Food is a Global resource, It doesn't have to be present at a city to feed the people of the city. As long as you have it, you have it.

I have found this extremely infuriating. It is taking me ages to take out my opponent because he has spammed the map with settlements with no food anywhere! Just by conquering them my food goes massively negative, and I can’t level up my capital. I just found out readin gthe forum today that you can destroy settlements, so I might have to do that. It is frustrating that the AI employs a settlement spam strategy that players can’t – not because it makes the AI too powerful, still a walkover, but it makes destroying them very tedious, having to secure and defend each one.

The bad thing here is that I see nothing in the game that stops infinite city spamming

1. Relying on the finite size of map is not the best way to control city spam. That's pretty close to uncontrolled.

2. My sovreign can instantly teleport to any city so defending them isn't that difficult. Besides I often leave settlements undefended for large amounts of time without being attacked by nearby creatures.

3. Food is not an issue. Most cities do not need any food because they only benefit from level 1 buildings.

One thing I noticed about captured cities, is that sometimes the AI builds a LOT of houses, again, probably not requiring food as a bug, and then when you take over, you go way into the negative on food. Some times the AI cities had 3-4 times more houses than needed, I don't know if the build routine tries to use all open building lots by default, or what.

I work around this by going in a demolishing most of the extra houses, with the demolish feature, and will occasionally raze the whole city. One thing I have noticed is that there does not seem to be any income advantage from having extra population, so why bothing trying to have more than 1250 per city?

I don't know if there are supposed to be "city taxes" based on population, but if there are, they are not working.

Yup I've seen the same thing, and its extremely frustrating.  

I assumed the AI was cheating immediately, but then read online where it isn't supposed to cheat (unless you choose Ridiculous as the difficulty setting, then the AI can see through the fog of war).  So then I went back and check it out, and I can't see how he can be expanding all those cities without cheating.  I took overall of his cities except for 1 (which didn't have any food production at all) and I went negative on food production.

Also, I watched the AI go negative on gold (you can see it on the diplomacy screen) yet keep pumping out groups and teams of units.  That's a neat trick!

Wait til you do diplo with them and notice they often have negative gold - and they're still developing their empire.  It's pretty amazing how it works out.

Deficit spending, just like real life

I always value stardock responses, but..
First off, only the cities on your "frontline" are vulnerable, and frankly creatures and bandits shouldnt attack cities, its just dumb. So spreading yourself too thin isnt an issue, just build two cities near the choke close to the other nearby faction and you're set.

And spiders and bandits raiding caravans is also dumb, for the simple reason that its micromanagement hell and simply not fun. Why do spiders attack caravans between fully developed cities anyway? Dont they have escorts? (think behind the scenes).

I know this may be harsh but imo EVERY newly founded city should start out with -1 food. No joke.
That way you have to pay something to get something (the 1 gildar, material, arcane, tech, and influence).
As it is now, you dont pay anything, you get free 1 gildar, material, arcane, tech, out of thin air.
If you have to edit the farms to give +2 extra food or whatever, fine. That would support 2 more cities before this change would make a difference, which would strike a nice balance. And for each +50% food building or caravan bonus, you'd afford about one more new city with perhaps 1-2 house, ofc escalating as the bonuses grow higher.

Point is, having no cost for lvl 1 cities is dumb. Its like if you could build settlers in Civ4 without using up construction time in your capital, and without halting the growth in your capital for the duration of the training, and without any of the costs. The entire game would be completely different, nothing but a settler spam..

Much like Galciv2 was in the beginning...... remember? Well, you made the same mistake again in this game. No offence, still love it though

I think he's just saying that to make a level 1 city (obviously after your capital) should cost 1 food, like I have 3 food, make a pioneer and go found a new city and now I have 2. Makes perfect sense to me, and imho it should already be in the game.

I have to agree this sounds a tad ridiculous.. I don't mind cheats for the AI but complete disregard for the basics is not  the way to go..

THAT makes sense.

A city starting with negative food does not, imo.

Another idea - require 1 food (and 10 population) to train a pioneer. That way the whole food thing at the beginning wouldn't matter, because the cost is tied to pioneers and then wouldn't need any possible workaround for the capital city (since the game might consider it all as "founding a new city")

And when taking a city, if it would put you in "negative food" then you have to destroy food-consuming buildings (or use a spell to increase food production of that city to put global food at 0 or better) before you can end your turn. That would seem to stop the -20 food stuff? Granted, it would suck to ruin the population of a nicely developed city - but I guess that's the only choice?

I think the AI sees through the fog of war one every setting. I mean, I've looked and seen how far they can see and they just beeline for mobs or goodies from way outside that zone into territory they cannot possibly have been to yet. Whether the AI expands seems to be totally random. I enabled the cheats so I could see the whole map and watch a game progress, moving my sov to an island so the game couldn't end. It's entertaining in a bad way (because the AI should be challenging, not randomly good or bad). Sometimes their pioneers get killed by mobs, sometimes they just plop cities down for little to no reason. Some sovs run around with 10 units stacked on them, when there are only level 1-2 creatures on the map and leave their cities and spouses completely unprotected.

Some sovs explore like crazy, others sit at their home city and don't move, eventually getting killed by trolls or something. I guess it's fun that the games are random, but this is a little too random.