man i could never get gal civ 2 right. they put it that way so you couldn't just city spam to win, it doesn't seem to look like they have done it the right way to.

The main problem I have is I end up with a ton of cities because I kick the AI's tail when it comes after me, and I end up with its not so wonderful cities, which I apparently have no option to burn to the ground >.<

Why shouldn't an outpost cost maintanence?  If all it is is an outpost with no infrastructure of its own, it would logically need to import all of its supplies for the small number of people living there.

No, maybe I was mostly right the first time: I can see that there's a food limit on city size, but I don't see a production benefit to lumber, stone, etc.

what I suppose I mean is that an outpost (level 1 city) should only ever cost 1 gold in maintanence, and not be included in the official "city count."

If our "actual cities" are going to cost ever increasing maintanence I would rather it be an additional sequence.

What I mean is, that if you have 8 cities, your city maintanence would be 8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 + Xoutposts

In that case, the amount of cities beyond level 1 would seriously allow your maintanence to add up. In this case, city maintanence would be 36 gold per turn for only 8 cities, and if you had 8 outposts AND 8 cities you would have 42 maintanence per turn. If, however, you upgraded those 8 ouposts BEYOND level 1, and they all became level 2+ "cities" at least in the official city count, then you would have 16 cities, which would be MUCH WORSE than double the amount of 8 outposts.

16+15+14+13+12+11+10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 136 gold per turn. That would be alot worse, than say, having 8 cities (36 gold) plus 36 outposts (+36 gold) = 72 gold. Having 16 cities is almost twice the Expense as having 8 cities and 36 level 1 outposts. See ... this is what I mean by little-no maintanence, what I mean is that owning More cities means that your going to need to be making even more money than would normally be required. Therefore you can have a large merchant empire, or a smaller specialized empire. Personally, I think this Idea is full of win. I also think that level 1 cities should only be able to build Huts, Walls, and Resource Gathering Improvements. I also think a level 1 city should be able to "send" the entirety of its resources to another city its connected to for a "travel fee" of 1 gold per turn.

In this way, you can have a hub of resource collecting "outposts" (level 1 cities) each costing 2 gold per turn at no additional fee. Say you have a Hypothetical resource accolation of 12 outposts or 6 cities to gather the same amount of resources. Lets also say that theoretically, if you could send all of your resources to your Capital (instead of sharing among 6 other cities) it would aid you Equally (or even more-so, cause extra cities might still mean more building room).

In this case, you can either spend 24 gold per turn in maintaining Resource Sapping outposts (sending the ENTIRE resource output to one city) OR you can spend 7+6+5+4+3+2 = 27 gold per turn using your additional 6 cities.

of course, this is Empire Wide city maintanence. So lets additionally say that, before deciding to mine this lush Region of its resources, you ALREADY had 5 cities. Which is a reasonable number. THEN the "larger" city option would actually cost 6+7+8+9+10+11 = 51 gold per turn VS the 24 gold per turn if you used Resource Grabber outposts.

In this way, your Empires and Kingdoms would organically build cities around the nearby resources which have enough land and food for large cities, and the smaller, crappier resource sites (like an Ore or a Shard in cramped quarters) can remain a simple outpost, with little comparative long-term expense to the player.

Additionally options to both Raze a city completely (which should take multiple turns for high-level cities) or for simply burning down buildings and exterminating population to bring the City level DOWN (during wartime).

A peaceful option would be to decommision buildings by way of Royal Eviction notice, and to FORCE migration from city X in order to demolish it with no colateral damage (all about maintaining/organizing your empire). In this way, you can peacefully remove unwanted cities, or reduce unwanted cities in size and population to that of an outpost. However, you should need at least 66% or 75% influence over a city to peacefully decomission cities, so it shouldn't be possible to peacefully destroy a newly captured settlement.

I think this would vastly improve how all players, human and AI, manage their Nations. Unless a similar idea is already planned for implementation.

I must agree with the origainal post, it is hard to have fun taking over the world while micro managing cities! I do think the building aspect of the game as it stands is messed up, and needs to be fixed before muliti-player is started. There is no way you can fight an opponet without knowing the rules for production of resources. Resource production seems to be very abstract as of this build, at least some basic guidlines as of what is required to advance a city would be nice. Then again who really knows how to build a city anyway, the flexabilty to mess it up teaches you to do it right in the first place. It might take 1000 tries but you will learn. Of course you may need to put that on the box, the learning curve on this game takes YEARS to figure out, and there is no help! Then muliti-player will be real fun for the 200 people who play it. I also doubt that past the Beta test I will have anything to do with muliti-player that is what killed Demigod for me. No single player game!!

I ran into some of these problems in the game I played last night. I crushed the AI handily to the point where just the enemy sovereign was running around the board trying to get away. The result, though, was that my debt skrocketed presumably because I had all these cities, none of which had enough income generators to offset their existence at that point... one of which was about 3 spaces away from my own (the AI and I settled on the same turn). I had no option to raze or combine the two cities though. And then I crashed. Heh.

So point 1 ... I wish I had some way to get rid of the couple of cities that were superfluous to the cause. Presumably razing a city and dumping tons of people out of their homes would have a political impact but the option should be there.

Point 2... I would like to see operating costs based on a "corruption" model. There would be little to no base upkeep cost for any one settlement. However a newly conquered or underdeveloped but populous city should lose a portion of its income simply because of the government's inability to track the pennies down. Adding banks, tax offices and other income generators would have a diminished effect if the requisite law and order facilities are not in place. If the place gets bad enough the income should approach zero... worse yet and the place becomes a money sink either because citizens are stealing your piece of the pie or military upkeep in the town becomes really costly. Cities that get too out of hand would eventually go away but manage to steal part of your treasury and maybe produce some roving bandit hordes. This would keep the player from spamming cities that they can't take care of, because neglecting them will still come back to haunt you.

The trick then would be to balance free trade and commerce (tax income) with law and order (operating expenses) in your towns. As they develop, the have the potential to generate more resources and income but would also require the infrastructure to make sure that a portion of that income is getting into your coffers. In this way you're not paying to have settlements, you're paying to keep those settlements producing for you.

Right now all production takes the same amount of time regardless of the population of the town.  Once resources like timber and iron begin to be WORTH something towards production and if production can be taxed, perhaps this problem will be canceled out.

The actual calculation is false. Devs already stated they will use the arithmetic upkeep instead of the exponential one.

And I think that is a good thing. If you want to go to war, you need to prepare yourself to be able to keep the taken cities.

Moreover they stated that a 5th level city wil multiply the effect o feach building by 5. A 4th level by 4th, etc.. so a building that let you earn 1 gold will in fact let you earn 5 gold at city level 5. So it won't be so hard to let your wallet stay in the green. You'll have to plan.

Tasunke is correct i could not have put it better myself when it comes to the cities and settlements etc. ideas.

my biggest surprise is that this game has you micromanage everything like some communist nanny state...

in the game "distant worlds" there is the state stuff (military ships, spies, and installations) and the private sector (mining, freighters, passenger ships, etc)... you have various governments such as feudalism, monarchy, republic, despotism etc... the one thing you do not have is communism or socialism... communism is simply not a valid way to run a country, it always collapses very quickly... so there is a massive "private sector" that is more then 10 times the government sector that deals with building up your empire, etc... Your biggest interaction with it is whether or not you allow your citizens to build commercial developments in systems controlled by other empires, or limit them to your own territories only... (its a trap really, allowing them to settle elsewhere will make EVERYONE else declare war on you). It will actually be hilarious if they allowed communism and just have no private sector at all, instead the state (you) gets to build those kind of things yourself and micro manage it (obviously you will suck at it).

And in a game called majesty 2 the private citizens build up little buildings that pay tax as long as you manage to defend them from the enemy hordes.

Anyways, it would be nice if cities in elemental did not require the level of micro management it does right now. it will be really cool if there was a private sector that expanded things by building things by itself (and needed your protection?). You still get to build stuff, especially to accelerate new cities (aka, give government funds to a border colony). but having a private sector would be nice... And does a tax collector really require the same amount of room as housing for 50 units of population? (aren't they in thousands?)... or a university require the same space as housing for 200 units?

University shoud allow some housing of population. thinking of dorms and fraterities and students living on the site of the university.