[0.295][Suggestion/Gameplay] Require building fewer houses

Have you tried to research the housing tech?

Yes, I just found that after researching for a while and that does not seem like the optimal solution to me. First, players who do not want to go down the "Civilization"  route for their research are still looking at having to take up a ton of time building houses.  Also, houses are not a "strateigc resource" from what I have seen. Unlike Barrakcs or an Academy or some building that requires me to balance the beneift the building will provide versus the upkeep and time I would spend to build it, housing is purely a matter of micromanagement - build  houses so the city can grow. This is the type of thing I should be able to leave to the AI as an automated task. Another thing to consider is that I am unlikely to pick the housing tech when it comes up, no matter how much I complain about micromanagement. It is usually competing against something vastly more useful in terms of technology research, and after spending turns to perform research I want a technology that provides me with a benefit beyond mere convenience.

I would greatly prefer the whole process be automated. Remove all the different types of housing and just have "Housing" be an ongoing project I can apply to a city. It is a lot easier to have it be something I need to remember to toggle on and off rather than making it a click-fest on the map.

part of the function of houses seems to be spreading the city; you have to have buildings adjacent to a resource to build an improvement on it, and houses fulfill this function nicely.

This is one of those things that Beta 1 doesn't cover. Just be patient... Even once you get apartments it can be a pain and you have to dedicate much of your city to housing... but that will get worked out. So hold these thoughts until Beta 3

But yeah, getting to a lvl 5 city right now is pretty tough even for a capital city with 3 food resources nearby.

A bit of maths.

For level 5 we need 1000 citizens.

Appartments provides 160 in 4 tiles : 40 citizens per tile (house provide 30 per tile)

1000 / 40 = 25. But appartments need 4 tiles. So you need to use 6 appartments and 2 houses = 26 tiles

We need 26 tiles to let a city get to level 5. And that's with the best housing possible (at the moment). Isn't 26 tiles a bit too much ?

One more problem : how will we be able to create an army of 10 000 men from a city that cap at 1000 or 2000 or 3000 citizens ? Because when you get to level 5 youget no more tiles. And more population = more housing. So with a hard cap on available tiles, there will be a hard cap on max population of cities.

Maybe an infinite tech that would let housing be more effective. Or at level 5, a city will still get tiles to build at the rate of 1 tile every 10 turn. Or housing become free at level 5, or anything that won't cap our max population.

I agree that it's hard to get over 3rd population cap even with many food resources (or especially when you have many, as harvesting them takes 4 tiles each!), if you build anything else than houses (especially 4 tiles buildings xD). A city should have more available tiles to build or houses should host more inhabitants, I think.

And I'm not sure you need resources to be adjacent to harvest them. I did harvest one that was 2 tiles away from my city limit (orchard). Even though I found it weird, I didn't screen it because I didn't know wether it should be impossible or not.

The situation with the housing is bad.  It must be fixed.

As it stands you need too much space for houses. Forget about building other buildings or mines or wizard towers or anything really, there's no space in the current system, unless you want a small city.

I Agree that you need them for snaking into resources, so fix it the other way around: double the tiles a city gets per level.

The "geometrical" requirements to build 4 tile large buildings must be removed, cause even if you have the tile space, you can't build them in the edges of the city.

Also as far as housing buildings are concerned an upgrade of houses is also needed or even an upgrade for appartments. Perhaps something that you build upon existing houses. Sometines you have just 2 or 3 tiles left in a city and houses don't do the job.

The  rules about building stuff over resources are not clear in the game inho, I can't make heads or tails of it really, I think it's distance from the city center. This has to be "crystal clear" because of the significant tactical value of resources.

At the moment, you can cap improvements away from your city hub with the following rule : as many tiles as the city level. City level 5 ? You can cap improvements 5 tiles away.