Agreed. 

What you describe is how it was in early beta.  Cities could only be placed in revitalized land.  We had to strategically choose to invest valuable essence or wait for revitalization to naturally spread (or place at adventure sites that popped up as they were revitalized, but my guess is this was an 'unintended feature').

I don't remember seeing any word from on high why it was changed.  The game lost a lot of its lore and an important strategic choice with this change, and gained significantly easier/quicker city spamming.

Nick describes my take pretty well.

I do vaguely remember catching scraps of talk about some folks (maybe not devs?) thinking that requiring the sovereign for settlement-founding was somehow making the sovereigns less fun or something? Like it was demeaning for a mighty mage-monarch to be bothered with something as tedious as founding settlements? The paucity of talk that I caught and my solid dislike for the change make it hard to remember the specific 'explanation.'

Spam is good for one thing and one thing only: Monty Python's Spam Sketch. In the TBS genre, it's baby fat that's been carried well into adolescence and makes many a game with good bone structure just seem bloated.

So add 'freed up the sov from being required to place some cities' to my list of what was gained from the change.  And one could argue this also could be added to the list of what was lost.  Reasoning is that with the lore's 'restore civilization to the lands' bit, requiring the sov to 'seed' the lands for city creation doesn't seem unreasonable -- especially so considering the sov is only needed where revitalization hasn't naturally spread.  So the sov isn't required for all cities, and decreasing so as time progresses.

Or have there be diminishing returns for each city, till it starts to cause your income to decrease when you found new cities.

I'd like to see Essence be needed more as well, especially with founding new cities if the land is dead and needs to be infused with life/death magic to be useful. The thing is though, Essence is INCREDIBLY LIMITED and you don't get enough of it when leveling up to make it viable to spend it every time you want to build a new city. Essence should be able to be gained in a few more ways, like draining it from a defeated enemy Sov. If we had more essence to spend, then make every city cost 2 or 4 essence to build, it could both reduce city spam AND make our Sovs more powerful as they're supposed to be.

Wait the old way sounds far more interesting and immersive, why the heck did they change it?

Though I have to say if they insist on this Good vs Evil - Grassland Kingdoms vs Deathland Empires, it would kind of suck because it would be yet another thing trying to force us into using only one of two terrains. I hate that the Kingdoms and Empires are so bland and homogeneous, they should have more diverse domain terrain types at least that would add some flavor, I mean why doesn't Kraxis use desert when they're right there on the desert and perfectly themed and color schemed for it? One of the Empires even has a description that says they're in Swamps and Forests but their terrain is just Fallen Terrain, why not Swamp Terrain instead?

Actually I wish they'd just do the terrain types like Age of Wonders 2, where you could cast a spell to transform your terrain as a seeping change from your cities, and also cast spells to directly alter the terrain.

Yeah, the city founding change game with the whole "Global" fad Frogboy had going off on how this is a game not a simulator.

The baby was thrown out with the dirty bathwater in a lot of ways.The idea was that the Sovereign wasn't supposed to be out roaming around all the time and would want to be parked in the home city for many turns (see how well that worked, eh?). So they made it that he wasn't needed to found cities. But then you needed him to roam around and recruit heroes and farm monsters for Gildar so it didn't make a difference.

City founding with the sovereign was too much of a pain. I like the idea of the sovereign being the only one to revitalize the land and pioneers are the only ones to found cities beyond the first. I'd like to see it that the first city and land revitalization came free. Influence spread was increased and after the first city you need pioneers to found cities on reclaimed land and only the sovereign could spend essence to reclaim it if it hadn't spread that far.

But for whatever reason they're very hung up on the whole Global economy and have been unwilling to consider reverting back no matter how unpopular (or unsuccessful their game launch).

Those are fair points, Nick. I just don't feel as though using essence as the tool to accomplish them has a greater weight of benefits than negatives.

I would be curious, however, to see how a more "financially punish the big bureaucracy" approach would work. Capital city is maintenance cost-free, and then install distance "tiers" which tack a cost in materials and gold every turn onto cities that are farther away from the capital.

I would also dislike losing my ability to fly around and fart death all over the heathens simply because I wanted to have a fourth city. Additionally, Essence cost for cities also creates an enormous penalty-for-failure for the player that loses a city. On top of the income, production, access to new resources, you have also lost the value from your sovereign's very finite pool of essence.

Opportunity cost paid with NO returns to use economic terms.

In terms of stomping cockroaches, they just need to put a 5 Mana spell into the fire book called "bug bomb" that immediately kills all pioneers in your area of influence with no save or damage reduction. That way at least you wouldn't have to chase them down.

Indeed. If essence were more of a meta-mana which regenerated super-slow, and spending it reduced your casting capacity over a period of time before returning to full power (a lizard regrowing a lost limb, for instance), I could see it working out. the same functionality would work nicely with imbuing champions and magic items. I just have unfond memories of floundering around last fall trying to level so that I had essence to found cities with and its kinda hard for me to see around that particular experience creatively.

I'm sure there are elegant ways to make it work out.

No problem. It's how we Malsqueeks roll. Thanks for my first Karma!

I think there is a lot needing to be changed and it should have to do with game play rather than "lore".

I would be much happier if they went the way of the Civ games or Mom for city management and expansion and building. Make every single piece of land have an impact on your city but still have nodes a bonus plots for food and production,gold, mana, research, etc..

As it stands it seems like they used the poor city building (where you have to micromanage every building in a city and place where the buildings go) to help make the game more interesting instead of just making the game better. When someone makes a mod that uses the principles that every piece of land is helpful and not a big desert it will be a lot better and will allow you to focus on actual empire building and attacking/defending. Cities can still grow and take up more space and cities could easily be different from one another in looks and what they specialize in. No need for a pop cap or tile limit that makes no sense other than they don't know how to make it progress so we will just not allow it to progress.

Having been there from the beginning of public beta, I have to disagree. People liked it in principle and how it fit in with the story/lore. They didn't like how it made expanding your empire drag on and put your sovereign at too much risk for every city you wanted to found.

What we got is 180 degrees the other direction and not what I think people were asking for and I don't think it is any more popular than the original.

I believe there is a lot of room for a happy middle.

The global mana pool will the the sovereign's power (aquired from the shards), everyone else only gets to use it be cause the ruler is sharing with them.

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