Slow down the expansion of borders into enemy territory

I agree with the problem of clashing borders, but I'm not sure if I have a strong opinion on city capturing. For border clashing:

Taking a page out of Sins of a Solar Empire, have competing borders be a battle of prestige. I believe in one of the 3B previews Brad mentioned that prestige increases the area of influence, but if not then it should.

Say you have a level 5 city that's making 10 prestige. Opponent builds a city to clash with your border. Being a level 1 with no buildings, it produces 1 prestige. Due to the 9 prestige difference, it cannot push its influence into your border, and can only expand away from it. If that city manages to build up to generate 11 prestige, it's not making 11 to your 10, so every X turns it will push one tile into your territory.

Obviously cities have a "maximum" influence area, which should be kept so one city can't eventually take over the entire map by influence, but it's a good mechanic I think to deal with competing nation borders.

I really hate it that only cities give influence, this is so detached from reality and wrong on so many levels. Civ 5 is doing it right imo. They haven't said what happens when a city is captured, but how it spreads is the best I've seen/heard. Empire:TW has the conquering right, taking a land means that the population will hate you and that unless you control them, an army will form to throw you out. This means that even if you defeat his armies, you msut have sufficiently many troops left to hold the region. Region population decides how many rebels you will get as well, which means that some regions throw very little against you, while others form nasty groups. Something like this should be doable unless the player torches the enemy city.

A simple fix would be to stop influence from spreading in captured cities unless you have controlled them for x turns unless the city is lvl 1 (an outpost).

Which is what? I haven't been following Civ 5 so I don't know. As to it being wrong, how so? Cities is where you have all your buildings, what else would give influence if not the majestic grandeur of your awesome city?

Zones of control are divided into several things:

Military control: Ie whose army has the most bang, this is something every leader considers yet they are free to act.

Domestic control: The land in which you are the financial leader, everyone buys your goods, reads your books, yet this doesn't directly change politics.

Political control: National borders. This is my land, this is my rock, that will be your rock. Etc. Derives from what you army can protect and how well communications work. This has nothing to do with who has the best artists or the best polished cities.

Cultural control: Who dictates the general thought, how you should live, how you should eat, and this only affect where everyday communication can reach.

Games tend to go for option nr 4 while 1,2, and 3 are even more important in reality. Military might, commerce, and politics should say more in how borders change than point 4.

Most of that doesn't really apply to games, I don't think. In Elemental, your zone of influence is basically your national border. Given that there's no religion/cultural system, what this border actually "means" is wide open to interpretation. It might not be military, certainly, but the big cities get all the trade, thus fulfilling the "domestic control" one, no?

In short - games are games. Applying real-world "mechanics", if you will, to them simply because they're real world mechanics doesn't necessarily make for a fun game.

How exactly would you suggest it being done?

I don't know... That's why I'm sad right now.

Regional control is fine to a point, and reflects reality much better, yet it limits the timeframe heavily, since region games don't want to change or add new regions. In a way all gridbased games are regions, but it always swings around the cities. Only 1/10 (give or take a lot since I pulled this out of my elbow) of the people lived in cities at the start of the 19th century. And while those do affect more than any one tenth of the country, they do definitely not solely decide a nation. You have far from lost if you lose a city in real life. You have lost if you lose your army.

I did a sketch on a way to make tbs games more realistic without going HoI, yet I can't find it now. It would still be boring in many aspects. For one, you wouldn't chose what to research until mid game, everything would be breakthroughs and technology diffusion from distant lands. Yet on many aspects it would still be a game, a prefectly playable game that would have immersive qualities as the world would grow by itself, you would be tending a nation, isntead of a bunch of cities.

EDIT: We are going off topic, if this is interesting, we should make a new thread.

EDIT 2: It is interesting, I'll make a new thred.

The thing is, Elemental is very limited in what it can do with influence due to the nature of it being game. In reality, nation borders are weird, except for purely geographical ones (coastlines, etc.). Elemental just has tiles that radiate around the city. And, it's much better off doing it uniform (meaning, it expands evenly all around the city), than trying to come up with how it would make sense to increase your influence by one tile in a specific direction.

The other issue is, real nations don't play to "win" as such, there's no accomplishing goal that ends the game. Elemental has victory conditions that emphasize military, diplomacy, etc. So while real nations have to juggle everything at once, we as players don't really have to. If I'm doing a Conquest victory, it's really not that necessary for me engage in politics/diplomacy, since all I'm doing is training guys to go kill other guys. Granted the average player is likely to dabble in a bit of everything (depending on the real depth of the final research trees, I suppose), but in general the system therefore has to remain fairly neutral and lenient since one path is meant to be as feasible as any other.

This more or less leaves us with a system that has to be fairly independent of the core paths and facilitate most kinds of average play. Which is why it sort of just comes down to cities. If you build a city, you'll need resources. To get resources, you need territory. In keeping more or less neutral, it's a fairly logical link to tie the cities themselves to border expansion. I do think it would be interesting if, say, there were military improvements that you could build that expanded your influence, or if you could negotiate for a wider border (though the practical use of this remains in question), but given that Turn Based 4X games are traditionally "play however you want", I don't think it would be a good idea to tie up all the various paths into this core mechanic.

Anyways, I think its better for Elemental's influence to be radial from each influential center.

City influence can be increasing (depending on city size) while Fort influence can be static.

City influence, for instance, could increase based by Prestige but have a "cap" based on city size.

The "cap" for a size 5 city could be soft-capped, or at a high invisible ceiling.

Also, spawns for bandits and rebels should be able to occur within influence borders. (and within LOS)

And spawns for animals/monsters should still (although less likely I guess) be allowed to spawn within forests, swamps, and other uncivilized areas within the borders of Influence.

By soft-capped, do you mean something like tying it to one of the repeatable research techs? I could probably go for that a bit. The main issue is that I don't want to see a single level 5 city spreading to a quarter of the map and grabbing up all the resources. Since resources go to the nearest city, this would always make few cities much more beneficial than more cities - you get the same income, and can concentrate defenses much better. In the late game on large maps you'd just end up with huge territories spawning from very few cities, which just wouldn't be fun.

@ Annatar11

say each cap has a 3 tile radius ... so 1 is 3, 2 is 6, 3 is 9, Size 4 is 12.

Then, for size 5 it goes at the normal prestige/influence rate for the first 3 tiles outwards (from center dot of city?), and on the 4th tile the rate is halved. and on the 6th tile the rate is halved again. and on the 8th tile the rate is halved again. and on the 10th tile the rate is once again halved. and then every tile after the 10th tile the rate is halved.

so basically you get 3 -> 6 -> 9 -> 12 -> 15 ... 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 ++

and at each interval it costs slightly more prestige per tile, yet after the 15 benchmark it starts costing exponentially more prestige.

So with enough turns, a really high prestige size 5 city "could" theoretically cover a quarter the map ... but the larger the map the more turns it would take.

Perhaps thousands of turns on a very large map.

yes i agree with this, you shouldn't get instant control.  it should be won over time as you quell the masses.  as your influence grows then you get the associated resources as the influence ring takes over it.  good idea!