I have a simple idea that could address some of the issues with city spamming without discouraging the player from building in their cities.
From what I can gather from the posts by Brad and other Stardock employees, the desire to stem city spamming is to give the game and the cities a more personalized feel. So that if I lose city [x], my response isn't "I've got 20 more just like her" or "Where is that?". I agree with this sentiment and support the implementation of the resource taxes. I think that the problem is that there is no real benefit in creating larger cites. A few unique buildings for larger cities encourage me to build up one, maybe two cities to level 3 or higher. Other than that, their only real benefit is decreased training time, but the cost in food doesn't justify that decision. It makes much more sense to have 10 lvl 2 cities then a 2 lvl 5 cities currently even with the resource taxes. This appears to be the issue in a nutshell.
My solution (if this is possible):
Leave the resource taxes in place, but allow the building's value to scale with the size of the settlement. For example,
Market (resource upkeep 1 food)
Lvl 1& 2: Gildar +1
Lvl 3: Gildar +2
Lvl 4: Gildar +4
Lvl 5: Gildar +8
I think this would achieve the result that the development team is looking for, makes sense from a real-life perspective (the market district in a large medieval city would be more valuable than a single gold mine and embarass the market of some podunk outpost on the fringes of a large and prosporous society), and would allow players with advantageous starts in a particular resource to turn that resource into a real benefit instead of selling those resources to potential rivals (which doesn't function well due to the diplomacy issues currently anway). This would also address the nerfed monster economy by generally making gold more accessible. That's my two cents for fixing the city spamming problem. A few other quick ideas:
-Make the weapons more unique and reduce the nerfing slightly (ex. Axe +5A, Spear +5A +1hp (to represent the increased odds of survival when armed with a longer range weapon), etc). I think this would add more flavour to the game, more depth to the tactical battles and be a fairly easy fix without needing a major change in how the game is programmed.
-Empires are too strong. Even nerfed the quick blitz to lord hammers is unbalanced and brutal.
-Where's the beef? Why is all the food fruit, honey, wheat, etc? I would think blood thirsty warriors might enjoy a nice steak (this is pure flavor).
-More techs! I find myself out of things to build in most of my cities by the start of mid-game. We need more techs and more buildings. I understand this is a large update so maybe for 1.1 or the first expansion?
All of this being said, I love this game and I would like to say thank you for the work done so far.
