I along with a lot of other people like the ability to build up cities on the map. However this seems to be raising some issues in believability, balance, and mechanics. The Spaghetti layout as it's called means units can exit and enter cities covering large spans with little to no movement. A single level 5 city could block off a 11 tile wide pass. Siege defenders can defend whole cities stretched over an 11 tile wide area.
Given these issues I was trying to think of how to keep the currently ability to build cities while reducing the "spaghetti" problem. And it seems to simplest answer is to make cities take up less space when building. But instead of reducing the number of buildings a player can make you instead reduce the amount of space current buildings take up.
If the game switches to having each tile use a 3x3 grid instead of a 2x2 grid that would mean the 8 tiles around the initial city center would supply 8x3x3 = 72 Spaces. A level 5 city only currently uses 60 spaces meaning a level 5 city could fit in 3x3 map tiles with room to spare.
This does potentially raise issues with resources as they are based on 1 tile currently. But the amount of resources they give based on the number of spaces they use is a balance issue. Though it could easily go a few different ways depending on how the devs decide to handle it. They could keep it so the resource buildings are only 2x2 buildings thus the rest of the square is left to be developed however you want. Or they could have the building now take up a 3x3 space and give even more resources. The second option would end up make choosing what resources to add to a city vs pioneer outpost even more important because they use up a lot more spaces.
As for city expansion because the player has tons of room around the city center to build up with 3x3 setup there is no need for them to be able to expand out all spaghetti like. Thus reduce the number of squares away from the city center they can build by about half. So level 1-2 city can only build 1 square away, while level 3-4 can only build 2 squares away and so on. This would make city placement more important along with using pioneer outpost to grab resources. As currently the 11x11 coverage of a level 5 city is a bit excessive.
I know we don't yet have the 3D engine but for the most part any change on existing stuffs models should just be a scaling issue. The buildings that could be the biggest issue though would be the city center and resource buildings. I have no idea how much of the art assets are finished but when it comes to resource buildings they could simply scale current 2x2 models and center them on a 3x3 grid rather then needing to completely redo them if the devs go the route of them taking up 3x3.
Anyway I'd like to hear your guy's thoughts on this.
