I agree, a good idea.

Agreed with this suggestion.

I was surprised by my first couple of playthroughs that you couldn't upgrade housing directly.

I still rather have them scrapping the whole housing idea. It's lots of micromanagement without any real benefits for gameplay imho. I rather have meaningful options for building then some insignificant houses that increases the population cap by some.

I think if you are able to just upgrade housing to the next level than you will have a city full of mansions... which is absolutely ridiculous in they are trying to create a living breathing world.

as i remember it, population increased with prestige to the point that a mansion was always going to be the best, for population and prestige. But i haven't looked at the numbers in the new beta, maybe they changed it?

Yes, I like the idea of having different kinds of houses in your civilization i would even like to see them in order to see how rich the people of that city are, but i don't know if i like building them myself. I just don't think its realistic at all to have only mansions in a city. And while the mention of the word "realistic" will make people freak out, tell me what RPG (be it Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, or whatever) has only rich people in the cities? a living, breathing world is made up of rich and poor and this game should portray that i think. With cities filled with huts and hovels of the poor and slaves and manses filled with rich merchants or lords. That's something i expect to see in the world of an RPG.

On the subject of rich and poor, if you weren't allowed to upgrade, you'd end up with slums in the middle of your city. Very realistic . Then, if you're feeling heartless, you could raze your slums to the ground and build mansions all over it.

Another proposal is that you have some kind of partial auto-upgrade, where you can build any type of house anywhere, but houses near schools/markets or your palace get upgraded with the increasing prestige of your city.

I'll also be surprised (and pleased) if the devs mange to make decent AIs that can make 'sentimental' decisions, but it seems far too early in the beta process to seriously sweat the numbers for any unit or improvement.

Adding a second, size-limited settlement type for outying resource collection sites and fortifications would go a long way towards putting me in the no-player-house-buliding camp. In yet another game, I found myself helplessly snaking huts out twoards a resource I wanted but couldn't justify starting a whole new city to reach.

Beg pardon, but could you clarify your "this" there? Could be you want to avoid two types of settlement found, or you don't like the snaking even if you can't stop doing it in the betas so far.

I'm actually a little torn on the snaking. It mostly seems too 'gamy' in the game, but on the other hand, it kind of reflects the way a nearby-but-not-close resource can affect settlement expansion. Just look at what happened to US towns with 'centers' just a few miles from where an arm of the Interstate system got built. To us, that transpo is a very desirable. In my town, I-75 came through in what was the rural western side of the county. The rural eastern side has grown very little since then, but we now have what amounts to a whole new town all glommed around that Interstate.

I sure can clarify  i was talking about avoiding snaking, i would most definitely like to see multiple settlement types found, it would add a depth to the game I think, I liked in the game Knights of Honor where you would have tiny villages and port towns that would produce income and food but unable to produce military units

And I def agree with your "too gamy" statement

As a compromise, how about if the new structures, those being more than one cell in size, be allowed to be "plunked" on top of an existing single cell dwelling thus incorporating that single structure into the new larger one. Sort of like a RENO upgrade where a second story and 700 more square feet are added to the old hut...

Or, allow huts to be built on the side/adjacent of roads thus alleviating some of the resource creep being noted. The road may not pass directly beside a resource, but if it cut the creep in half that would be a good compromise perhaps.

Snaking isn't too gamy. I live in dallas and the city council actually did that back in the 70s. They decided the population was gonna boom in the next decade so they took these 10 foot wide 2 mile long strips of ground, bought them up, and used to expand thier control out to every water source in the area. Now they make a crapton of money selling water to all the citys that grew up around us. So snaking actually happens in real life, whacky as it may seem.

True statement. As well as the fact that it just looks silly  Im still hoping to see a city center, and then outlying resource "colonies" as you will. The city is where most of the population lives, and military units are trained. and wherever you harvest resources there is a small population (village, hamlet, what have you) and then those resources are then shipped to the city by way of caravan to be made into the proper item.

I would love to have aqueducts (water supply in general) be part of the game, but I'm one of those weirdos who loves pretty much any micromanagement that isn't tediously repetitive.

The 'snaking' in Elemental is nothing like an aqueduct system. If anything, it's sort of an anti-version of how preindustrial cities connect to distant sources and then see secondary population sites develop along the road or canal. In the builds so far, it is things like housing, schools, barracks and whatnot that form the links on the chain out to distant resource tile.