a way to limit city spam?

This is a bit late considering the beta for 1.1 is not far away but I'd like to share it all the same.

One issue that has been bothering me in elemental is that the only way to exploit distant resources is to construct a new city right next to them. In larger maps with fewer factions (I like to give my maps alot of "breathing room" to ensure late-game mega battles.) this leaves me (and on some occasions the AI) with many level 1 cities existing just to exploit that certain crystal mine or horse farm.

I was thinking that it might be useful to allow cities to build a "merchant" whom when sent to a resources would claim it for their respective faction, connect it via road (like caravans) and allow the player to improve and exploit that resource.

As far as game balance goes I would treat them like caravans and limit the amount of merchants available to one per city and give them a prerequisite tech. -Probably one fairly late into the economy tech trees, since the merchant's main purpose is to eliminate late the game city spam needed to control far-flung resources. This way I don't think merchants wouldn't totally undermine the whole city influence system. Also the connection to the resource would be severed if the merchant was killed, making such a connection more vulnerable than a traditional one.

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What would happen when your opponent drops a city next to the resource? For that matter, without the influence over nearby forests, you'll have random spawns that are likely to eat the merchant:-( It's awesome that you're trying to come up with a solution, though. I'd prefer to build up just a few big cities myself, but I don't see how to be successful with the current game mechanics (city influence, especially).

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Giving us more techs buildings options etc to increase influence would help in building higher influence with a few cities. Pretty much agree with the OP though.. ICS is the only major tactic the AI uses at this point.. well have to see what 1.1 brings though. Should be a bit different with being able to specialize cities more.

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I think the OP places to much emphasis on resources as a reason behind city spam. While I would generally support an outpost/resource runner mechanic, I think these should be heavily limited to avoid simply trading city spam for outpost/merchant spam. If one really wants to end city spam, one would have to address the large question about the value of a city. In 1.09, getting one or two level 5 cities is a fairly simple task due to certain improvements, yet beyond these easy cities, getting more level 5 cities is a major undertaking which can take hundreds of turns. However, we are still left to wonder what is the value of even one level 5 city v. the combined value of the cities one can build in the same time it took to build the one level 5 city. In general, the only real way to promote city leveling over city spam is to either make city spam so costly that it is detrimental to all strategies ( like civ 4's incredible maintenance cost curve ) or make a level 5 city so incredibly valuable that no amount of level 1 cities can even remotely compete with its sheer awesomeness. Personally, I think making OP level 5 cities is the correct avenue of attack, as this allows for both strategies to exist while giving a bonus to players who want to manage a small but meaningful empire.

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Personally, I dislike relying on the influence system to capture resources. As it stands now its just to hard to predict the rate of expansion, many times I'll be waiting for my influence to expand, and in the mean while the AI will come by and drop a city next to the resource I wanted to capture.

The only real benefit here is that it give me a nice pretext for war hehe..

In another post I saw an solution involving the use of a "corruption" system, where the more cities you have the harder it becomes to maintain your empire- Its not a bad idea, but it has potential to ruin the fun (Rome: Total War for example).

Maybe the answer is just to make new cities and powerful, advanced buildings require food. That way a player will have to choose between more basic cities, or fewer advanced ones.

Also I've heard talk about treating population as a resource in 1.1? I'm guessing it will work by making a new city use up population of existing cities. I think this would have a similar effect on game play to what I described above.

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