjy's walkthroughs, (those are very cool BTW thanks) he prefers playing option 3. 

Personally I like all three and will change which tactic I use based on my starting position what the map looks like.

Now the land grab as the begining is really somewhat essential for all three to be viable. but I'm with Tuidjy in that I don't consider the first 4~5 cities to be "spam"   thats pretty normal from any strategy game (RTS or TBS) I've ever played.  The inital resource buildup at the expese of miltiary units or research is pretty standard across the genre.   Once you have that though the other two options are very viable (again at least on Challenging or below)

for the first you need to do the land grab at the begining to put quests and monsters in your range to be able to level up quickly and find the cool swords and armor that allow you to take on the dragons or epic quests.

Reserach also requires at least 4~5 cities and a little luck but you can focus on a few units to keep the AI's at bay and do some other stuff while you are waiting for "Dance with Dragons" tech or the "game ending spell" (cant remember the name of it) generally you can defend well enough and still get there ahead of the AI since they never seem to try for anything but a conquest win.

First of all, there are dozens of threads on this very forum which make it VERY clear that I do not think everything is peachy.

Second, I have six play-throughs of different versions, which include 1. A single city win 2. Two pacifist challenges 3. Two standard races 4. A race suggested by someone else 5. A race designed for 'in character reasons'

Third, I do not even always min/max on ridiculous, and I disagree that the 4th city one builds takes him from "Master Strategist" to "Cheesy City Spammer".

I have probably tried every setting but "epic", because to me, it just means "slow".  It's bad enough that the game has been slowed down with every version, I have to play with dead time between turns?  Because on top of everything else, you want sparse monsters and no quests. I'm sorry, but clicking the [End Turn] button does very little for my enjoyment.

I keep telling you, I am not playing a SINGLE strategy.  On ridiculous, I play EVERY strategy (expansion, production, combat, research) because otherwise you lose.  It's ridiculous to expect that you can win at high difficulty by playing a crippled strategy like yours (weak defenses, research goals with few cities)

Note that I believe cities, as they are now, do not bring enough bonuses as they grow. I have posted numerous suggestions as to how to improve things to make big cities more appealing.  But what you're pushing for is how to make numerous cities less appealing, and that is very wrong in my book.

Well it's not spamming if you build 200 cities.. As long as there was a reasonable amount of time before each city.. 

For me atleast that is the difference between spam and not spam.. If you are at turn 50 with 5 cities that 1 city per 10 turn.. Spam.

If your at 5 cities turn 100 - 150 then that is better.. Think about it it funner (for me at least  to scout ahead looking for a good location and then planting my city.. right now if you want the best chance to win you scout ahead once you find any cluster of rejuvenated land you immediately create a pioneer and boom new city.. or else you lose.

That is one thing I will add, it does seem to be stupid that you have to build cities. instead of outposts they should be settlements, settlements would not need to be built on resource tiles, they will use the closest city as their supply, they can have one attachment built on to them which would provide a place of secondary training. example, you build a settlement with a barracks, you can now train militia independently of the main city, but to balance it a bit, one you unlock higher tier military units, the settlement will not be able to produce them until you upgrade the barracks