In the thread about city spamming, Raven X makes an excellent suggestion that I believe merits its own thread so the Devs see it.

He talks about expanding the ZOC of the cities to much larger areas so that resources are the valuable sought after realities they should be - especially if either a) cities cannot be placed within a large number of hexes near each other or level 1 cities only DRAIN resources until level 2 or some such balance to make fewer cities much more the preference with resources playing a larger role.

I encourage reading the City Spamming thread - but also wanted to pull out this idea of ZOCs b/c I didn't want it lost in the other.