So I was playing Galactic Civilizations II and, as always, I found the game was getting tedious as my collection of planets became an empire. While managing a small number used to be fun, zipping around the galaxy trying to keep track of my scores of planets got tedious pretty fast, and AI governors were just never as good as the real thing. How might this stumbling block be averted in Elemental?
So I thought about how empires were historically managed and came up with a possible solution: Megapoles and regional capitals. Basically, when your civilization starts to get too large to manage, you assign your largest cities as megapoles or regional capitals and they manage the smaller nearby cities. Let me ellaborate.
You build a large imperial palace to assign it as a megapole and then "tack on" the nearby smaller cities of your choice. In this arrangement, you lose the ability to explicitly customize smaller cities (this is done automatically by the AI with general instructions from the player along with a variable stipend of gold) but you are still able to customize your megapoles. Your megapoles will gain a net growth benefit but the smaller cities will frow more slowly. You gain stability in the smaller cities, lose some efficiency, but all of the non-food commodities, military manpower, and resources are shipped from your smaller cities to your megapole cities where they can be easily managed (which means large armies in the region can be raised at one single site, rather than 10 separate cities). The smaller subordinate cities would be managed with possibly a slider or two, denoting how much military garrison to post in the city or how close to revolt they might be. Small time unrest in smaller cities can simply be managed by "sliding" more soldiers to the smaller city rather than having to march an entire army to the "unruly children" every time they get upset.
The net effect is that you end up with about the same number of cities to manage in the late game as you did at the beginning of the game, which keeps empire growth from losing the charm of early game city management. Also, there are other implications with Megapoles that would make the game less tedious and more interesting. For instance, it makes warfare between two large empires less monotonous as well. Rather than having to march to every city to defeat an opponent, large battles can focus around capturing megapoles. Also, if your empire begins to fragment from over strain, large scale declarations of independance become a lot "neater," with, say, an entire megapole splitting off from your empire and taking all of its subordinate cities with it (perhaps some of the smaller cities that were more loyal, though, might remain with you). It's important to mention that with this feature, once you grow to a large enough size, it would be essential to assign megapoles to avert instability issues involved with governing so many cities. In games like Civ and Galactic Civs, even though there was a governor, many players that value efficiency (but hate managing a billion cities or planets) are forced to keep them off anyway. With megapoles being a mandatory element of managing an empire, the player doesn't have to sacrifice effiency in order to manage a large empire.
After we open the phones to the audience, I'll ellaborate more on the implications of megapoles 
