Exactly, 

the reason I am so concerned about playing epic games on huge maps. Can you imagine making all those towns?

the level of garden/house spam is to the point that i purposely march around until i find a site that will provide optimal food income via a farm/apiary/orchard/oases. on those "punishing" maps that have little or none of said optimal food squares, the garden/house tedium would be frustrating.

What about a mechanic that rewards you for managing your housing and food, but doesn't require it.

I'm not sure why "houses" is a tech you have to rediscover (people in this world can build Inns out in the wastes, housing can't be a huge stretch), so if those first three levels (slums, huts & houses) were functions of city prosperity (education, wealth and prestige) that your citizens built automatically then basic housing could be ignored. You'd then have three options a) ignore housing entirely, allowing your populations to be a scrabbling rabble build prestige and educational buildings to let the people build houses, being happier and more productive but taking away from the tiles you could otherwise build (since you built educational, etc.) c) take even a few more tiles and build high-quality houses. In fact, you could capitalize on high-quality housing by making it a requirement to attract talented adventurers or such (or making for a discount in their price), etc.

A similar mechanic for food would work (if it were per city or you didn't have caravans running), lowering the output capacity of your city, lowering prestige and (if it were bad enough), actually causing starvation die-off.

As for setting related things, e.g. nobles, inns, etc... Well, nobility isn't money it's power and those who had power before the cataclysm and whose family maintained their power would likely still hold on to titles and local spheres of influence. In fact, I would welcome some of them challenging your authority (and I seem to recall "neutral" city-states being a possibility).

And of course inns would exist - in fact, they might well be a nexus for founding small villages and such - as would any number of common structures. Along those lines, rather than random Inns scattered about, if they were villages and/or estates (that would eventually fall under your sway if/as your territory expands and preferably named), I think it'd make far more sense. I wouldn't be surprised if calling them Inns was an intentional beta thing (rather than giving away info from the campaign).

i was thinking about this some more, someone correct my math if ive got this incorrect...

gardens provide 2 food

huts require 4 food

therefore you need 2 gardens for every 1 hut, right?

i propose increasing the food provided by gardens to 4, this way you only need 1 garden for every 1 hut

this would reduce garden/hut spam by 33% - that's huge!

or going the other direction you could make gardens provide 8 food and make huts require 10 food - hot dog & hot dog bun style.

+1 for everything OP said.

Particularly the micro of building the city and stats points.

I hate the stats decimal point system. Everything should be a round, rounded number for the purposes of both mechanics and display. 

Not only the sovereigns but the heroes and regular units would also gain character by this.

I like the AoW2 style design of units, where a lot of abilities (for all type of units) were listed as "feats". From simple things like strike, block, archery, to powerful immunities, teleportation, fire breath and such. Stats (ability scores) can still be there, but fairly dry if they are all that distinguishes different units.

Considering how many enthusiastic beta players have voiced their concern about this, I'm not sure ignoring them is a good idea for the general appeal of the game. No one so far has said that the citybuilding should be abstracted to one tile. I for one like the idea of bonuses by having different structures adjacent to each other, but I would like to have a preset area into which I can build regardless of my current layout.

Here's a really rough example of something that I'd like at least better to the current system:

Another option would be to let you 'Buy' tiles of land to build on each time your city levels up while letting you to place any building anywhere on the tiles you have bought. This would retain the tactical aspect of extending your city to block paths while getting rid of one of the more annoying micromanagement part of extending your city building by building.

This won't help with the gardens + houses spam though, but will help the city micromanagement.

@ leveling:

The decimal system seems a bit hardcore for a strategy game, but I don't mind really. The only annoying thing is that you have to click 10 times instead of 1.

@ city building:

Agree with the OP. There should be some sort of auto management available. And I don't see why the city itself has to be the thing that blocks the AI. You should have the opportunity to build walls and towers within close range of the town as defense.

In general, I want more war gaming and less city building.

Some ideas:

- when creating a new city, randomly chose from a predefined set a city background/history that come with a description and a small bonus for the city, this was done in Heroes of Might and Magic V.

For exemple, you might create a new city and find that it gets a small +10% gold bonus (or maybe the bonus could be fixed or change with city size, such as +1 gold per city size per turn.

Creating a new city with a bonus to units construction or science could give you a reason to specialize each city and give each one more flavour.

- I agree with the fact that house buildings is not fun currently, and I dislike the fact that one at the metropolis size, population doesn't seems to matter anymore, encouraging to scrap any excess house. Maybe some buildings could get a bonus depending on population (tax/science, or even a general +XX% in all productions for very high population). Another solution could be to have new slots automatically opened for construction each XXX population after reaching metropolis size. Combined maybe with some automatic house construction, it could give cities a more organic evolution.

- I agree about souvereign: gaining 10 points each level and having each one only inscrease a decimal have no sense: such low inscrease are too small to matters, I would prefer having only a few points to use but that each one has a true value.

Maybe you could have not all level come with a choice from the player:

- have the souvereign creation be all about "perks" instead of numerci values, and have those perks effect increased with the level.

If I chose "very strong" as a perk, the souvereign could start with +50% attack (same as 15 strength in the current system), and each level gain +10% (or maybe each other level, as he could have other perks increasing too)

Some perks could only be chosen at creation (and having champions with them could make them more unique), while some other could be gained at some levels (maybe one bonus perl each 3 levels, or you gain one "perk point" each level but most cost several points so you have to wait).

Note about champions: have some perks reserved for them.

I think there should be a population cap in the world that would effectively limit city sizes and discourage city spamming.

A population cap would also make it more of a competition to raise prestige and get the people to come to your city instead of an enemy city.

I would also like to see people migrate away from your city if there is another city with higher prestige.

Imagine the joy of casting a Plague spell on an enemy city to lower their prestige and get the people to migrate to yours.

Started on Beta 2.  Did my first game and got killed right away (didn't read any instructions, just wanted to run it and see).  After two 'learning' games, I can see the points made originally.  For the decimal, they just need to multiply everything by ten and suddenlly people would be ok, we just don't like decimal.  I do like RPG within a strategy game.  So keep the abilities update (just make sure it has an impact) and add feats every X level as a target to achieve if possible.

Great idea, but don't cap it as much as make it dynamic.  Maybe slowly grows at first then a bit faster as world gets civilized, but drops when war are waged.

We each have our own definition of fun for those type of games.  Some people like to micro manage and get the maximum out of their resource, other prefer the discovery aspect, other the war, etc.  So I agree, don't dumb it down, but also provide a 'manager' that has a general goal: food, population, research, soldier, etc. (more work for the AI guy).  Advantage of micro managing or revising once in a while would be to destroy and put better house type maybe?  If AI takes care of it, he might bring your city level down by destroying huts for house and when would it update slums?

Sushikawa - I too like being able to build my cities, and I don't expect (or want) that to change. I think the quest here is just to reduce the amount of times you have to go back and build a garden or hut.