The specific plan is as follows:

The city hub gets 1 tile.  As a city grows, it would add 1 sub-tile based on the city's specialization. Each faction would have their own look and each specialization within that faction would have its own look. So at a glance you will be able to tell what type of a city it is and how big that city is.

A separate screen will display the bustling full city.  This allows us to add a lot more city improvements without it taking over the main map.

Well, since the first time I saw Elemental in action, the thing at the top of my list of things I wish they'd change has been the sprawling cities.  I really hated it.  So obviously I'm in full support of this new direction.  1-tile plus a sub-tile here and there is fine by me.

Seriously, of all the announcements of changes in FE, this one has me the most excited.  That's how much I hated it before.  When the distance between cities is about the same as the size of a city, it no longer feels like a dangerous fantasy world.  It feels more like New Jersey, where all the towns have grown together into sprawling suburbia.

Re: Frogboy

That is good news. I was thinking you meant that an absolute one tile limit was the design. This is better than what I imagined. To extrapolate, let's say I am Tarth and I want to have a defensive expansion city. I build on a 4 Grain, 3 Materials, 2 Beer. At the first levelup I choose a production option, adding a production themed tile to the city? Will there be terrain based improvements as well? Like a Lumbermill may have to become a special levelup option, as would Windmill and Dock. Or, will the city view be advanced enough to read the surrounding area and put a forest near the city, which will be the spot that a Lumbermill is built on? There are so many new possibilities! 

Maybe they will look like this:

As I have said in another post I hate this change.  I believe we are losing three big strategic elements -

1) Ability to create chokepoints (well not entirely, but largely so...).  This can be worked around and is not crucial but IMO is worth keeping.

2) Ability to include terrain and resource tiles within the city.  We lose lots here including the ability to tie the requirements for buildings to resource tiles within the city.  Important.

3) Ability to manipulate the zone of influence for the city.  Essential in my opinion.  Really hope there is an innovative mechanism proposed here to keep this possibility because otherwise we are back to entirely square and predictable zones of influence.  One of the things from the early days of WoM which was rightly improved is coming back... argh... heartburn...

There is an entirely valid concern with city movement/pathing, but it is part of a more general set of movement/pathing problems and should be fixed as such.  One tile cities will merely reduce the scope of this problem it will still be there.

Map space is a strange criticism - the vast majority of the map is empty.  You want more space play a bigger map, increase the minimun distance between cities or otherwise limit the city spam.

Concerns on scaling are also strange to find here: outposts gathering resources instantaneously from up to half a world away are much more remarkable.  Even the closest outposts are usually a year or so travel away and yet they deliver their resources immediately without threat from all the monsters, bandits and enemy factions in the world, and without any pilfering, corruption, drowning of caravans in floods, etc.

The separate city screen will in all likelihood be visited by me exactly once.  Good for people who want that eye candy though.

I realise this is a hotly contested topic but those are my thoughts.

1)  Sounds like a challenge for Frogboy to create an AI which effectively creates/exploits chokepoints.  Not my speciality but I can't see why this is particularly difficult.  No harder than grouping armies strategically, for example. 

Barring this, if you find it particularly gamey, don't use it.  Remember it is a single player game...  Stopping us all from doing something just because you do not want to (and are not forced to) is not good form.

By the same criteria I guess you would have all the terraforming spells removed from the game.  (Please no...)

2) True.  But in a very dumbed-down fashion.  Instead of having to make deliberate choices decisions to incorporate certain items within the city walls (including at times mutually exclusive choices) you presumably get them all automatically once your zone of influence expands.  (Does the game even differentiate between a certain city's zone of influence and your general territory?  I don't know.)  I prefer having the strategic level involved.

3) We will have to wait and see if there is any replacement...

I guess I would like to hear you spell out what you think we gain by having one tile cities.  I really don't hear these arguments being ennunciated, beyond 'get rid of that gamey snakey city thing' which is hardly an argument.

*tin foil hat on*

We know Derek Paxton creates forum posts and hides it from us, to be unveiled at an appropriate date. Frogboy, with his god+1 admin abilities, probably saw the post and thought it was public.

This is a good idea. I'm sick of the unwinnable task of making symmetrical cities. So long as the new cities still look like large sprawling cities (even if zoomed out) then i'm happy. The total war games do a decent job of this.

Agree with the calls for sieges. Not necesarrily flashy 3d battles, but again, a total war style system where you have to wait a few turns before you can launch your assault. Right now you can just walk to a city and conquer it in 4 turns before it can be reinforced, and it's just too fast given the timescale of the rest of the game.

I am totally in support of reducing city size, and the input from Brad makes it sound pretty good.

Goodbye sprawling ugliness. Goodbye non-buildable terrain 2 tiles away being a factor in where I build my cities. Good riddance cheater movement exploit through strung out cities.

Hello cleanly designed world-map cities.

Personally I like the one unit per tile because it sort of turns the whole would into a Tactical battle map. The one thing that has always bothered me in Civ is the lack of tactical battles. Which made Civ battles very boring. CIV V combat is the most fun of any civ game. Now if only CIV 6 would have good tactical battles then it would truly be an awsome game. 

To which I say: I care. The snake cities were unrealistic looking and needed to go.  Simple as that.  Another reason is that they made the maps look small.

I'm very happy with this change obviously, I've been arguing for something like it ever since FE was announced. Honestly I had given up hope that citybuilding mechanics would change significantly, so this is just wonderful.

Funny thing is, the whole on-map-city-building mechanic was an experiment to do just that; not take you away from the strategy game. It failed, horribly. It was an ok idea and Stardock did it's best to make it and its (afaik unintended) mechanics that you and others like fun. But in the end, it just wasn't.

Like you say, it is still possible. But now you can't turn just about everything into a chokepoint.

Including resource tiles in a city reduces strategy. Instead of having to make a strategic choice where to build your city and which resource to possibly include within it and which to leave more vulnerable, you just build a city in the middle and include everything by snaking. No choice required, no danger from raiding parties, everything can be defended with the same stationary force, safe behind city walls. 

This will likely still be possible by 1) leveling the city to increase it's area of influence, 2) building a new city (I think minimum distance can become smaller now), and 3) building outposts.

Agreed, next change should be setting up a distribution network for all resources using caravans

But seriously, I realy don't understand how you and sweaty can just brush over the whole scale issue. In lategame WoM nearly a third of the map could be urbanised. FE did slightly better, but it still doesn't fit the setting. This isn't simcity or a settlers game. This is a game about rebuilding a civilization in a big, hostile world. The smaller the cities, the bigger the world seems. With one tile cities, a tile with trees will look like a small forest next to a city. With on map building, the same single tile of trees besides a city looks like someone thought it would be a good idea to have park for dogs to take a crap in.

Please yes. Maybe not remove them completely, but at the very least move them WAY up in the magic tree. Lowering mountains and raising seabeds should be epic late game spells, not your starting set of utility spells.

I think you mistake what is going on here.  Single tile cities do not address the movement issue.  Units will still be teleporting at least one tile, and possibly two (depending on direction) once the city is level 2 or above, and maybe 4 tiles depending on how the rest of the level up subtiles are placeable.  Sure it is better than teleporting ten tiles but I want to see no teleporting.  Do you?  Also it will do nothing to address the problems associated with moving units through cities (such as having to move out other units and loss of movement points for the units left in cities) merely mask the existing problems.  What is needed is a fix for the movement problems in themselves.  It is a different issue to the multitile cities.

With single tile cities it will be impossible to include any resources within the city walls.  You will have no choice or strategic decision, everything must be vulnerable. 

Yes, influence can be expanded but, barring a new mechanism, we will not be able to change its predictable block shape.  Personally I think it will be aesthetically horrible but feel free to differ on this.  Importantly though it takes away from strategic concerns - cities become entirely predictable and staid with the area and shape they can encompass resources within.

Actually I would like that .  But I understand we had that discussion long ago and I'm not trying to dust it off.  More than anything the game resources needed to implement it are way beyond what I reckon the dev's have got to offer.  But it is a question of scale.  Teleporting units through a city 'cheaty gamey exploit' - teleporting resources across half a world 'no problem with that'.  To send a unit there will take years of game time but we get the resources immediately, huh?

As to the scale of city size to the world map I have some agreement with you.  However to me it is a problem of too many cities rather than each city being too large.  There should be more wild lands - agreed - but the problem is that within the first 10% of a game the world is completely colonised and territorial borders are bumping up against one another just about everywhere.  Reducing the minimum distance between cities is just going to make this worse.  Nowhere in the world will a unit be more than a couple of turns from a city.  What 'big hostile world'?

Huh, I can't believe that this is a mechanism that was being used in a way unintended by the designers of the game.  So it's no exploit huge or otherwise.

As to your point - I don't get it.  You want to stop me pressing the 'I win' button?  (Why would it be any of your concern?)  You can't stop yourself pressing an 'I win' button?  (That could be a problem, but not with the game.)  You don't like me telling people not to do something they profess to not like?  (I would have thought that this was sensible advice.)

It seems to be the last, or some combination of it with a lack of self control or transparency as to your own desires.  But I really can't undertand what you are getting at.