Currently, it seems like a no-brainer for me to expand when I see another plot of land I can build a city on. I've starting thinking of trying to create a tradeoff between expansion and building up existing cities. My goal would be to make both "City Spam" and "few mega City" viable, with some in between space for a combination of the two, but hopefully creating influences that reinforce going one way or another. To that extent I'm hoping some of the experts or creative types might be able to weigh in on what would be a good way to do this. Here are a few ideas I have so far, likely I would use a subset of these or other suggestions. :

1. Adding more levels to cities with additonal buildings and benefits: Just like a player can level thier sov to 35 into a powerhouse, why not have cities face a multitude of levels with unique options for specialization. Some gate mechanism would need to exist that would make it easier to level with fewer cities...
2. Increasing food limits drastically and making growth from prestige the dominant limiting factor limiting cities. Some tie from city grains would still need to exist...perhaps improving growth rate but to a lesser degree than prestige.
3. Creating a greater value of world resources to a city: the number of resources that attach to a city is going to scale with the space from other cities, so if we add some small incentive to a city for every resource such as +5 food per shard would mean create an imediate trade off between building one larger city with multiple outposts or multiple cities with less resources. Other bonuses might have to be +5% gold or +5% research (maybe tied to level of the the shrine).
4. Creating a new city level/specialization before the first that choses between "City" or "Hamlet" where a hamlet has no builable squares or options but can provide great bonuses to all other cites this would have to be differenatied from towns by much greater incomes in towns and greater benifit to all other cities from hamlets.
5. adding additonal buildable squares and improvements to cities, giving them deeper levels of improvements that are very rewarding and more improvements or instances of an improvement. Creating more of a "Mega City" feel, and offering deeper investment
6. Significant population drain from building pioneers

Does anyone here have other suggestions, or feedback on the above. There's alot to consider and this would be my first attempt at a mod. Off the top of my head I'm concerned about each of these points for pretty much every item I listed above:

• Can it be done?
• Balance swinging too far towards less cities
• How might these changes affect the AI, is there anything that can/needs to be done for it to take advantage of the change.
• Can I justify it logically i.e. "Shards provide food?"
• Would anyone else enjoy this, or be annoyed by this .... (I'll probably do it regardless)