I think that has something to do with the 1000 gold you start with now, which makes it very easy to spam.  I imagine in a more proper game you would start with 0.

I'm with BlackhatHedgehog on much of this.

Each city costs more to build than the next. It's just that you start with so much $$.  

I popped it up to 1000 to start to give myself a little extra time to start doing a proper job on the balancing of the cities because, the economic buildup is ridiculously slow right now.

There won't be a "tax" system per say. Instead, we need to reward players more for building up fewer, bigger cities.

I am not sure if you will have the expected result when you need to snake your city to get those nice ressources.

I definitely like the idea of higher build costs with each successive city. It should be very costly and expensive to build a city and not free! Also maybe some sort of pollution penalty the more cities you build? Maybe some sort of immigration system where you need a certain amount of population before you can build another city? Also agree here that players need to be rewarded for not city spamming. Any of these kind of ideas definitely help! Thanks for listening Frogboy!!!

its already been stated theyll change it allowing to build on rarities without having to city upon them

so the frog idea is perfect big and fully developed towns should be rewarded

even though im not sure its enough

what would prevent the player (or ai) to build +n cities equally big?

also with new lvl up its easy to pick food and have enough food to support many towns

dunno, i cant think of something apart from a malus preventing millions of cities

If you ever played Civilization IV you would know that they implemented a "maint" cost increase for every new settlement a player created to the point of too many settlements not enough income to sustain them. There was also corruption in Civilization and this had to be solved by building governmental buildings to increase law & order and lower corruption. Of course MOM had a very simple system based on population and taxes but it didn't really stop city spamming by the player or the ai and was easy to overcome with shrines and religious buildings. Distance should play a part as well in keeping control of settlements far away from the players capital. This could cause some swings of settlements to other players/npcs as they became closer to them than their own faction and influenced over to other faction cities with higher influence values. Nothing should remain set in stone sotospeak just because some player built it or found it. Some players spread out too far and too fast in most empire games and should be punished for this until they have the proper government and policing units and buildings in place.

I like a more realistic setting with few power units (dragons, balrogs, sky drakes (you get the picture) and more low to medium class units as in reality would be present moreso than hundreds of power high level units. So, keeping city populations down and not allowing city spamming can keep the game in this limelight. Nobody should be able to run about the board with stacks and stacks of power units like dragons and balrogs and sky drakes. Perhaps one or two IF they find the SPELL that can create them and then IF they have enough resources to cast them too. Games should be epic with many balances on how one can WIN the game not on how one can spam cities or make stacks and stacks of overpowering units. In fact someone with one city who can build up a mediocre army and go around and find all the elements to casting the SPell of Mastery(Making) should be able to win the game just as easy as someone who's running around the map with power stacks.

A feature I would also like to see is Invisible castle/city spell. That way even if you are weak you can keep yourself secluded and the other players either have to step upon your  doorsteps by one hex or cast a view area or view world spell instead.

What has to be managed carefully though, is if you add maintenance costs per city "owned", how do you reward a player for taking and keeping "captured" cities vs forcing them to have to Raze every one he/she takes over or risk tanking their Economy?

Will captured Cities be dinged for maint. costs as well?

It was that way once but I don't seem to notice it as much in 3A but then again I spend all my time trying to rid the map of the thousands and thousands of Goodies Huts, that seem to appear on the map now, despite a limited amount of Adventuring tech being researched. No need for the Magic Mushroom spell, just tech some in the Adventure Tree. LOL! 

Another point is that the AI currently doesn't grow it's cities very well, or seem to want to. After 900 turns I discovered an AI City and it had only reached L2 or L3 Max. and contained very little population. How the hell will they be any challenge?

Yes I know, the AI is not "IN" yet but let's see some of that AI magic in 3B PLEASE!

How is changing "city spam" to "village spam" a viable solution to.. spam? Besides, Frogboy already outlined the solution: resources play a much bigger role (meaning, your cities don't magically make stuff out of thin air), and in return you can claim resources in your own territory.

No spam needed.

That just means one would want more territories quicker to avail one self of those resources. City creep is quite slow currently. I cannot see it getting much faster but still in order to get that resource that is 7 tiles out can take a while. How long are you willing to wait for creep if a Pioneer can go plunk down a Village for instant resource gratification?

The only "real" solution to true "City Spam" is a very heavy maintenance cost. So bad in fact that everyone will bitch for months about how bad it is. (sadly, NOT FUN!)

Otherwise, curbing income sources may help as well. (sadly, still NOT FUN!)

A way to handle the city spam is to remove the “instant” upgrade of a city once it reaches X people.  Perhaps a step could be added where you have to pay X amount of gold to implement the upgrade (call it infrastructure costs for more populace, etc.).   To increase the emphasis on less but more powerful cities, you could make a vast number of the improvements occur after a city is upgraded certain levels.

For example, to upgrade my first city in the current system, all I need is a workshop, houses and a garden.  Then I sit back and wait until the city automatically upgrades to a “village.”  Under the system that I’m suggesting, you would get an in-game prompt that asks “Do you want to upgrade the city, then pay X gold.”  As a player, you want the city upgraded to unlock the higher level improvement tiles.  But you are going to be required to preserve enough gold to enable to upgrade.

This might not alleviate the issue of several “level 1 cities.”  However, without the useful improvement tiles offered in “level 2+ cities,” the player/AI would just be wasting their own time and money by using the city spam tactic. 

I apologize if this idea has already been mentioned, but I believe it is an easily implemented way to resolve the city spam problem.

Brad already has the right idea here; there's no need to punish players for spamming cities. You just need to give players a better option instead of building new cities, such as improving existing ones.

Say I have a level 5 capital, two level 3 cities, and 500 gold to spend. I can spend that gold on a new building for my capital, or spend it getting the 3's to a higher level, or found a new level 1 city. To cut down on city spam, you just need to make the first two options more effective than the third.

So what if, for example, there were a bunch of uber buildings only available in level 5+ cities, each of which costs 500g and produces oh, say +20 of some resource, more than you'd get out of an entire level 1 city. As long as my capital has room left, I'll be saving my gold for those buildings rather than spamming new cities. And when my capital is full, I'll be spending my gold on the level 3 cities, getting them up to 5 so they too can have their uber buildings. Sure you could spend that gold on a bunch of level 1 cities, but it just wouldn't be the best option for improving your empire, players (and well designed AIs) will generally go with the smart choice.

If city spam is happening, then it's probably because it is the smart choice - you don't need artificial limitations to fix this, you just need to rebalance the game such that it's no longer a better idea to build a new level 1 city instead of improving existing level 5's.

Practically speaking, I think the main cause of city spam, right now, is materials* - unless you take the lumbermill trait, the only way to produce materials is a bunch of little workshops any level 1 city can build. Materials and gold are the primary 'economic' resources used to make the buildings that produce more resources, and while level 5 cities can produce several times the gold of level 1s (thus providing an incentive to level up cities rather than spam them), my level 5 capital still produces 1 material per turn just like any level 1 city - this is a problem. So even if I really, really want to develop my capital fully and I really don't want to spam a bunch of little cities, I still have to city spam just to produce the materials to develop my capital with all those essential economic buildings. This isn't a flaw in the game mechanics, it's just a lack of material producing buildings above city level 1, easily fixed by giving everyone lumbermills back and making the trait do something else (a third material boost on top of that, faster build times?).

Now, materials aren't the only problem, just the biggest one at the moment. There are other changes that'd help - increasing the cost of new cities, starting with less gold, adding more buildings only available at higher city levels (like the hypothetical 500g uber building mentioned above), there isn't any one magic change that would fix city spam. But these are all easy changes to make, and such balance fixes are all that's really needed, not new game mechanics like city maintenance costs, paid upgrades, taxes, etc. I'm not saying those are bad ideas, just unnecessary when a few balance fixes to existing game mechanics would accomplish the same thing.

*Edit: I'm deliberately ignoring another major cause of city spam, building level 1 cities just to get some essential resource - because, I hope, this'll be going away anyway with the promised changes to resource gathering.

I can understand why a tax system can be hard to balance, but wouldn't a tax system actually favor larger cities over small cities spam? Since food is scarce, and higher level cities have access to denser population buildings (like the slum or houses versus huts), restricting yourself to a few cities with a lot of housing will net you a lot more population than using food to make a bunch of level 2 or 3 cities. Having a source of income proportional to your populations then discourage cities spam (although it doesn't prevent the player from leaving his spammed cities at level 1).