So, if this is a problem, what can be done about it?  After all, Stardock have been putting in heaps of overtime effort to get 3B out tonight, how are they going to re-jig magic research in the time before release? 

Best regards,
Steven.

Would making it so that the higher your essence is, the higher your total magical power is (mana, spells, power etc), yet essence is needed to make land fertile so as your borders expand your essence decreases; therefore having a inverse relationship between empire size and magical power.

I don't see a smaller empire as having difficulties keeping up magically, or in adventuring.  The problem is that now, mundane research (as opposed to acquiring spells) is directly tied to the amount of territory you control, or namely the type of territory you control (lots of lost libraries=high research).  So that larger empire is automatically going to be more advanced technologically.  Personally, I think that if you are a less advanced nation that is trading with a more advanced one, tech points should be part of the caravan.  The further behind you are in tech, the more tech points you get every time a caravan comes in from that nation (if you are ahead in overall tech levels, this shouldn't benefit you, or perhaps you gain a little bit more money as a result).  This represents tech diffusion in a realistic fashion, and enables a small trading nation to keep up technologically.

Hopefully, the new resource based city development should deal with this. See Brad's 3B video, hopefully will allay all or most of your fears.

In fact, the new system is the problem. Because to gain more research or more magical power, you need to control more ressources which means having a larger empire. So my suggestion is according to plan A or B on the original post,

Plan A: either there is nothing magical on the land or no magic powerup that can be built in cities (magic vs non-magic)

plan B: there are no ressources or buildings that increase you technological or magical research rating (Research vs power)

Personally, I would vote for plan B considering the way elemental is currently designed right now.

Some thoughts about trading. Trading does not necessarily increase your research level, it diversify your research. For example, in master of orion 2, in each technology field, you could take in average 1 tech out of 3. Trading allows you to get the 2 tech you have missed, but it should not allow you to get technology from a level higher than you can actually understand.

I strongly agree with the OP. Currently, if you early conquer an enemy with, like, 3 towns, you have won the game.

You gain the production of those towns (food, research, gildar), but you dont pay anything.

Like I did before, I strongly suggest maintenance cost for towns. The founding cost is just not enough, cause when conquering, there is no founding.

These are worries, yes.  Bigger empires are not always better.

Best regards,
Steven. 

Yup, add me to the list that agrees with the OP.

I think the benefits of expansion should be in creating more mundane units, access to more mundane resources, denying others access to certain areas, and of course the fast travel with blink/teleport (useful for quests).

I think the current way of attaining tech and magic should simply be ONE way to do it....and not even the main one.

I'll list some other ways a player can gain research and magic without needing to expand their territory. These are just a few from the top of my head to get the ball rolling....im sure you can think of more and better ones.

Directly from the Sovereign or a Champion

Allow the gain of research and magic points by simply moving the sovereign or a champion onto the lost library or arcane temple, and then leaving them there. The higher the sovereign or a champion's intelligence the more research points gained each turn. The higher their wisdom, the more arcane points gained from arcane temples.

The flavor behind this is that the sovereign or champion is directly "studying" the library or temple.

Once a player builds/"fortifies" on the library/temple in their territory, it effectively denies other players from researching there, and allows the player controlling it to research without needing a champion on it. Other players can then then destroy this upgrade, and move in a champion to continue (even if its still on the other player's territory!).

Quests

Quests rewards should also include lost scrolls and such that give players a sizeable boost in research/magic. The harder the quest, the better the boost. Frankly I think this should be the main way to gain tech/magic, since it wouldn't directly favor large territories..... however, indirectly, having control of larger areas would facilitate in completing quests and gaining tech/magic that way.

Defeating Mobs

This could also tie into quests, but not necessarily always. Defeating an evil wizard or magical being should give a boost in research and magic. Flavor reasons: you learn their secrets or absorb their power/knowledge after defeating them.

***Forgive the big obnoxious bold brown text, but I see a lot people losing heart over this build. There really is no reason to worry right now. I like the lore and world behind elemental, but the main draw for me has always been the modding capabilities of the game. They have spent A LOT more time in allowing players to mod the game, then the actual game. The fact that they will incorporate mods from the community into the cannon game means the community will make the game better and better...and thats why i'm here really. Brad himself said that the modding community will shame them. Many mods have shamed the original game, and looks like elemental will give crazy modding control to the player. Its only been a few weeks where they started seriously focusing on the gameplay....and each build is heck of a lot better then the last...it'll get there....if not we'll make it get there ; )

I fully support this approach. Linear benefits will always encourage city spam. There needs to be some increasing global upkeep or production penalty for the whole kingdom for any and each city beyond the first.

The archmage who only controls one city should be the most powerful spellcaster since he is spending all his time on magic instead of expanding / governing multiple cities. Save for controlling shards which would be easier for a larger kingdom. But there could be ways to contest the shards remotely with magic.

Perhaps that's the key - should you want to expand and found new cities, you would get more production, more troops and more tech research at the cost of falling behind in magic. Making it a trade off between magic potential and mundane technological and military power.

So make spell research more personal for the Sovereign. Have him sit in his tower if he wants to learn new spells.

Actually. Why not? Because typically its not fun when your carefully created empire breaks apart and you can't do anything aganist it. Especially if you are on your hard earned way to victory.

So making it more difficult to archieve a powerlevel that dominates all other nations is good design, arbitray penalties because you did overcome the competition is not.

Europa Universalis, e.g., had techs getting more expensive the more regions you controlled. The idea was ok, but the had gon a bit to far, in a way, that the smalles nations (1 province) would be tech leaders, and only nations comprising of, if i remember correctly about 200 provinces were equally fast researchers. In between you lost the technology race.

So in that game the average number of research points per region were relevant for your technological progress. In fact something like this could also work in Elemental. 

Consider the fact that when the research is distributed around the empire and not centralized, two things would often be researched at two places simultaneously.

Therefore your tech progression could be something like: The best Research City produces 100% research points, the second largest 50% and all other cities 25% (numbers to be tweaked). So growing beyond two cities would then be somewhat rewarding (technology wise) but the largest part of the technology could also be obtained by faction controlling only two cities. This would also fit the game design of trying to build few specialized cities. The same approach could then be applied to diplomatic influence and arcane research. Therefore: Many cities would result in large armies, but not automatically a large technological advantage.

Perhaps Kingdoms/Empires could have a 'dynamism' rating that increases in proportion to realm size. Huge realms become staid and slothful in charactor- plumbing, buying food rather than hunting it and indulging in the vices of civilization reduce technological research and increase expansion costs. 'Barbarians', being somewhat more hardy, could have small realms but have a high dynamism rating- fast production (but poor army sizes), high reproduction, low costs and fast research of select low techs.

One of the problems with techs in games like Civ4 was that you could easily research all of them and if you missed out, say, Stirrups you could go back after a while and it'd be done in 10 turns or so. Making all techs increase in turn-time as you advance could be linked to dynamism, e.g-

1/ Kingdom of Butthurt has extended to ten cities and a very large territory. It's dynamism has suffered as a result and is now at 20% (lower is worse).

2/ Having just researched sophisticated war-machines, it now wishes to research a fairly basic cavalry upgrade- stirrups. Because it's dynamism is low, the Kingdom can only research it at a +80% penalty (100 minus 20% dynamism), and it's base research cost is the same as the last research you completed (in our case War-machines). This may sound unrealistic, but take into account Stirrups will have to be distributed throughout the sizeable realm, stables will have to purchase them, train riders to utilise them etc. The research takes into account the scale of implementation throughout the realm.

Or something similar. It would at least ensure kingdoms/empires had differing strengths rather than the late-game generic ones of civ4: FfH2.

I like these ideas.  Is there any way to incorporate City Maintenance (and higher Captured City Maintenance and reduced growth of influence of Captured Cities) into Elemental before release, or will have to be left to mods?  And would the above changes be possible in mods?

Best regards,
Steven.

Larienna, thank you for putting together a clear and concise analysis.

I don't buy your scenario, namely because I have not experienced my 4x games that way.  Rather, I have had to be clever to orchestrate a come-from-behind win against AIs, especially in CIV IV, where the outcome was most certainly in doubt the entire time.  I know that that kind of experience is not necessarily common, but to say that your three stage scenario is the only way, or even the most typical way, these games play out is not true in my experience.

I do think that you have identified a real problem, not of 4x games, but more generically a problem inherent to free-for-all games where players cannot cooperate effectively.  In my experiences with multiplayer free-for-alls in CIV IV, the player who gets ahead first most assuredly does not finish with the win .

Frogboy's a good guy and a strong AI coder, but I don't delude myself into thinking that AIs will be able to appropriately identify, collaborate against, and then backstab each other while dealing with a human player, so we're faced with solving the problem through game mechanics.

Our goal, should be to keep players in contention as long as possible.  I have an aversion to the technology and research hobbling that people are advocating here.  EU3 really did go too far in that regard, and I think we can come up with a better system, closer to the second option that Larienna identified.

I think that the imperial efficiency system I developed with prompting from Tansunke in this thread might give a good idea of the kinds of ideas we can use to deal with this problem, without taking a bat to the kneecaps of large empires.  The end result of such a system, would be that small empires, with a moderate investment in resources and buildings could achieve production multipliers of 200 - 300%, whilst large empires would be spending large amounts of resources just to be in the 105% range (a well run large empire).