Wow. This sounds like a potentially major twist for the basic colony/city rush phase all TBS games seem to share. In all the other Civ-kin games I've played, you either had predetermined city sites or you had settler units that could found a city almost anywhere. I very much like this hybrid notion where channelers could spend essence to influence a potential city site, but at root we are working on a map where the population centers all have a core tile that the game chose in response to player choices.

It's an ineresting idea and it does seem more realistic than the usual model where every population base is founded by state sponsored settlers. It goes without saying that it would have to be implemented well to not end up being massively irritating in practice.. but if it was done competently then I think it could work. Part of me worries that I'd find it kinda inhibiting to have potential city placements denied to me.. but then in actuality that's happening anyway due to random map creation. There's always going to be places where you might, and places you would never put a city so I guess a system like this is just an extension of that but intentionally structured to solve some other problems otherwise inherent in the genre.

I definently like the way this idea is sounding I would think that an option for a leader to provide incentives for people to move towards certain areas that are strategically important such as offering 10 gold per settler for people to move into a demon/monster infested region that just so happens to have lots of valuable ore to be mined. Granted normally people wouldn't ever think of going to such a region but if you offer enough gold people may be willing to take on more risks. Also there could be other ways of getting people to settle there are well. Several magical spells that make the place seem like a green pasture or spells that compell people to settle there come to mind and of course using these types of spells should come with costs such as your heroes essence or other downsides such as a compelled workforce not being as good as a regular one or people being more susceptable to being killed when they're under the illusion that a monster's lair is a place of safety. Evil leaders could also go with a slave camp type settlement where you can force people to work and settle into an area however, there needs to be a certain amount of military personal there otherwise revolts will happen.

Anyways I seem to have gotten off on a tangent but the point is players should still have ways to choose where a city should be or ways to increase the chance that a city will appear on a certain tile so that they won't get frustrated with the AI placing potential city sites in areas where the player dosnt want them to be. There should be some downsides to this so that it is more feasible to go with what the city location AI wants you to do and I think it would be pretty cool if there were multiple ways to provide 'incentives' for your people to make towns and cities in extremely inhospitable environments. 

some good stuff there. it seems like a novel way to deal with founding cities and city sprawl. But the problem here would be the computer choosing too many 'sub-prime' areas and leaving you with a shortfall or lack of access to specific resources (ie no bears). Maybe a combination of your idea (where villages can be persuaded to take root) with what has been hinted at elsewhere (specific places are urban-setting friendly). This would mean quite a lot of city friendly squares though and i'm not overly keen on that idea.

A few questions; How do your villages establish themsleves? Naturally without any hlep from you (the Wizard) or must you send your military to pacify (i.e. patrol) specific areas, or do you mean that your military must be sent out to pre-established villages (generated randomly by the computer) in order to promote their safety and encourage their growht? I would think that you (the wizard) would be confined to encouraging a certain amount of villages but how would you limit that encouragement? Resources/magic shards/time? I also like the idea i read (can't remember where) that your wizard would have to expend some of his precious magical energies to build/establish cities. Could we actually still do this to gain access to a specific resource that the computer has failed to account for? Finally, what about forts? I read somewhere that 'cities' could be founded and developed as forts (ie not cities) that can gaurd specific choke points.

ps does anybody like Massive Attack or Radiohead? If so then you might remember the songs "karma" Koma or "karma" police

On the other hand, it might save people like me from obsessive and futile attempts to tesselate their cities in a land-use maximizing pattern.

Well, GalCivII doesn't have a very good system to prevent or devalue city (resp. colonies) spam (though the extreme planets helped a bit). The essence cost in Elemental though sounds like something that could be balanced extremely well to make city spam not a necessity without the need to remove controlled expansion from the player.

I didn't get that impression at all. AFAIK you're only able to harvest resources that are on your city tiles, thus making a cities location very important. But I agree on the second part, balancing those different needs should be mandatory. But that would make city location even more important, making randomness in city location even more potentionally debalancing.

The reason why I don't like a system like this is, that I don't want to be at the mercy of a random number generator which decides if I get what I want or not. Especially not in something so important as city location. Let's say I want to defend a mountain pass by building a city there (which should be easily possible by Elementals modular city expansion system) and now rand decides that my city starts a few tiles away, ruining it for me. Of course you could (as you've said yourself) have the option of still be able to found cities just where you want. But then it's easily possible that older cities (or villages) that were randomly founded get in my way. (Something I absolutely hated about the founding city bonus in goody huts in older civilization titles, which often came in the way of my planned city expansion.)

Also I need to come back to my old complain, it removes control and choice from the player. (Yeah, I'm an obsessive control freak regarding my empire. Even marriages are prearranged by my clerks. )

Well yeah, I probably took it too literal and applied it in a too narrow way on the game. Gotta conceed that point I guess.

Sounds better the way you've described it now. If you could controll where and when to invest those resources and the city would grow on a place where you've decided as a player, an over-time creation of cities depending on safety and resources could work.

Seriously, why would I get the impression you want to pick on me? We're discussing ideas, so it's normal to disagree with each other and to dislike other peoples ideas.

I think this is a perfect example of what's being discussed in another thread about how some non-feasible ideas (either due to complexity, would be too frustrating, etc) can still lead to a great discussion! Personally I think that the original poster's unmodified idea would be very frustrating, but at the heart of it there are some amazing concepts to be drawn from it!

I love the ideas of having to encourage population growth by making sure the area is safe, and possibly even by giving incentives for people to move there. On the other hand I think it should be impossible to establish any major population center without using some of your channeler's essence except on the rare, already fertile spots. Instead of having two separate ways of establishing cities, I would love to see them both combined into one more involved method. 

If a little small population gathers in a good spot for you, maybe because you've had a large troop presence there or some other reason, you can choose to imbue the land with your essence. The result would be a new settlement under your control with a slight advantage in that it already has an establish population, or maybe in costing a little less essence. Whereas if you want to establish a city in that dangerous, relatively far-off mountain pass, you can still due so. But it'll cost a little bit more from your channeler and it'll be somewhat harder to grow the population there at first.

And the little 'volunteer' population centers should never interfere with the placement or growth of a city. Because like Vandenburg said, that is annoying.

I'm pretty sure that when your population reaches a certain point and is able to expand to another tile, you will choose which tile it'll expand to.

I've had this similar idea for a a few years with the aim to implement it game design wise, just remember that although it is an organic based process in many situations, throughout history leaders etc. have purposely settled cities and towns such as demonstrated in the Hellenistic periods etc..

The best idea imo, is to give various routes and options to enable city/village founding that keep the realistic image of an organic civilisation.