FEEDBACK: Housing & Food & Max Buildings

I guess it is working as intended. You should not be able to build all or even most of the buildings in each city AFAIK.

I rather disagree with OsirisDawn.

We will see how the final game turns out but currently the only way to really cover all aspects of the game is to city spam. I mean if you want to be strong in research, magic, military and economy (and frankly why wouldn't you?) you needs lots of cities. The scaling is a bit out I think.

I really love the ability of a small empire/country/realm/whatever to hold its own if it can isolate itself or hold a choke point. The ability of small (city count) player to compete should be retained. 

I dearly remember my alpha centuri days playing as the university faction and getting miles ahead of everyone in tech with my 4 cities and pityful handful of units only to suddenly upgrade them all in uber pawn mobiles the likes of which could not be equaled by anyone else in the game.

Yeah, the housing/food balance is a little off. It works well at first, but then you get to a point at around city level 3-4 where you're building nothing but houses/farms and even destroying old improvements for more houses - sure a city shouldn't be able to do everything, but it should be able to do something other than spam houses if it wants to hit level 5. Forget about building any kind of resource collection (like a mine or shard), you'll have no room at all left for gold or research generation - you end up needing a mining city, a gold city, a research city, a fire shard city, an earth shard city, etc etc, and you're tempted to leave these cities capped at level 2 or 3 because it would take too many houses to get farther. Essentially it forces city spam.

Personally I think housing should be far more lenient, but buildings that speed population growth should be more limited and expensive - this way you can worry not quite so much about raising the population cap, but actually getting your population up there will take quite a while. It makes your older cities and especially your capital (i.e. wherever the palace is) much more valuable, relative to those new cities that will take forever to hit level 5. You should have the option to speed the development of a new city by investing a ton of resources into a city hall or two, but it should be expensive enough that you can't do it for half a dozen cities at once. This would cut down on city spam and put the emphasis on a handful of core cities that have either had plenty of time to grow or a heavy investment into population growth buildings.

[What was the population growth value called? Influence or prestige or something.. can't access Elemental atm and I'm getting my games/beta versions confused.]

Yeah, it's prestige. Also, I think Frogboy somewhere not too long ago even made a comment that you have to spam houses too much and they're looking to fix that. 

I'm liking it the way it is.  The main point of getting high-level towns is to unlock the advanced buildings, not just to have lots of tiles to build on.  If you want more high-level buildings in your metropolis, replace your farms, mines, and lumbmermills.  Those low-level industries can be moved to low-level towns (that may stay low-level) or handled by pioneers.  I like the idea that an efficient metropolis has a different character than a useful small town.  It makes sense that a big city is a center of commerce and research but relies on the surrounding settlements for raw materials and food. 

I guess if the issue is that building lots of houses is too much busywork/annoying micromanagement/repetitive clicking for the player, you could keep the same strategy decisions but reduce the work by changing both the number of building tiles available at each city level, and the number of houses needed to reach that level.