It seems like there is an unnecessary amount of complexity that doesn't contribute to game play. One pet peeve of mine is the Hut / House etc... that you build in cities. Why am *I* the one building these? Instead, IMO, population expansion should occur automatically, but at a decreasing rate when certain thresholds are acheived, due to disease etc... A class of buildings could improve the growth of a city, and growth would then continue. These could be things like Sewer, Public Bath, Hospital etc... You could adjust the size / food usage of cities by choosing which buildings to build in which cities.

Having to monitor cities to figure out which one of have hit their population cap due to lack of "Huts" is lame and not fun.

Incidentally, if maintaining population costs food, the troops cost population, howcome the size of your standing army doesn't impact your food resources? This seems logically consistent (whether necessary for gameplay reasons or not). Should I not be able to resettle obsolete troops as citizens, Roman style?

I'm also not a huge fan of having to place new buildings. Since location has no real game effect, it seems like this should just happen randomly. All my cities have a long line of buildings stretching our to the South East. It looks funny. Maybe randomly place buildings that are not explicitly selected.