Reworking population and dealing with city spam are two of our priorities, and both will be addressed in 1.1 and onward. See Brad's latest journal for some initial information on this.

My opinion?

Click here to see it.

he he he,

good one

seconded.

well i have what i think to be an interesting way to deal with city spam.  i normally don't like to pimp one of my threads in somebody elses thread, but i am curious as to what you think.

corruption and why you don't want a bunch of cities.

I didn't mean anything by my post. I just saw a comment on a dead horse and thought I'd interject a more visual response.

But city spam is a problem that will hopefully be sorted out soon.

city spam is bad in civ 5 because of social policys thats if you wanted them should have made all the crappy places i took pupets too .... oh well...

nothings going to deal with city spam... unless you make it that you can only have one city.

There is nothing wrong with "city spam" per se. The problem with it is that right now, in 1.09, city spam is the most effective tactic for the game.

City spam is caused by:

1. It costs basically nothing to found a city.

2. It is the most effective way to gain access to resources quickly.

3. It allows you to out train your oppponent.

These are the 3 issues IMO that have to be addressed in v1.1.

It hasn't, there's like 6 billion people on the earth.

Speaking of city spam, do enemy sovereigns retain the power to found new cities after the first one is placed?

I ask because I took an enemy city, and then ghosted the sovereign, taking each new city he created because he would leave after a turn or two, allowing me to waltz in and take up residence.  I built a lovely empire thanks to that, finally getting bored after taking 3 newly made cities. 

Message here is that founding cities as a sovereign need to cost something - there needs to be a limiting factor - and I would suggest 5 essence, starting all sovereigns 5 higher to make up for the first one.  Anyhow, I don't have to explain how this would be abused with human players. And it would also provide some logic as to why sovereigns aren't super-pioneers.

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Nick - non-global mana was the achille's heel of this.

In the original design, global mana was a core game mechanic.  Which isn't surprising since I ripped it er, I mean was inspired by Master of Magic on that.

However, our engine was not able to allow unit actions to make use of global resources until v1.09.

The mistake was thinking that we could turn mana into a local unit stat without it undermining the overall game mechanic. 

People nitpick this or that about Elemental but IMO, that one issue ruined for me the whole game design.  If there is a mistake of mistakes, it is that particular compromise.

So how did it happen?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Why did that happen?

Stardock policy: NO manager shall work fewer hours per week than anyone under their management including the CEO.  If my guys were working 90 hours a week, I was working 100 hours a week. It was a bedrock principle.  You do that for a few months and you'd be surprised at how "good" easier solutions start to look.

I find the Elemental launch endlessly fascinating (which I know I shouldn't bring up from a PR point of view) because experiencing first-hand some of the project development catastrophes I had previously only read about has been a real eye opener. 

When I yelled at Ben over on Qt3 when he suggested the game wasn't ready, I was 10X angrier than even my post implied. The game was ready. Only a horrible evil terrible no good very bad person could even imagine it wasn't the case.  At least, until we got to take a few days off and sleep and look at things from a fresh perspective.  It's a lesson to be learned by any developer.

And the most concrete example of that lesson was the compromise on global mana. 

The lack of global mana keeps us going with the "What the hell were we thinking???"

Your asking, let alone answering, your above question bodes well for Elemental's future, and upcoming SD games.

I respect your 'the boss expects more from himself than his/her employees' philosophy.  The bosses I've most respected led from the front, didn't ask of others what they wouldn't do themselves, and generally worked their way up through the ranks so they understood each job they oversaw.  Sometimes it bites one in the keister, but what doesn't sooner or later? 

I hope the laid-off SDers get their jobs back ASAP.