Well this alone will not stop the city spam... because inserting new cities inside your ZOC will each provide 1 gold, 1 material, 1 arcane... and if you have the gold 1 research.  The distance between each city will also need to be increased.

I'm with all those saying the food mechanic is the best way to address city spam. It fits the setting and the mechanic is already there with the intent to stop city spam, it just fails because level 1 cities don't cost food

• Pioneers and settlements cost 1 food
• You start with 1 food
• Caravans don't give you food - gold is a better fit and will help with gildar being the limiting resource outside of monster farming
• Nature's Bounty maybe needs to be modified/removed if too strong early with this setup
• No need to be able to grab resources outside of your influence - better to have to make tough decision as to city location

At the very least this stops city spam in the early game. It may still be a (lesser) problem later on, but that has less impact and each nation wll have had the chance to go and grab a few good spots. Any late game spam issues can be addressed once the early game is sorted

True. That's why I added aditions in a later reply, but a combination of things could. Here's something I said on Pg4:

"My problems aren't with getting Gildar from my cities or anything like that. It's the very simple fact that there Are Too Many Cities, period. Multiple fixes "could" be used, which is true and in the long run probably what's needed. In the short term, they simply need to stop the AI and players from needing to build so many cities to grab up resources that are four tiles away. The playing, having human intelligence, will wait until the ZoC spreads and then build on the new resource. The AI, not having this intellect, Won't, and will simply build a city and then build another city four tiles away, which looks incredibly bad/stupid."

Hmm, wasn't talking about any Mods, but I see what you mean. Also true having more cities doing research is better, but to me, I think setting up another city or outpost just to build a research structure might be "abuse". It's a valid tactic I'd say, would have to agree there, but, it makes the map look really bad. A better way would be to just let players build more stuff within their ZoC. Then you could build more research structures or whatever it was you trying to do faster than your enemy.

I agree allowing things to be built in strategic places should be allowed, which is why I would of built my city in the pass that needed guarding from the start .

Outpost structures, or Forts, or something should be allowed that don't grow and don't count as a city. I think that might fix the issue you're having based on your play-style. Letting the AI and players spam up the map with cities isn't the answer though and is as much a form of abuse as cheating with cheat codes (not to mention making the map look like crap).

Pioneers should NOT cost food. Level 1 CITIES should have a -1 food modifier (except for your capital, which should naturally produce +1 food or whatever).

That way, if you lose a pioneer, you aren't out 1 food for the rest of the game :/

Caravans should not give food, but give gold instead.

The "Cheaper Pioneer" perk drops the food cost for level 1 cities from 1 to .5.

It could also come back to "City Specialization". Simply let the player build a bunch of farms, or research structures, or whatever, like we did with our planets in Gal Civ 2. This allowed players to specialize their planets and made planets count for something. Loose a major food producing planet and your empire would start starving. Same should apply here. Loose a major food producing city and your faction starts starving. Loose a important researching city and your research slows down, etc etc.

Right now there's no incentive to specialize and no draw backs to spamming, there needs to be both. Allow Specialization by getting rid of the mechanic that's stopping players from building multiple types of the same structures in cities, and add in building maintenance costs to keep players from over doing it. Enlarge the rate of ZoC spread so players and AI don't have to build cities every four steps because the resources will already be in their spread. Seriously, these things are what's needed to fix this. Until that happens the map is going to continue to be One Big City.

Kalin: I can see what you mean when you say "Even if you vary it base on map size (min 10-15 tiles on a small map = no other cities)", and honestly this is a problem with the maps being Too Small. All of them. A level 5 city can cover a 1/10th of a small map by its-self. I think part of the purpose behind playing a small map to begin with is that people want to play a Fast Game, with limited resources and limited space and limited enemies. This is why people would play a small map.

I have some thoughts on some of the ideas put forth and some possible fixes.

First, I agree that there are too many cities with no drawbacks, especially in a downtrodden world.  I also think that the current ZoC is just right, especially early on, and maybe a little too fast later.  It would seem odd to me to have small cities somehow controlling large swaths of land. Sure, as you gain power and research the right techs, you ought to be able to control more land with small cities, but I don't see ZoC increases as making more sense than city spamming.  It, for me, is a lore-breaking mechanic to increase ZoC very much.

My suggestions (some of which have been suggested earlier):

A unit or modified caravan that can harvest resources outside the ZoC at a decreased rate compared to building the structure within the ZoC.  Creatures should aggressively target these, particularly food.  I think it would be great if certain creatures target certain resources (like trolls might go after gold) but that's an AI issue and not crucial.  It would just add depth to the game play.

No level 1 cities besides the capital produce prestige unless (in order of game-appearance): The sovereign or a prestige generating hero is present in the city - meaning all sovereigns are at least +1 prestige, unless the player choices not to as a penalty -- people will follow sovereigns anywhere, I would think; a building is placed to generate growth; passive prestige-generating technology is researched (or some other benchmark for a base +1 prestige to kick in).  The reason for all this is that growth in a new, out-of-the-way city will be very slow, I would think.  Scary and dangerous.

Level 1 cities can only build resource structures, houses and 1 of the basic +1 structures.  This would limit the usefulness of cities in terms of resource generation unless well-placed and also encourage city specialization.

Each city generates a build cost.  It could be a -1 to the food total, which might severally limit expansion early on.  Or it could be a gildar cost per turn in a form such as x*(n-1), where n is the number of cities and x is some multiplier.  That way the capital is free,  and if x=1, the second city has a cost of 1 gildar/turn, the third has a cost of 2 (bringing the total cost to 3), the fourth a cost of 3 (6 total), etc.  That would also limit early expansion especially because not all new cities will get a +1 gildar unless that's the only thing they get.

I think also tying the level of unit training to city type might be something worth thinking about, assuming the tech has been researched.;  So the first two training tiers would be available level 1, then next at level 2, the final at level 3+.  That would reduce the effectiveness of troops coming from small, undeveloped areas where you're less likely to have master trainers, but I'm not sold on that idea.  Just something that would reduce the desire for level 1 troop-producing towns.  However, the lack of population growth discussed above would also have the same impact initially.

Finally, perhaps increasing the 5 tile nearness limit to something more like 7 or 10.

Maybe I'm missing something but how does ZoC effect "Lore" at all? The Lore is that the world is destroyed and being rebuilt. The ZoC is how much of an area a city controls around it, meaning you can build on a resource without needing to build ANOTHER city. If the world is shattered, and being rebuilt, and there aren't a lot of people, WHERE is the Population coming from to support all these cities that are being spammed? To me it seems like you got it backwards. Increasing the ZoC FITS with the Lore because there aren't supposed to be a lot of people, hence one small city could control VAST amounts of land because it's all just barren wasteland. There Shouldn't Be enough People to support lots of new cities sprouting up. That goes Directly Against the Lore.

If anything some of the Lore has incredibly Hampered game-play by limiting ideas so much.

The whole reason behind increasing the ZoC is so the player and the AI can grab resources WITHOUT needing to place a city every few tiles.

I like the rest of your post though and I think there's some merit to those ideas. Still, no matter what way it's done, the city spam has GOT TO GO.

I think it is obvious. Spamming cities is bad because it may be the best way to win the game but the purpose of any game is to be fun. Having to manage 20 cities - own and captured from the AI (and you cannot raise them coz the AI will rebuild them ASAP) takes away all the fun. Not to mention there is no warnings when enemy/brigands/monsters enter you teritorry so you will have to disable the "auto end of turn" feature and manually check each of the cities each turn. Or just put every research on "war", spam 2 squads of militia and wipe the map.  

But doesn't this fit with the background...the land is ruined. People are the most valuable resource to run an empire/kingdom, from balcksmiths to street sweepers.  Otherwise it would be mage wars. And people require food.

This is the best reason against city spam I have read so far. Having too many cities starts to take the fun away...longer turns. Imagine a 4v4 multiplayer game where everyone has to wait for the city spammer because it takes him 20 mins to manage his numerous cities.

I don't see why this would take long. If they put in a good city management screen, this should take few minutes tops.

I'd do something like :

- All production buildings move up one rank in city level. Meaning all those buildings require a city rank 1 to be made

- Initial town starts at level 2 with some kind of Palace structure that acts as an house that uses no food.

- No more food production out of thin air. Food production buffs improve an existing resource tile only.

That way, you can make as many "outposts" as you want. An outpost is a level 1 city that produces no resources by itself but can house troops, maybe produce more of them and can be used to link existing resource tiles.

Drawbacks : since food is SO important, your first city will always be build on top of such a source and such, it means your first capital city will always end-up specialized as a food production town.

use food supply. spread food available over all settlement in proportion to their level. the higher the food supply, the faster the population growth. due to other negative factors (like overcrowding and special buildings), the population growth eventually levels out and population becomes static until food supply or other factors change (see total war games). so if you build lots of settlements, they level out at lower populations than if you just had a few. so you have to weigh those level one production factors against getting high level cities. if you don't want some villages to develop, to higher levels (and just use them to control resources), then just don't build any houses (which determine the hard cap, but don't cost any food).

simples.

Regarding increasing influence / zone of control, I don't pretend this will solve the issue of too many cities. People who still want to spam them for economic reasons still can and will. It may solve one subset of city spam though, i.e. little outposts purely to make one's border's coherent, to fill in the gaps in the wilderness.

It's occured to me that it's also a scaling issue. I typically play large maps and on those you can often have large wilderness areas between resource node clusters. In this case, I definitely feel the need to spam cities just to fill in the gaps so I can run caravans and only need strong defenses on my outer borders. On large maps then, I'd definitely like to see larger city influence rings / zones of control. However, the current rate of influence spread seems pretty balanced for medium maps, while you could probably make the argument that it spreads too quickly / is too large on small maps. Is there any reason this scaling couldn't happen automatically in game set up, when people pick their map size?

Again, I don't think this will solve city spam, but it's a legitimate balance issue in its own right and it seems like it would be a pretty quick / easy change for them to make.

As for making level 1 cities all over the place undesirable, that will be a more complicated problem to solve. It seems to me the key is some sort of maintenance mechanic, however they want to implement it. This is a harsh world where people struggle for survival. A level 1 city should be a net drain on resources (except for your first city) and need support from more established cities to survive. 

One more "IF" for the game. Four patches and two hotfixes and still there are tons of "IFs". The problem is the main game designer knows the theory but lacks practical understanding about how this game exactly should be made. The result so far - tedious (and boring)micromanagement and lack of most obvious interface options. So don't hold your breath for "good city management screen".

To me, that sounds like the need for a defensive building, like a fort or something that can fill a defensive role. I think the "defensive" use of cities is born out of a lack of any other building that can house troops and block areas.

Wow, where did that one come from? lol. If you've played GalCiv2, you'd know they have done decent management screens before. I'm sure they could whip up a similar screen if that is what they felt is needed. However, if I recall correctly, the reason they borrowed the empire tree interface from Sins was because they originally envisioned the players to having a few strong and specialized cities, and thought that it would be better to have something easily accessible (the info card with mouseover is pretty nice). Of course the system didn't translate too well here for a variety of reasons, and the city spam problem made it unmanageable, which is why we're talking about this now.

Back on topic though:

A couple of people suggested a small maintenance cost, and while I didn't find anything particularly wrong with the idea, I'm inclined to say that a "small" maintenance won't actually do much to help the situation. As mentioned in one of my earlier post, I find Gildar way too easy to come by, typically, my capital with 2-3 gold mine (from adventuring tech), palace and some 300+% Gildar bonus produces upwards of 80-100+ Gildar per turn, then you have Gildar drops from hunting, that can amount to another 200-300 Gildar per turn rather easily (even more as the game goes on). The only serious Gildar drain in the game thus far comes from decking out a bunch of your heroes like Mr.T. So if you were to add a 1 Gildar maintenance cost to a building, or  x-1 cost to a city, the end result is that I'd just leave a bigger hunting ground and kill another mob or two, or leave a hero unequipped (don't need to equip them at all since they are only there to cast blizzard/deflect anyways). The maintenance cost on buildings also has the downside of making your large cities unproductive since it naturally has more buildings which seems counter intuitive to the problem at hand, while the x-1 runs into a problem of scale (doesn't do anything for smaller maps, a pain on big maps).

If you want to be serious about using Gildar as the driving force, you have to seriously up the maintenance cost for cities, and then adjust that adequately by giving bonuses on higher level cities. For example:

Lv1 Outpost cost 20 Gildar to maintain a turn.

Lv2 Villages cost 10 Gildar to maintain a turn.

Lv3 Towns cost no maintenance.

Lv4 Cities produces 10 Gildar a turn.

Lv5 Metropolis produces 20 Gildar a turn.

Have the capital be free of maintenance. Just think of this as the cost for settling and terraforming a new area (to your chosen land), develop and maintain it, etc. As the city grows, the population pays more and more taxes that offset this cost until it breaks even and eventually nets you money. Thus, city building becomes somewhat of an investment that can pay off if the game lasts long enough, and forces city development, not city spamming. Also, this way, you can build a little outpost to defend whatever you like, wherever you like, you just have to pay a bit to maintain it. You can also still build outposts to get more research/mats/arcane, but you won't be able to fill the map with these unless you have an insane Gildar economy (which you might get with enough big cities) or are willing to invest tons of your time fighting monsters. Even then, you'll still want to put in some effort to develop those cities at least to a lv3 Town, if not to lv4 to make back some of your investment. The downside to this is that it will drastically slow down early expansion (and the AI have to be taught better city building mechanics), which might, or might not be, what the devs are looking for.

Yea I'm not a big fan of the "Lore" but in a sandbox game this LORE should not get in the way of playing the game. I like the ZOC and would not want it slowed down at all.

Interesting idea, I think you may be on the right track. However, I think maybe this particular formulation would be a bit too crippling in the early game. Some other games address this by having some sort of inflation mechanic so that maintenance costs go up as the game drags on. Also, I don't think we need to necessarily limit ourselves to a purely guildar based maintenance cost. Food is also another likely candidate as others have already mentioned.

Part of the problem with balancing this is going to be that the economy is so random and inconsistent in this game. It's not based directly on the population and size of your ctiies like in most other games, but rather primarily based on the resource nodes and using cities to multiply their output. And because the resource nodes you get is so random and inconsistent on each map, so too is your economy. Your proposal for guildar based maintenance is fine if you can find some gold mines in your starting area, but if not you're in for a struggling slow start as it is and it will be much worse under this proposal. You can maybe get one or two gold mines through adventure tech, but it could take a while to get there. You can also farm some gold from monsters, but will have trouble supporting the troops to do it effectively until you get at least one gold mine (which if you are founding a new city to get will be a net drain for quite a while as you work on getting this city to level 3 as quickly as possible). 

Currently one of the best solutions in this situation actually is to spam level 1 cities with a money changer to get you enough gold to get by in the early game. Ditto if you are missing other key nodes, e.g. a library, a temple, or have no source of materials. Which I think in itself is an indictment of the economic model in this game. For me, anyway, it's creating the feeling that it's all about grabbing those nodes and the cities themselves are trivial in comparison, when it should be the other way around.

I think if they implemented the steep gold maintenace costs you suggest (which, don't get me wrong, I think would probably work fine for mid to late game), they probably have to code it so everyone is guaranteed to get a gold mine at their starting location. Or they could do some sort of inflation mechanic for the maintenance costs as I previously mentioned. Perhaps even better, they could implement something like taxes, which would also help make level 5 cities more important and special and make population count for something besides unlocking a few high-level buildings.

I've thought about this a little, and if I was a modder I'd probably try and design this system (if it was possible) just to see how it plays out, but ... here was my rough idea:

• You can only build on land that is "reclaimed"  (In my mind, reclaimed land looks more lively than it does now.  Either by making the unclaimed land look even MORE dead, or the reclaimed land more bright and obviously alive -- think of how Disciples3 had obvious differences in terrain elements depending on which kingdom was in control of the lands)

• Your Sovereign can start the process by building the first settlement (and the ZOC grows around it and reclaims land).  You can then only build new things within that ZOC. (The Sov are, after all, the only ones with the power to make the world nice again.)

• ZOC would have to grow rather quickly, and probably reach further, instead of the current system - resources would have to have a set distance they added bonuses to the city, or like now, have diminishing returns (balanced of course) so one city nations aren't really all that feasible. --- Think, like the Civ4 Culture system, resources are useful close to the city .. but the cultural borders will expand beyond that.

• Perhaps if your Sovereign is stationed in a city and channeled power in some way, the ZOC of that city grows faster?  That would force a trade off between using your Sov to fight, or staying in town/defending town to push ZOC faster.  If the Sov-push effect was per-city, it'd also have you running around, deciding which city's ZOC you want to boost, making a spamming mechanic harder and adding at least some level of strategy to how ZOC work beyond "spam it".  If channeler children pushed ZOC or not would depend on balance issues. --Again, think Civ4 ... the Sov can boost the cultural border to expand faster, like certain Wonders in Civ4.  Your Sov is a walking wonder, after all.

• Pioneers do not create new pockets of ZOC (no more running around spamming cities).  New cities must be build within the reclaimed ZOC.

• Shards can be made important in this system.  Maybe they spread their own ZOC when tapped, or boost the speed your Sov's ZOC expands.  Maybe they can only be tapped by your Sov (it has to stand there and channel at them for a while, or fight strong guardian monsters utilizing the quest mechanics) and it'll start reclaiming area around it for your kingdom.

• I'd like to see the shards influence the world even just cosmetically.  When tapped they should expand their influence to the area around them.  Fire shards turn a few tiles around them into desert ... water would spawn swamp ... earth would grow hilly or something, or forest ... having them even just remotely alter the landscape and make it instantly more "vibrant" and colorful around them gives them a "wow" factor.

That, to me, makes the lore fit (Sov is very important to fixing the world again) and instead of city spam, you'd have a more gradual domino effect ... as first city ZOC grows, you place further cities to grab resources and push their ZOC, expanding your bubble outward.  No more random pioneer "plops" all over the map to eat up space as fast as possible to deny the AI resources and remove monster spawns.

It also makes the mini-factions more important, since they come with a built city and ZOC.  Capturing them gives you a new map area to expand from (if there was a way added to increase the ZOC from their outposts ... or maybe just by utilizing the Sov-push method above).  They'd probably have to be beefed up to avoid people rushing them to expand faster, but that is another gameplay balance issue that is up in the air.

Taking over the big AI factions is also more important, as absorbing their ZOC gives you more to work with.  <-- This also helps explain why enemy ZOC, cities, etc .. just "vanish" if their Sov dies.  Without a Sovereign to keep the ZOC bubble going, the world collapses back in on itself and everything/everyone winks out of existence.  By taking over their cities and ZOC you are basically protecting the resources/cities/people from inevitable nonexistence when you banish their Sovereign from the world.

All the sudden .. lore fits better .. game is less "crank out pioneers" and more "I'm pushing back the darkness and remaking the world in my image".

It'd have to balance well for game speed to be fun at all levels ... you wouldn't want to force players to sit in town for 10 turns doing nothing while the ZOC expands, for example, but it could be less exploitful' than the current system.

Actually there are some of us that do not agree. I like managing a lot of cities if getting a decent management screen. I personally don't like the idea of have only a hand full of cities especially on a large map. I prefer to build my empire the way I want to not be limited to only a few cities.

I think that maybe there should be options to cater to both our play styles. Perhaps a simple toggle that you can put the maximum number of cities a player and AI can have at any one time.  With a max of unlimited (which I would always have set.

Just want to quickly comment on this point:

I have been successful in implementing and testing a "Balanced Starting Point" mod that spawns a tech library, stone pit, and goldmine at the starting location for all factions using a mod of the existing "Iron mine" ability for sovereigns and adding this trait to all sovereigns. Thus, every faction now starts will all the things it needs (although some still gets luckier than others and get two, lol),

The reason I don't like the inflation mechanic is that it set a hard limit to the number of cities you should own. So if you go over x amount of cities, you'll start razing everything, even if it was a nice lv5.

well, of course they should cost food, that way you dont have a stupid situatoin where your pioneer is sitting and not founding a city for lack of food.

starting the -1 food when you build the pioneer smooths out the gameplay. 

Dont worry about being out 1 food for the rest of the game, that's an obvious stupidity thats easily coded out.

Perhaps cities cost a combination of gildar, material, and food to build, maintain, and upgrade (money to pay, materials to build, food to feed). But also, if you are lacking in a certain resource for a city, the city will convert resources into the other needed resources at a loss (2 to 1 or worse), first from local than from global resources (at an even greater loss).

For instance, I build a new level 1 city. It needs, per turn, -1 food, -1 material, -3 gildar, or whatever the case may be (pulling numbers out of thin air to illustrate the concept). As it is a new city, it doesn't have any resources linked to it. So it must draw from my global income at a loss. So to pay off that -1 food, I need +4 food. To pay off that -1 material, I need +4 material. To pay off that -3 gildar, I need +12 gildar.  So building the city costs me, initially, -4 food, -4 material, and -12 gildar. Per turn.

It's built near an Old Growth Forest, grabs it, and links it for +2 material per turn. The city is now making a positive growth on material (+2 from Old Growth, -1 from city maintenance). So I jump from from -4 material a turn to +1. However, I'm still at a loss for food and gildar. As I have a positive income from a local resource (the Old Growth Forest), that +1 material gets converted into food or gildar with any left over being taken out of the global pool. So the city now requires +0 material, say -3 food ( converting from the extra material and global), -12 gildar. Per turn.

Many turns later and through other mechanics, the city is now producing - locally - many goods. For now, we'll assume it's still level 1 and just happens to be really really lucky with resources. Say it produces +4 food, +2 materials, +15 gildar. It's net production that it contributes to the global pool is +3 food (4 less 1 for maintenance), +1 material,

In this set up, things like Lost Libraries, Scenic Views, and so forth would be considered resources that can be converted for maintenance. Consider this like tourism money or research patents.

The key point in this method is that resources are liquid. You don't -need- a certain resource but you're encouraged to find them. Overly aggressive expansionism is tempered by the fact that if you have too many undeveloped cities, they're hurting your entire economy but they're also not even getting you a benefit. This also benefits efficient cities since a high level city can more readily overcome it's cost while also allowing for expansion. And, if you happen to end up with an high excess of a certain resource (say you found a lot of old growth forests), you don't have all this stuff that you will never be able to fully use. It still helps - you can use it to pay off per-turn costs as well as sell off excess for lump sum trade payments.

I dunno about that.. sounds harsh!

It does remind me of SOASE's expansion limiter though, where newly colonized worlds had a significant tax penalty against them until you spent resources to develop them.