Yeah, the housing/food balance is a little off. It works well at first, but then you get to a point at around city level 3-4 where you're building nothing but houses/farms and even destroying old improvements for more houses - sure a city shouldn't be able to do everything, but it should be able to do something other than spam houses if it wants to hit level 5. Forget about building any kind of resource collection (like a mine or shard), you'll have no room at all left for gold or research generation - you end up needing a mining city, a gold city, a research city, a fire shard city, an earth shard city, etc etc, and you're tempted to leave these cities capped at level 2 or 3 because it would take too many houses to get farther. Essentially it forces city spam.
Personally I think housing should be far more lenient, but buildings that speed population growth should be more limited and expensive - this way you can worry not quite so much about raising the population cap, but actually getting your population up there will take quite a while. It makes your older cities and especially your capital (i.e. wherever the palace is) much more valuable, relative to those new cities that will take forever to hit level 5. You should have the option to speed the development of a new city by investing a ton of resources into a city hall or two, but it should be expensive enough that you can't do it for half a dozen cities at once. This would cut down on city spam and put the emphasis on a handful of core cities that have either had plenty of time to grow or a heavy investment into population growth buildings.
[What was the population growth value called? Influence or prestige or something.. can't access Elemental atm and I'm getting my games/beta versions confused.]
