Expanding should have more costs.

I preferred the system where each successive city cost more than the previous, forcing me to plan carfully.  Now its just a mad dash for land grabbing.  And the unfortunate side effect is that the game tends to run progressively slower with each new city.  I wonder why there was a change ?

Just add -1 food upkeep for even newly founded outposts, that way you have to give something to get something (those +1 gildar, material, arcane, tech and whatever resource you just founded it next to).

There's no reason to have lvl1 cities be essentially free.

How much gildar? Why dont they display it anywhere? Why dont they display a drop-down box when hovering over your resources / gildar in the top row, so you can discover these things?

if you go into your faction management screen under costs, i think it is there.  you may be able to click on it, can't remember.  it tells you the total though i believe.

edit:  well i checked it, and looks like that admin costs aren't working properly.  i had a few cities and no admin cost, however one of the factions did, not sure what triggered it though.

they did under kingdom reports there is now a admin cost per turn currently mine is 12 gildar and I have 4 cities..

Yep! I love this game, but what ruins it most for me is the city spamming. I think a fantasy game (even when it's a grand strategy game as well) should not have cities everywhere and tight together as in Civ (or MoM). I want them fewer, and much further apart from eachother. This makes for more wilderness and space for other creatures, adding to the atmosphere you need to really believe you are in a fantasy world. I can easily do with 2-3 cities before having to conquer to get more of them. Meanwhile there is a huge wilderness for me to quest and fight monsters in.

Some ideas to make this happen:

1) A heavier cost to build new cities. I'd suggest 400 G for the first one, then perhaps 800 etc. (Yes, the initial system in the beta was better in this regard)

2) More clustered groups of resources with long distances apart from eachother. Obvious good city spots, but with a long distance from eachother.

3) Make the number of tiles distance limit from other cities huger, so a new city has to be at least twice as far away from current cites.

4) We could also restrict city building to very few areas on the map, making own rare tiles where it is possible to found a city. It would be exciting to search for this sites, and trying to get a pioneer there alive before your opponents. This would also help the AI to build it's cities wisely.

NB! A rise in administrative costs per city does not solve the problem with cities being buildt too close to one another.

Funny thing is I was playing recently and noticed it didn't cost anything to build a city.. even though I was mentally playing the older style.. (not that I was totally fond of that one either.. especially for my 14x14 sized world..)

I'm sure a happy medium will come about.. or after all of this they will listen to my organic satellite communities (ideas I've written profusely about) sprouting up to simulate society recovering ... 

I think the world of Elemental should be a wild one, where civilization is scarce. Currently there are way too many cities in each world. While I don't believe there should only be very limited certain "spots" where you can build a city. I'd say there should be two kind of regions, wild ones and settle able ones. So that some of the very dark and twisted places of the world will always stay wild, and the more fertile areas will carry clusters of cities. You could only build 1 tile outposts to harvest the few but rare resources located in the wild lands, which will be under constant threath of bandits, darklings, and other scum.

I recall seeing a post by Brad where he said that the (increasing) costs for cities didn't turn out to be fun, so this was scrapped. I didn't play the beta, so I have no first hand experience with it. Personally, I'd like to see at least a fixed cost for additional cities so that spamming them has a distinct downside.