Ok thanks for the heads up, never realized that.

Essence is like Mana except you can't gain it back... You gain some by leveling, but cannot regain spent essence.  

YOu gain a certain number per level up. So your total mana will be something like X*level .. X being whatever value they use.

I thought you could build additional cities for free if the ground was already infused with Life Essence.  But then, it's not exactly clear how Life areas expand.

In addition, though, you have the Governance Penalty.  After a certain point, the more cities under your control, the less efficient each one is.  This is generally worked around by turning some into computer-controlled vassal states, after which you have a whole new breed of politics to worry about.

I have one of the balky systems that won't play nicely with the builds so far, so I can't strictly claim what I've seen as 'normal,' but it looks like you can also found cities on viable terrain that is either just there on the map (presumably having survived cataclsym) or there because of a dragon fountain.

Re the OP, wall-to-wall cities in a TBS game bore me also (although I loved them back when Civ ran on DOS). I'm seriously hoping that the default conditions in Elemental will prevent that situation or at least make achieving it a challenging goal in its own right. My kludgy installations of the builds so far have all made it seem a bit easy to spam cities, but this is the shakeout part of the long public beta, not even close to a 'playable' version of the game.

I think it would be better if there were some more realistic prevention of the Infinite City Spam. Why did medieval empires not have ICS in real life? Well some places are suited to making large cities and some are not. Areas with rivers for example tended to breed cities. Also there needed to be plenty of room around the cities for farmland. I think this is something that civ games don't do really well because all production comes from cities only. In reality most of the production of raw materials comes from rural areas. Mines and farms are generally not immediately adjacent to cities.

I think it would be cool if elemental could model how people actually live. Cities would be hubs of trade and production centers. But if they covered the land they would strangle themselves. Sufficient habitable land needs to be left for farming. Villages would pop up around the city but they would be small and not have production capacity. They would just house the people who harvested materials from the lands. And if habitable land is at a premium then you need to manage that as a resource. Not indiscrimately building cities.

Another limiting factor would be people. People don't just come out of nowhere. Yes. When you found a city they come out of the wilderness and join but would the second city in an area get that big population boost? What about the fifth?

It's more than that : the max mana you can have in each mana type is capped by the essence value.

If you have 5 essence points remaining, then you have only 5 mana max in earth, water, wind and fire.

Just a heads up, in some areas of the 'net ICS stands for something completely different and this topic cought me by surprise.

Back to the topic: I don't have any problem with spamming cities, as long as the needed infrastructure to support them is coherent. For example, civ4 pisses me off in this regard since new cities cost a lot of money and you don't really know how much, so you can accidently commit suicide by building a couple of new cities at the start.

Hopefuly, Elemental won't have this problem because you pay for your cities in advance, instead of in interest.

I think Stardock did mention at some point that since your population is drawn primarily from people coming out of the wilds into your cities, spamming lots of cities next to each other would limit their expansion potential. You might end up with a bunch of smallish cities, but your achievable population might not be much more than a player covering equally as much land with fewer cities. It doesn't appear that such a mechanic is in-game yet, but I would love to see them follow through on that.

Another way to limit city sprawl, I think, would be to allow us access to resources without having to build a city on top of it. Having a city on it could maybe be more efficient, but I would hate to be forced to start a city in a crappy location just to access that mithril deposit, or whatever. Civ IV got this part right, although city sprawl still happened because that was simply the best strategy in terms of building up economic, industrial and military power.

The problem right now is that the only way to harvest resources is by building cities near them. So you can wind up with a ton of cities just due to that.

I'm hoping that as the beta goes on we get some kind of "outpost" option that lets you build say a logging camp to harvest a resource, but isn't a full blown city. With that in place, the need for a zillion cities goes down and the cost of building lots of them should slow ICS down some.

I think to build an actual "city" you should first improve the tile with direct essense or something, and this essense helps for the immediate amount of production potential for the area, improving nearby tiles in the thin cross, for instance ... and therefore whenever you make a true "City" ... then it will have to use essense. However you can create as many villages and towns as you want, as long as you have enough physical resources and people, and as long as its established upon land which has already had regrowth visited upon it. (the life that spreads slowly outwards).

A "city" will be able to expand, grow (through immigration) and become rather powerful rather quickly, and will be the only sources of fame and prestige. You will only gain population from immigration (which seems to be the main source of pop-growth). Eventually your cities will become large metropolises, while villages are mere outposts and farming centers ... spread out among the lands to collect resources. Villages and towns can slowly grow, but only due to natural childbirth, and until you expand the village with housing and food storage, extra births will usually migrate to the city. Therefore, cities will naturally grow while you have to directly assign resources for a village to grow, and usually, other than collection of raw resources, cities will be more versatile.

If a village is in a proper location, geographically and resource speaking, you can spend essense to upgrade it into a city. I shouldn't think villages will have enough citizenry to recruit soldiers directly, although you can certainly garrison troops there if you build a fortress nearby, and you can certainly gather raw resources, occasionally housing a skilled blacksmith or alchemist for fine master-worked items, can use them for agricultural breadbaskets, and use them for limited speed equipment production (if you have built the proper facilities and have enough able men available).

Wall of Text, I know, although it would be nice to make those cities you spent essence on to be special, and for villages (which should be as numerous as your economic capabilities, and spread throughout your empire) to never quite attain the prestige or "factory potential" (production, commerce, or reasearch) of true cities.