With the current implementation that makes no difference.

There is no way to navigate to the city other than remembering which one it is on the map.
Outpost or city... they all take one spot on the scroll bar so it's not at all helpful in manageing your cities.

If there was a way to keep the micromanagement in check, noone would complain.
If we could sort the 3 metal producing cities to the top of that list, who cares if there are 50 empty outposts below?

Garrison/defend them? What for? Their point is either to tap resources (so no choice there) or to cover the land in influence so you don't have to defend them all the time.
If one is destroyed, build another. *shrug*

Real cities and mere outposts should be separate entities entirely, IMO.

I really agree that the city spam is way too easy and boring of a strategy.  Right now, I am enjoying the game, but I find it terribly easy and kind of simplistic.  I think the city spam is a large part of it.  There is no penalty to the ICS style of game play.  There is no need (or really a way that I can see) to specialize cities for different things (like in GalCiv2 or Civ IV, having one for research, one for food, once for unit building, etc).  As far as I can tell, there's no penalty for just building everything you can in every city.  The only balancing I really see that you have to manage is a bit with food/housing to determine where you want your size 5 cities to end up being.  I would really like more of a limiter on what you can build in cities as well as a way to specialize cities.

I also agree with some other posters that a city/unit screen is sorely needed. 

This game has massive potential, and I'm really looking forward to seeing it evolve.

Raven X's main reply is fantastic!  I hope the DEVS read it!  The idea of a much larger ZOC would solve almost all the problems in my opinion especially if outposts only drain resources until level 2 cities.  But overall: what he (RavenX) said!

Noone is against strategic city building. It's just that there shouldn't be many "real" cities to actually manage and interact with.
If nothing else, it helps the medieval atmosphere along.

What you built there is what I'd call a fort and I think there should be support for that.
Sort of a mini-city that you can only add 2-3 "buildings" to. (both to add defensive stuffs like a palisade and to make it fatter and block passages)

I don't think there really needs to be a separate settlement for "forts/outposts".  Technically speaking aren't forts simply really small cities with a wall around them?

The way I see it is that people who are constructing the exact same improvements in every settlement, even when it isn't actually needed, are just hurting themselves strategically.  For example, if Player A decides to build 20 settlements and he spends the time/money to build all of his improvements in each, he will lose to Player B who is specializing his improvements in cities that only truly benefit from the improvement.

If you take the ability away from players to build whatever they want in any city, you lose this strategy element of the game.  As the game is now, the smart player will know how to manage his money-making cities and his smaller forts, while the dumb player simply spams everything full of all of his improvements.

The key here is make sure that the benefit from building an improvement in a city which has the local resources to support it is more apparent.  For example, players building markets in cities with a mine should be rewarded much more than those who build markets in cities without a mine.  What I'm saying is that the benefit should be more striking than it is right now.  And I think this is a better solution than what RavenX suggests with bigger ZOC.

Thanks. I appreciate that. Part of my thought processes behind that reply were in line with a post Boogiebac made about cities a long time ago and what his inspirations were for setting them up the way he did. I think he did an awesome job conceptualizing them. The ZOC issue is the only thing lacking really to make sure we get the "feeling" he wanted to get across in the first place.

It's Worth the time because there is No Building Upkeep Costs. When the AI and players spam out cities, and each of those cities brings in tax revenue, and you build a Market to get another 25% income, it only takes 4 Markets to get another Gildar for your Kingdom/Empire. When you have 20 cities, which is quite common with them being spammed everywhere, that's an extra 5 Gildar in income. I would say that each city only bringing in 1 Gildar from taxes is pretty low and needs to be adjusted based on the city level. 1 Gildar should only come from a level 1 city, not a level 5 city, which should bring in a Lot More tax revenue because there's a Much Larger population to be taxed. Honestly, I haven't paid enough attention to notice what the Tax Income is, but 1 seems a bit low. Either way, my original point stands. With no Building Upkeep Costs all you have to do is build four Market places and you get another Gildar. With the average city count on a large map being between 20 and 30 cities, that adds up to a good bit of income.

All Buildings need to have Upkeep costs (which currently they don't). Why this wasn't thought of from the start I have no idea.

I agree your logic behind it is correct though. It wouldn't seem logical to build a market in a city that doesn't have a gold mine, but, the AI does and so do the players because the income adds up and every little bit helps when there's no cost for keeping the building maintained. More detail and more defined thought processes NEED to go into the mechanics. If the buildings had a upkeep costs neither the AI nor the players would build everything in every city to get the benefits because the loss would be greater than the benefits for building a Market in a city without a gold mine or other source of more income aside from the 1 tax income.

That 1 tax income seriously needs adjusting per population level if it really does only give 1 gildar. Again, more detailed thought processes are needed here.

This is a better idea than your larger ZOC suggestion.  This would still allow us to build lots of minor forts and outposts for combat strategy, and at the same time make each large city far more unique and varied.  It will allow us to focus our settlements on specific resources and other purposes (like choke-points, unit production, food, gold, etc) and get rid of the cookie-cutter cities.

I'd also like to see the influence zones of cities increased substantially. Spamming level 1 cities in wilderness areas for the sole reason of linking up the influence zones between my main resource node extraction cities is not fun.

I'm not spamming these cities for the economic benefits, but purely to spread my influence, and I don't buy the argument that multiplying 1resource/turn buildings in these spam cities is worth it. All these multiplier buildings are quite expensive if you bothered to do it across 20 crappy city sites and it takes a really long time for these cities to recoup your initial construction costs. My gold city with a couple gold mines, a palace and all the gold multiplier buildings easily produces most of the gold my entire empire needs. Instead of spending these resources building ineffectual buildings in sucky cities that I built solely to link up and spread my influence, I'd much rather spend these resources on troops to go capture AI cities with gold mines or whatever other resources I need and then multiply them in cities where it makes a big impact instead.

In addition, in other games the micro-management for a lot of cities is handled with a city overview screen where you can order new buildings and units directly. This feature would be great to have in Elemental, but unfortunately this won't work well in the case of building construction because you have to physically click the tiles you want the new buildings to be constructed on. Because sites for new buildings needs to be individually selected each time, managing a lot of cities in Elemental becomes very tedious.

Oh, and don't even get me started on playing the city-level-up memory bonus game for all these cities. Hmm, is this one of my thirty cities with a gold mine, library or temple that hasn't been harvested yet, or is it one of my spam cities instead and I should take the extra military unit? Well, this giant unmovable, annoying interface screen is in my way so I can't actually see the city that just leveled up, so I'll have to take my best guess I suppose. City leveling up bonuses is a great concept, but the execution here is just terrible because of the bad UI. Also I don't understand why there are only 4 bonus options: gold, the 2 types of research, or a unit. I guess my city with the 2 iron mines or 2 old growth forests gets stuck with the crappy extra unit instead of a nice multiplier.

That and the fact that late-game can get really annoying when you're trying to manage and protect a dozen cities.  In Civ 4 I end up just turn on the auto-governor because I can't be bothered with it.  That to me is not a desirable solution. 

There are some great suggestions here and I hope the devs are still reading this thread.   I think that there are two ways to fix this issue that would require very little work.

1.  Increase minimum spacing between cities – Currently, a pioneer must be 5 tiles away from a city to build a new city.  This could be increased to 10 or even greater.   This would tremendously help with city spacing/spamming.

2.  Outposts – I like this idea.  The negative of increasing city spacing to 10 (or greater) is that resources will go untapped until the zone of influence reaches it.  However, if we could utilize pioneers to create an outpost with a 1-tile radius to capture resources that are in the “wasteland” areas, the problem is solved.   This shouldn’t be difficult to implement since it is essentially the constructor/starbase system from GC2. 

An issue might come up when an outpost comes under the zone of influence of another faction.  Well, add a “rebelling” icon to the outpost (like in GC2 with mining bases) to warn the player that they’re about to lose the outpost.  The player can then decide if he wants to risk going to war to save that particular resource.

If the level 1 and 2 settlements are fine, but the larger ones being everywhere is not - then wouldn't:

1. Increasing the food cost of huts and other food-costing buildings (get les pop. per food and have to choose being stuff like markets or another hut)

2. Less food tiles. I mean for a shattered and broken world, I have a game where I started near 2 fertile land back to back, a wild wheat not too far off, another wild wheat with some exploring. I mean that's, what, +4, +4, +6, +6 [I think wheat is +6] food right there. Throw in irrigation system for +25%, because I'm definitely going to build it, and then the "resource discovery" techs in Adventure opened up some Bees and Orchards I could have used. That is a LOT of food. I didn't spam with it (I usually build settlements only to control resources my Influence won't eventually capture if I "build towards it" and level up the settlement), but I could have easily.

3. Put in the mechanic that an Essence-costing spell should be needed to make fertile land, and and even higher essence costing spell to make wild wheat. Sovereigns are supposed to be infusing life into the land back into the land. Why not let us actually do so?

Those three things would seem to solve the problem without changing anything else? Maybe I'll mod it in and see how it works. I do like the increased influence ranges and the idea of another influence zone building other than a settlement (I was calling myself trying to mod it in, even made a thread for it, but...stuff happened.)

Can't emphasize enough.

We really really really need to be able to click on the damn city so we can decide which bonus to apply.  I've taken to memorizing the names of the important ones and keeping track of when they'll level just so I'm prepared and apply the correct bonus.

My solution, which no should have to do, is to rename the city to <whatever name> (G,T,A,2xF). So when the city level up screen comes up, I know what the city has.  G=gold, T=tech, A=arcane, F=food, etc...). This was critical when I had one city with 2 gold mines and was trying to eek every gildar out of it.

Couldn't agree more!  Please let us look at the city before figuring out what bonus to give it.

Why not a rule that says a city needs a governor (a champion or sovereign) present (in the city) to direct the construction of new buildings and oversee the training of new units?

i.e. A city; other than your capital city, cannnot construct buildings or units without a champion or sovereign being present in the city.

This would limit city spam and increase the importance of recruiting champions.

Also there aren't actually any capital cities currently. You as the player may perceive one to be your capital, but in terms of actual gameplay mechanics there is nothing making it distinctively different from any other cities.

I havn't played elemental yet.  Game CD due in three days.  However, i have played CIV, MOM, GalCiv, etc.  I'm not sure what the concerns about spamming cities is all about.  Civ dealt with it by introducing increasingly expensive costs associated with ever increasing numbers of cities.  Complicated, but it worked.  If someone is modding Elemental aleady, this might be an approach worthooking into and exploring.

Hah!  Cool idea.  Although, you could get a little more fancy by using related keywords such as: "Arkenal the Gold Town", "The Advanced Hamlet of Ruuka", "The Magical City of Acoozoni", "Farmers Dale".

I am not even sure how to spam them out.  I am usually so desperate for food that my other cities can't even grow.  Even progressing through the adventure only opens so much food.  My typical city gets to level 3, and my main city gets to 4.  Most of the time I notice the AI has a bunch of level 2 cities.  They usually do have a ton of them though.

I do think there should be some kind of difference.  Also give some kind of Prestige, gold, or research bonus when your sovereign is there.

In the currently released build, there is 0 tax income. The only income sources are merchant champions, gold mines, the 1-gildar building, and the 7-gildar palace... oh, and monster hunting.

The main benefit of city spamming I see is that it allows you to make up for a poor resource draw.  Don't have any libraries?  Spam lvl 1 cities with studies so you can limp along until you find a library.  Solution: Tie the output of the base production buildings to population and add some sort of upkeep to every building.

Yes but the larger ZOC is needed so the towns are Spread Out more. That's the issue with spam. Having upkeep costs would help greatly too though. Mostly though it's an aesthetic issue. It just doesn't look good with tons of cities so close together.