I think that he was talking more about someone who played a reasonable amount, rather than an 8 hour slog.

If you've played Civ 4 here's a comparison of the largest map sizes.

Those are big and all, but I'm expecting bigger from what he made it sound like. Hopefully come Monday or maybe before we'll get some official answer.

Hopefully a lot less! I want cities to be few and far between, not just few 28 cities is way above the upper end of the # of cities I'd like to see per empire, at least until the stronger players start dominating the map and pushing everyone else aside. And even then I'm hoping the proposed vassal system will keep the number of directly-controlled cities per player to a minimum.

But yeah - I will be very happy with such a large map size! Still, bigger is better  

in terms of city count, cities  I feel are much  to close  together   in  the   current form  of the game.   Being that your city  physically expands,  I would say t hat no less than 5 tiles between  cities should  be the  standard (rather than 3,  which  is the current)   Possibly 6-8 would actually still be fair  (though 8 would   be a pretty massive block.  That might be  pushing it for smaller  maps)

I would like 6-8 to be more of a minimum except in maybe extreme situations... The world is just starting to recover from a cataclysm, armageddon for god's sake! Cities should be few and far between. I'm still holding out hope for some sort of village/outpost mechanism, though - I'd like those to be scattered around largely for the purpose of gathering resources without having to set up a full-fledged city on top of them.

On small maps, I don't want to be able to build more than a small handful of cities without encroaching into other players' territory. Think about your favorite fantasy worlds - how many of them contained lots of nations each with more than a small handful of major cities? I honestly can't think of a single one... A lone dominant nation will sometimes have a pretty hefty number, but that is by no means the norm. I want Elemental to convey that! In the end it will make cities more important, and higher value strategic assets! Where you place them is crucial, and they are not to be spammed so as to cover the whole world.

And in Elemental, considering cities take up multiple tiles (a pretty large # of them for bigger cities), that is exacerbated. Now, I'm not saying I want there to be a hard limit preventing you from founding cities less than 8 tiles away from each other, but I want it to be discouraged - so there would have to be a good reason for doing it! (Like trying to block off a wide pass, or access a resource-rich area, etc). 

A dev responce is always awesome.  but, they are too busy making the game.

I've come to the conclusion that city size should not cap as low as it currently does.   I mean, I was saying before 5 spaces would be good between cities, because you could build out 3 spaces no problem.   Now in 1B, I can hardly build out 2 spaces because I never have enough house room to increase my city size cap.

Just a comment I wanted to throw out there, as it pertained to the topic.   

That is cheating.   Because most fantasy worlds that come to mind don't really have the time to deal with minor cities.   Middle earth has in theory a bunch of small towns dotting the landscape, but we don't really hear about them because they are... well, not major towns.   Places like Lake Town or even Bree wouldn't me mentioned if something had not happened there.

Warhammer, warcraft, forgotten realms in the hands of the right story teller, and Even Eregon (I feel dirty bringing it up) has a bunch of space that COULD be other towns.   We just don't know because they are not so major that we hear about them.

Yes, there is a point to bring up that generally "fantasy worlds" focus on the mysterious and fantastic parts of their world.   More often than not, this is focused on 1 or 2 major cities and the 'wilderness' that surrounds them.   I think the World of Darkness, i.e. white wolf's world, even goes out of their way to specifically say there should more concentrated urban cities with wild unknown between them.   Very little in terms of suburbs or other instances where rural community isn't detached from urban society.  

But it all boils down to how we imagine it.   I often imagine my fantasy settings to be like feudal Europe, just that it has dragons and stuff where the major trading routes aren't.   Since this game HAS trade routes as a major feature,  It makes sense that there would be spotted cities along such trade route, which may very well be exactly what we get since hospitable land should grow to connect channeler created cities along trade routes.  So while we may WANT this game to be solitary major cities, I think Elemental is looking to be more based on effectively managing trade and urban expansion.

Depends on how you define major city. The Dragon Lance world has at least a dozen good sized cities, and more if you consider smaller but important race-specific areas like Kendermore or Mt. Nevermind. There are also many smaller towns and villages scattered all over.

Well, it's all relative right? My highest population before the game crashes is about 150. Not exactly a metropolis.

Very interesting indeed, Scorpiana. Thank you