It would be cool if sieges could destroy buildings and leave a fiery effect in the city view screen. Maybe even some rubble! 

Only one tile? 

It seems just as easy (considering the engine already supports it) to make cities grow organically across multiple tiles.  No more building placement, ok.  But cities could still grow along rivers or coasts; they could still blob out over the landscape.  (Though instead of 5 tiles across, maybe just 2 or 3.)

The on-map cities are one of the great visual aspects of the game.  I'd hate to see that abstracted away to a generic castle building on a square.

I am still in a state of disbelief about this whole one tile thing. It really only makes sense if moving improvements to a subscreen actually dramatically reduces memory usage and I can't bring myself to believe it. If it somehow does get implemented I hope they chuck the building placement screen idea. That seems like a whole bunch of work and memory usage for no reason what so ever. The only reason to have it is so that all the existing artwork doesn't get wasted and that's a horrible reason.

Except for the memory usage the current system works fine, there is no reason to change it. You could easily limit the more extreme cases of snaking by limiting how far from the city center you can build. As for the distance thing no measurement in Elemental makes any sense what so ever, literally none. Gildar, turn length, tile length, and whatever are all assigned rediculous values. Civ has the same problem bacause really the entire concept of playing a game that lasts several hundred or thousand years is a rediculous concept.

Sure cities might look slightly more impressive and realistic under a one tile system but only at the cost of all of your cities looking exactly the same. Which kinda seems like it will kill city specialization. How would building beside resources work under a one tile system? Are shards going to be the size of the the entire city? Are lumbermills being removed?

I'm not sure how moving to this system would make implementing sieges easier. Sieges have been pretty much declared a no go several times already.

Personally I think a hybrid system would work the best. Seperate improvements into major and minor ones, with only major ones creating visible improvements on the map. Then have houses randomly generate around the city like suggested. Bakeries and workshops for instance would be minor but castles and unique sctructures would be major. This would reduce memory usage but cities would still look unique. This way you also wouldn't need a weird sub screen for cities. Also building beside resources wouldn't look weird.

They're moving the city tiles to a separate window/map. If any time was the time to do some sweet combination between tactical maps and city maps, it is with sieges.

Even if the city has no effect whatsoever on the tactical battle, I'd still like it just to be there in the background. And, hell, give us a few archery towers and a gate like Dom3 and you have a siege.

I'm torn kind of.  I do like how each of my cities do look different with the placement of buildings, and I really never thought that the snaking of cities to allow "teleportation" was really a big issue...but the size of these cities just seemed too much.  They covered a large area of the map, and although very interesting to look at, they were almost too interesting as they all ended up kind of blending together.  I'm slightly worried about defending nearby resources, as they're improvements are easily destroyed.  Also, I worry this will make the map even more boring to look at.  I'm hoping this strikes a good balance of solving problems vs blandness.  I am in constant worry that the devs will cut things that cause problems and the game will work better and better, but be more bland for it.  I felt that happened to WoM from release to 1.4.

I wouldn't mind some small buildings appearing outside the city tile when the city grows, in a purely cosmetic fashion.

My idea is mainly cosmetic, but not purely. There would be two kinds of buildings: normal and special. In one city you could build only very limited number of special ones.

Alfdaur gets it.

Fb said that minor changes would happen as the city progresses one the outside, while the main building would be on the inside. Since we are getting new art for factions in beta 3 and one tile cities in beta 4, it is only logical that city specialization and faction differentiation will affect the cityhub. The code is already there to do this. I have been working on a cityhub that changes according to what buildings are present. If I can do it, they probably can too.

Sieges would indeed make the city view more interesting. I would love it if the city view were more than just a aesthetic affect. It should have some interactive features too. Sieges are a good place to start. I would also like spells to change the way a city looks. Freezing a city should show up on the screen. I should be able to set it ablaze with a fire spell. There are so many potentially awesome things we should be able to do to the cities. Afterall, the more fun thing about Sim City is when Godzilla comes along and stomps your towns.

On a side note, I would relish the chance to have a tile design contest at some point when we can use the new editors. This might be a beta 4 thing though.

My understanding of cartography based on what I learned at school. Mile is an appropriate term considering that it is a feudal era measurement of length based on very illogical factors. Assuming the game's mile is the same as our mile, it is logical to say that each tile is hundreds of square miles. That is the only reason traversing them would take a season. That is assuming the travelers are not moving in a straight path. When roads are built, the do begin to move in a straight path, lending to faster travel times. Rivers are commonly drawn much larger than the space they actually take up for emphasis. Rivers are very important. Important things take up more space on a map. You should imagine that while you are on a river tile, there is much more land, but the river is the most important feature.

In fact, with one tile cities the scale starts to make sense. If you look at the medieval maps of Europe, you start to notice that for a long time, cities would take up 25% of the map, while the surrounding areas were much smaller in scale. We are simply moving to a more modern map form, maybe even one where North does not point towards Jerusalem. 

I applaud this advancement in cartography. It makes alot of sense. Also, pointing out that the scales don't make sense is not sufficient logic for justifying the enormous size of cities. We should strive to either have a purely logical map form. Be that representational or abstract.

In also would support it costing road level movement through cities. Free movement is a mistake.

What makes you think building placement would be gone, even in a 'miniaturized', city-screen style UI environment?  I think they would be silly to completely scrap this empire-building function because at least a few of us enjoy such things, and the code already exists.