[new concept] idea for a deep strategic way to control city spam.

Really as long as the claim 1 square around them people will spam a city at every node.  Honestly though any system is better than the current one where city spam is just better than everything else.  It has it's place but it should always be some kind of trade off.  Basic economics should be enforced, everything has an opportunity cost.  Currently the only opportunity cost is... damn now i have to waste time to manage 50+ cities.

yeah, but you would have to think twice about dropping a level 1 city right next to a single library resource because that would increase corruption to every city you own.  this in turn might make you lose a resource in a different city.  with this system lots of thought has to go into management.

also, this system would allow influence wars with other factions.  you could have spells that cause corruption on a faction city, or reduce it in your own.

also i see that if you have a resource and lose it due to corruption then it will go dormant until you or someone else enclose it in your influence.

The corruption concept is an intriguing one. And I would like to see it developed.

Another way to reduce city spam is to split "food" into two resources.  Food and water.  Fertle land is all well and good.  But it takes water to grow things. And people, animals need water all the time.  Currently, Oasis act like fertle land, and not water.  Make water a truly scare resource.  Use water to maintain animals (like at their herd tile) and some water to grow food / animals.  Now food which relying/consumes some water every turn) AND water to drink, are both necessary to support every population (troops mounts, etc.). 

Now, if a player sets up an outpost (outopst = name for settlement, in this discussion, that has no water supply inherinit in its location) in the desert by a non-water producing resource (all ores, minerals, shards, wild wheat, fertile patch, lost libraries, old temples), that settlement must then draw its food and water from an existing settlment.  A 'caravan' run (caravans also need water and food) must be set up, and maintained in order for the outpost to continue.  Outposts without water and food have their population die down to level of water available.  So do settlements.  The trade offs make for interesting decisions.

Almost forgot.  Re: corruption.  I think that members of the royal family stationed in a settlement should reduce some of the corruption.  Also, perhaps, should that royal be married to someone from another faction, their loyalty might be 'influenced' to towards their spouses faction.  Cold war?  

City spam is caused by a poor decision on my part to have resources totally dependent on natural resources. Players are practically forced to city spam.

This is something we're addressing in v1.1.

Civ4 has a good system against city spamming.... yes you can city spam but only in your own region. If you try and city spam in someone eases region you will cripple your economy. Also having extensive modifiers which only cities 'linked' to the main empire can share with one another discourages city spamming.

I suppose you could apply some kind of 'absolute' solution to city spamming as well.... lets say the level of your founding city and the map size determines how far away new cities can be established. As the game progresses and your founding city levels up, this increases your range exponentially.

the thing is, in your opinion does the idea your implementing in 1.1 stop city spam or does it just give you other options?  because based on your post it would seem that you can still city spam.  granted i am not totally against city spam, i am just offering a solution if city spam is voted out.

I've never heard of a concept like this in a TBS 4x game before.  The more area of control, creates an equally proportional AOE penalty.  Definitely an original idea worth exploring.

the idea comes from real life really.  its easy to control a small area as long as you can have direct control over it, but the larger your dominion is the harder to keep it in check.  example: if you ruled 10 cities that were large in their own right, it would be hard to watch every area of your domain.  lets say at the edge of your lands you have a city that has 2 gold mines.  since its so far away, it would be hard to keep an eye on it.  because of this you would have a noble that might be corrupted by a wealthy merchant to work together to take one of those mines as their own without you knowing about it.  because so much is coming in you wouldn't realize it.

this is where the improvements come in.  basically you would create a sort of branch of your elite guards that were very loyal to watch over and investigate that sort of thing.  however it would cost guildar to build it and also upkeep(gotta pay em).

to me thats corruption.  it makes it continually harder to keep an eye on an ever increasing empire.  the bigger the city the more people that want to take money under the table in order to look the other way.

The main problem I see with this is it would be complicated as influence does not really have hard, visible numbers. I would suggest it be abstracted to just paying the gildar to enforce order and prevent corruption and other problems that come with having a large nations (also, zone of control is somewhat magic-y in nature).

I wish frogboy would say as little more about what he means by :  

well that could all be simply alleviated by opening influence to the UI and showing some numbers.  you could simply have right the influence and corruption number in the box hovering over the city(it would show as 23/10 where 23 would be influence and 10 would be corruption).  and have global corruption labeled under kingdom overview.  doing abstraction to me just wouldn't be as interesting as a real representation.

In theory the idea of corruption is a good one, but in practice, in Civ III it ended up being a nightmare.  It killed the fun, which is the most important part of any game.

well, you may be right although its been so long since i played civ3, that i don't remember how corruption worked in that game.

I never city spam.

Ex: today i had a huge sphere of influence with my one level five city. My army=my sovriegn. this is around turn 300. later when one of my enemies attacked between my sovriegn and my sole champion we took control of goo 15-30 cities. Of those i took about 3 or 4 and razed the rest because they were completly useless and a drain on my economy.

I personally don't city spam but my enmeies constlantly due which is my biggest irritation in the whole game

For a quick fix (like maybe 1.09F) increase the minimum distance between cities by 1 or 2 squares.

Note, I didn't like the corruption in Rome:TW.

I'm wondering what the sense is for denser cities causing more corruption, other than an abstract mechanism to reduce city spam, and there is enough abstract mechanisms already (like caravans producing food).  Refering to post #8, don't cities in real life benefit organization and oversight by bringing law and administrative functions to the outskirts of your domain?  I can maybe see corrupt administrators of these towns pocketing some of the gold and resources produced by the town, and so the player takes a resource hit if they city spam, but an influence penalty makes no sense to me. 

Second, if you are spamming cities at every resource node, how much penalty would limiting influence be?  It would make caravans die more to wandering monsters, but other than that, I'm not sure what other penalties to reduced influence there are that city spam wouldn't solve. 

Finally, the math of corruption involves understanding the math of influence and all gets pretty distant to the player.

[Corruption resembles the inverse of a hinterlands system I proposed in a similar thread, where a city requires a certain number of contiguous free tiles surrounding it (within ones influence and not used by other cities) in order to level up, with the rationale being a city requires the products of its countryside to feed expanding populations.  Whereas corruption reduces influence, hinterlands consumes tiles under your influence, and you can still city spam if you keep most cities at a very low level in order to spare hinterlands tiles to feed your occasional level 5 city.  The penalty if you city spam is limitations on city level, and the math involves simple tile counts.]

well the denser the cities become and the more people then yeah, it would be easier for an enterprising individual to lower YOUR influence in that city.  you would start to lose what you think is yours.  you might think that your getting that gold mine, but so much is going on that some greedy merchant is working with a local official to take it from you.

if you spam a city at every node then you will have no influence.  so you won't be able to reach out to other resources.  since you can't put a city closer than i think 5 tiles away you wouldn't be able to nab resources thats beyond 1 tile around your city.  this would foster much more organized and well thought out planning, so that you try to keep a balance between such things.

May I follow up on a suggestion I made a few weeks ago?

Divide the current "food" resource into "food" and "water."  Now, make the only sources of water to be:  Oasis, and 'herd' squares.  Fertile land, by itself, has no value.  It is ONLY potentially valuable IF you have sufficient water to nourish crops.  Now, by herds, I mean wild horses / wargs /unlikely allies.  The herd would not be there without water.  Insect/spider , etc squares have moisture enough only for the initial unlikely ally settlement that you unlock thru tech. This means NONE of these provide water.  Any troops you train from these sources rely on food and water from your settlements. 

Refugee camps add just enough food and water to support the increased population they grant to the settlement.  (They have hydroponics, or whatever.)  

Water is required to raise food.  Fertile land, wild wheat, etc. are places where one unit of water will grow the most food.  Both food and water are required for every unit of population (Civilian population, workers, miners, scholars, mages, horses, wargs, warriors, and "other" (spider, etc) warriors, every turn.  Eliminate irrigation - or limit it to settlements that actually grow crops.  Currently, any settlement size 2 or above can irrigate, even if it has no planted crops.  If a sov want's to use mounts in a unit, that unit is now "two" for food and water consumption.  Now it will consume resources every turn to grow and keep a herd of horses for mounts.

In extreme cases, a Sov might have the herd butchered to provide food / water.  A system set up like this would reduce city spam significantly, as the only real water sources are oasis.  It just depends on how much water you decide each oasis can "deliver" each turn before being drawn dry.   is this a possibility?