Because a lot of the time you're putting up outposts rather than cities, and having to protect those.  Which means you're relying upon the gildar-producing buildings in your cities to cover not just those cities, but everything else, as well.  I've long been a proponent of Strangle, since I play Pariden or a Pariden variant a lot, and it's made for the strategy.  Resource grabbing via arcane monoliths.  But there's a lot of exposed, under-protected outposts around, plus a lot more terrain to cover with your stacks when attacked.  The AI is more compact, closer in, and has to protect less.  You can get your ass handed to you on a magical platter, very easily, if you don't carefully manage things.  Plus, the occasional wandering troll group looking for a fun time on a Saturday night can just knock out one of your cities, and there goes even more of your thinly stretched financial base.

This is not so simple.

Lets assume the following, for easy scenario:

It takes 2 turns to build pioneer, 1 turn to build a troop, 1 turn to move 1 tile. Each city has a 6 (I believe) tile of free space and a you want extra outposts for resource grabbing your city spam is missing. There are a lot of resources you want. Resources take no time to use. 1 monster kills 1 troop and dies, always. A player has to deal with 3 monsters to build a new city. There are 40 tile range between both players, mission is to kill the sovereign.

Both players start the game in a flat world. Both build 4 troops and 2 pioneers. Turn 14 both players got a second city and a resource outpost between them.

Player A doubles his land every 14 turns, till he meets player B or he has no more room for effective expansion.

After  roughly 70 turns, player A has 32 cities.

Player B created 112 troops, and starts marching to player A. 100 or so are left from monsters. Will player A manage to stop the army player B sent?

Maybe, maybe not. In this case, mose likely. If troops were moving faster, probably not.

As you can see, investing in military can topple an expansion based strategy, which beat turtle based strategy, which beat the rush strategy. It all comes down to balance.

But anyway - I'm speaking from experience; try it for yourself and compare between a small empire and a big one. In civilization 4, infinite-city-sprawl was a winning strategy, and that was *with* major limitations for large empires. Fallen Enchantress doesn't even have those. In practice, I've seen it to always be true: a large empire has so many resources it can just overwhelm small empires with no significant drawback. Expansion is a winning strategy, all the time.

And expansion opportunity cost is a valid concern, but right now it's not that big of a deal: a hero with 1 or 2 low level troops can escort a pioneer, which itself takes 3 turns to build. After turn 30-40, it's negligible.

I'm fine with Fallen Enchantress being all about the land grab and expansion, but I strongly disagree that small empires can compete with large ones, unless the large one is poorly managed. Remember GalCiv 2: was there any *significant* downside to expanding as much as possible? And FE didn't change much in that area, aside from the monsters.

There is, by the way, one disadvantage to large empires: tediousness, which can lead to a player not managing a large empire as well as a small one. But that shouldn't be a concern for the AI *or* a meticulous player.

Perhaps if pioneers doubles in price each time you made one (or went up by a percentage in price).

Then you can keep expanding but it gets more and more expensive and you have to trade off more.

Mike.

Well, your current and OUR current are different things.

We've made a lot of changes since Beta 4 because, frankly, we agree with a lot of what has been said.

There's more to do. But balance != new features.  We don't need to come up with some new game mechanic in Beta 5 to address balance issues. It's not like we need create some new resource or invent some new type of cost.

For example, and the modders can back me up on this because they are already doing this right now:

I could completely alter the relationship between # of cities simply by modifying a few lines of XML so that a) city leveling is where the power is and the faction prestige is the main way you go up in levels. Voila. You could tilt it completely the other way by changing a couple lines in the XML.

Similarly, you could, in XML, make it so that every outpost costs 50 gold per turn. Or 1000. I don't recommend that but you get the idea.

And frankly, I would be highly disappointed if after release there aren't many different mods to let people play the game in drastically different ways.

I look at a major part of my job, post release, to involve myself with modders directly to make it easier for them to get their mods out there, to make it easier for users to install them, etc.

If people knew how moddable FE was, they'd freak out. We owe that to Kael and Shafer btw.  They started out as Civilization IV modders and brought that to Fallen Enchantress.

Kael made air elementals able to fly over mountains this week just by modifying their XML.  No code. How's that for insane?

That is great to hear Brad. I see some people saying "I don't want to try mods, vanilla should be perfect in every way for everyone". I was like that until a few years ago, and since then I don't really play unmodded games. People should realize that they get so much more for their buck because of mods, and especially for FE, which is hugely moddable and people will be able to do pretty much anything. Pioneer spam, quests, items, small balance issues, these are so easily fixed. Perhaps Kael should better explain how he was able to do Fall from Heaven for Civilization IV, which isn't by as moddable as FE is. Maybe people would then realize what modding potential FE really has, and how mods can offer a totally different experience from vanilla, free of charge.

I think it's important that developers should now focus on things that require more expertise, such as AI behavior and strategies. I fully trust you Brad to work on the AI, because of GalCiv 2

This is awesome! Surely after release you guys should post some tutorials on what and how such awesome things can be done so the talented modders can fully take advantage of the engine.

EDIT: I would like to quote seanw3 regarding his modding of FE so far, just to give you an idea of what will probably follow after FE is released...

BTW, I am planning to release those quests as serials. Each quest series will have an overarching plot and play much like an epic story. This is only possible because the devs listened to what WoM modders wanted for quests and added in twice what we asked for. The main thing I want to mod in is storytelling. It's kind of cool how well it fits into the game. One thing I am working on is a quest line that functions like a tech tree, unlocking abilities and items as you make choices and defeat enemies. You will have to work through the story and choose your path to ultimate power. Or you can sell your essence to the demon lord and raise hell on earth. Your choice. We haven't even touched the surface of questing yet in the vanilla.

I'm excited to see beta 5 come out. At some point in the development of the game you have to move forward with what you have so you can finish the game, otherwise every game would just stay in beta. I'm excited to see the balance changes of this game and allow me to finally play with modding stuff (I didn't want to play with things that would eventually change).

I would like to know if we get to play with the map editor with the beta 5 release? I would like to try my hand at making a map or two.

Also, I am sure that if there appears to be some major issue still lingering in beta 5 that they will bite the bullet and move to beta 6 (I don't see this happening because I think this game is shaping up very VERY nicely).

Keep up the good work all you guys at Stardock. I'm very happy about how this game is turning out. I was not there with the release of WOM although i wanted to be (school got in the way), but I was happy to see that you didn't give up on the idea and that this result (from what everybody has been saying) is an improvement on the original.

I just want to see all the changes.

p.s.: When are you adding a hipogriff as a mount.

This sounds like a pick up line. I hope Derek isn't out there using it....    JK

or  10 ...  or  20 ...

I would dearly love to see the Map Editor made available in the Beta 5.  <--- I expect this is asking a lot ... and I really expect that access to the Map Editor will be postponed until the Retail Version is issued.  But if, by chance, it can be made available earlier, you'd really make my week!    

having specific tombs, caves, castles etc depending on quests and encounters is nice,something i've been lazily promoting for a while. of course having more complex battelfields with bonuses and tailor made tactics from the AI depending on what the tactical map is would be AWESOME. perhaps this would be more easily implemented into a campaign that resembles heroes of might and magic in structure, where there are more known parameters like what faction the player is playing and the resources available on the map.

As someone who tends to prefer a slower paced game, I would like to see some sort of infrastructure tech that limits available cities.  For example Logistics 1 allows for 1 extra city, 2 allows 2 cities etc.  I like this structure because it still allows for a rush gameplay, but people have to invest their research if they want a sprawl so there is a bit more of a cost to early expansion.

Right now people are complaining that there is little incentive to build a smaller empire.  This would provide that.  By keeping the number of cities low at the start, players don't spend valuable research on infrastructure.  This investment would mean that they spend less research on the tech because by the time they want to expand their research abilities will be faster. 

Meanwhile the benefit to early expansion remains in early resources and choice land acquisition.

Obviously I have no delusions of this being put in the game, but I'm hoping it is something that could be modded in the future.

Fair enough. My point was that there was no "small empire vs. large empire" balance. The only valid strategy in FE - based on empirical evidence, not theorycraft -  is constant expansion; there is no incentive to keeping an empire lean.