With the current implementation that makes no difference.

There is no way to navigate to the city other than remembering which one it is on the map.
Outpost or city... they all take one spot on the scroll bar so it's not at all helpful in manageing your cities.

If there was a way to keep the micromanagement in check, noone would complain.
If we could sort the 3 metal producing cities to the top of that list, who cares if there are 50 empty outposts below?

Garrison/defend them? What for? Their point is either to tap resources (so no choice there) or to cover the land in influence so you don't have to defend them all the time.
If one is destroyed, build another. *shrug*

Real cities and mere outposts should be separate entities entirely, IMO.

Raven X's main reply is fantastic!  I hope the DEVS read it!  The idea of a much larger ZOC would solve almost all the problems in my opinion especially if outposts only drain resources until level 2 cities.  But overall: what he (RavenX) said!

Thanks. I appreciate that. Part of my thought processes behind that reply were in line with a post Boogiebac made about cities a long time ago and what his inspirations were for setting them up the way he did. I think he did an awesome job conceptualizing them. The ZOC issue is the only thing lacking really to make sure we get the "feeling" he wanted to get across in the first place.

It's Worth the time because there is No Building Upkeep Costs. When the AI and players spam out cities, and each of those cities brings in tax revenue, and you build a Market to get another 25% income, it only takes 4 Markets to get another Gildar for your Kingdom/Empire. When you have 20 cities, which is quite common with them being spammed everywhere, that's an extra 5 Gildar in income. I would say that each city only bringing in 1 Gildar from taxes is pretty low and needs to be adjusted based on the city level. 1 Gildar should only come from a level 1 city, not a level 5 city, which should bring in a Lot More tax revenue because there's a Much Larger population to be taxed. Honestly, I haven't paid enough attention to notice what the Tax Income is, but 1 seems a bit low. Either way, my original point stands. With no Building Upkeep Costs all you have to do is build four Market places and you get another Gildar. With the average city count on a large map being between 20 and 30 cities, that adds up to a good bit of income.

All Buildings need to have Upkeep costs (which currently they don't). Why this wasn't thought of from the start I have no idea.

I agree your logic behind it is correct though. It wouldn't seem logical to build a market in a city that doesn't have a gold mine, but, the AI does and so do the players because the income adds up and every little bit helps when there's no cost for keeping the building maintained. More detail and more defined thought processes NEED to go into the mechanics. If the buildings had a upkeep costs neither the AI nor the players would build everything in every city to get the benefits because the loss would be greater than the benefits for building a Market in a city without a gold mine or other source of more income aside from the 1 tax income.

That 1 tax income seriously needs adjusting per population level if it really does only give 1 gildar. Again, more detailed thought processes are needed here.

I'd also like to see the influence zones of cities increased substantially. Spamming level 1 cities in wilderness areas for the sole reason of linking up the influence zones between my main resource node extraction cities is not fun.

I'm not spamming these cities for the economic benefits, but purely to spread my influence, and I don't buy the argument that multiplying 1resource/turn buildings in these spam cities is worth it. All these multiplier buildings are quite expensive if you bothered to do it across 20 crappy city sites and it takes a really long time for these cities to recoup your initial construction costs. My gold city with a couple gold mines, a palace and all the gold multiplier buildings easily produces most of the gold my entire empire needs. Instead of spending these resources building ineffectual buildings in sucky cities that I built solely to link up and spread my influence, I'd much rather spend these resources on troops to go capture AI cities with gold mines or whatever other resources I need and then multiply them in cities where it makes a big impact instead.

In addition, in other games the micro-management for a lot of cities is handled with a city overview screen where you can order new buildings and units directly. This feature would be great to have in Elemental, but unfortunately this won't work well in the case of building construction because you have to physically click the tiles you want the new buildings to be constructed on. Because sites for new buildings needs to be individually selected each time, managing a lot of cities in Elemental becomes very tedious.

Oh, and don't even get me started on playing the city-level-up memory bonus game for all these cities. Hmm, is this one of my thirty cities with a gold mine, library or temple that hasn't been harvested yet, or is it one of my spam cities instead and I should take the extra military unit? Well, this giant unmovable, annoying interface screen is in my way so I can't actually see the city that just leveled up, so I'll have to take my best guess I suppose. City leveling up bonuses is a great concept, but the execution here is just terrible because of the bad UI. Also I don't understand why there are only 4 bonus options: gold, the 2 types of research, or a unit. I guess my city with the 2 iron mines or 2 old growth forests gets stuck with the crappy extra unit instead of a nice multiplier.

There are some great suggestions here and I hope the devs are still reading this thread.   I think that there are two ways to fix this issue that would require very little work.

1.  Increase minimum spacing between cities – Currently, a pioneer must be 5 tiles away from a city to build a new city.  This could be increased to 10 or even greater.   This would tremendously help with city spacing/spamming.

2.  Outposts – I like this idea.  The negative of increasing city spacing to 10 (or greater) is that resources will go untapped until the zone of influence reaches it.  However, if we could utilize pioneers to create an outpost with a 1-tile radius to capture resources that are in the “wasteland” areas, the problem is solved.   This shouldn’t be difficult to implement since it is essentially the constructor/starbase system from GC2. 

An issue might come up when an outpost comes under the zone of influence of another faction.  Well, add a “rebelling” icon to the outpost (like in GC2 with mining bases) to warn the player that they’re about to lose the outpost.  The player can then decide if he wants to risk going to war to save that particular resource.

Can't emphasize enough.

We really really really need to be able to click on the damn city so we can decide which bonus to apply.  I've taken to memorizing the names of the important ones and keeping track of when they'll level just so I'm prepared and apply the correct bonus.

Couldn't agree more!  Please let us look at the city before figuring out what bonus to give it.

Also there aren't actually any capital cities currently. You as the player may perceive one to be your capital, but in terms of actual gameplay mechanics there is nothing making it distinctively different from any other cities.

Hah!  Cool idea.  Although, you could get a little more fancy by using related keywords such as: "Arkenal the Gold Town", "The Advanced Hamlet of Ruuka", "The Magical City of Acoozoni", "Farmers Dale".

In the currently released build, there is 0 tax income. The only income sources are merchant champions, gold mines, the 1-gildar building, and the 7-gildar palace... oh, and monster hunting.

The main benefit of city spamming I see is that it allows you to make up for a poor resource draw.  Don't have any libraries?  Spam lvl 1 cities with studies so you can limp along until you find a library.  Solution: Tie the output of the base production buildings to population and add some sort of upkeep to every building.

Yes but the larger ZOC is needed so the towns are Spread Out more. That's the issue with spam. Having upkeep costs would help greatly too though. Mostly though it's an aesthetic issue. It just doesn't look good with tons of cities so close together.