I like where you are going but I think you might have not included in your mechanics the concept of choosing growth over materials and essence in your city location.  If you have a garden and granary and you aren't getting to level 3, it's possible you've chosen a spot with too little grain?  Like you are choosing the 3/2/2 tile over the 4/2/1 tile or the 3/3/1 tile over the 5/2/0 tile almost all the time...

I do like the idea of +X per city level.  That should be a must.  There is not enough incentive to grow your towns, as you mentioned, which is the crux of the matter. The growth penalty should be more stiff the larger you expand - this would help with Pioneer spamming as well.

I think the solution is to make more buildings that require a high city level.  Not too hard to build but provide real benefits.

Also, make wonders require a lvl 3 city to build period, and require them to have a certain building type- some for conclaves, some for fortresses, some for towns.  I'd also like to see more wonders, and maybe a limit of 1 wonder for a lvl 3 city, 2 for a lvl 4, and unlimited for lvl 5.

I think these changes would balance things out.  If anything, I'd lean to overpowering lvl 4-5 cities as a comeback mechanic.

I agree that right now, a number of small cities is much better that a few big cities. Forget what they bring in as cash (I keep my taxes at zero for more than half the game)

What multiple cities do is deny land to the AI. On higher difficulties, the AI knows of the existence of every fertile tile and every resource.  It WILL plop a city or an outpost to claim EVERY single resource. Thus, you have to have a city in every fertile tile you consider within your borders, if only to be able to assimilate the outposts of the AI WILL build there.

If the developers make having a lot of cities harder, it will shift the balance on ridiculous and insane. Insane is already pretty unpleasant to slog through.

What we need is to give tangible benefits to bigger cities. The simplest, and time honored one is to require a certain city level before you can build some buildings: for example, one can say that a level one city is simply too small to support a shrine, or mason, or a lumber camp.

I think the balance for this is intended to be that the number of available cities is very low, so each player has about the same number. Any city with 4 or more grain can get to level 4 by the endgame. You see, there isn't a strong limit to city level, except technology. Each higher city level offers massive amounts of research and gildar. I don't totally agree with the design choice, but it is pretty well balanced. The only thing I would say is that there needs to be less available prestige so that growth is more of a strategic factor. Altar is the only one who should be getting bonus prestige. The whole +.5 per level from Sovs makes it too easy to get massive amounts early on. 

Weird.  I must be doing something wrong, because I can somehow never get these 'massive' amounts of prestige people are talking about, although I use my sovereign very aggressively.

Speaking for myself, I seldom if ever go against the food limit, and I never even look at the food rating of a tile when I settle it.  I have the stats for the last game I AAR'd, and here are my prestige and number of cities from beginning to end:

Turn 17)  Prestige:  1.5 + 2 = 3.5   split between 4 cities

Turn 40) Prestige:   3.5 + 3 =  6.5  split between 5 cities

Turn 53) Prestige:   6.5 + 4 - 10.5  split between 6 cities

Turn 87) Prestige:   8 + 4 = 12       split between 7 cities

Turn 98) Prestige:   8.5 + 4 = 12.5 split between 8 cities

Turn 104) Prestige: 9 + 5 = 14       split between 11 cities

Turn 113) Prestige: 9.5 + 5 = 14.5  split between 10 cities

Turn 120) Prestige: 9.5 + 5 = 14.5 split between 12 cities

Turn 132) Prestige: 10.5 + 5 = 15.5 split between 18 cities

Turn 142) Prestige: 11 + 7 = 18 split between 25 cities

Turn 149) Prestige: 11.5 + 7 = 18.5 split between 31 cities (alliance victory)

So... at no point is my prestige even as much as 2 per city.  How is that massive? And really, how can you justify reducing it?

Well, it's too late to rebalance cities towards large powerful cities. Next week you guys can just play my cities mod that has a more meaningful levelup system. I am not sure this kind of improvement is going to make or break the game. In which case, a mod is fine. 

I think right now the wierd problem is that it takes the same amount of resources to build a city than to build an outpost. It is a nobrainer to build a second city when building a pioneer takes only 8 turns on level 1 city, as long there is a place to build it. This investment will make up for itself in 7 turns empire wide and has huge long turn benefits compared to any building or whatever else you can spend cities resources on. One of the things is that cities start with a default 5 production multiplier. I'm not sure if it gets higher as the city levels, but I personally think this multiplyer should be tyed to the population size instead of just a default 5 which is bigger than logging camp and workshop + mining tech together. And that comes out from a single pioneer. If anyone knows the term Return of Investment. Then we are talking about 7-9 times differences here at the very basic level without taking into account the future of the second city, its additional research, gold, position etc. production alone.

Pioneer is well balanced for making an outpost however. I think that the initial city could start with more population so that it reaches the default 5 production multiplyer and the next cities would start at a level with a production multiplyer of 1 or so. Making it a just investment. Then when you divide prestige you actually start diving production growth between cities. As for now the only reason for levels is the free building, yay, it rarely compares to simply a level 2 city.

Ofcourse sadly going this approach would be kinda huge overhaul and would have to include way too many changes . Does anyone know if you can mod something like that right now? Like make material multiplyer connected to population size?

Reduce the automatic sovereign prestige to make the growth improvements more prominent because they are never necessary to build (unless you always use a sovereign with the wealthy trait to spam cities.)

Yer missing the point dude.  We're not trying to remove a strategy from the game.  We're trying to add a strategy to the game.

Which strategy is added to the game by utterly stunning the growth of level 1 cities?

You mean, the way I used a wealthy sovereign in 33% of the playthroughts which I have posted? One of which was standard Karavox, who was requested by someone who said that he found him the weakest?  For your information, at the moment I am playing Lord Relias (I only play standard sovereigns now) and I have 5 cities on turn 27. (One used to be Ceresa's)

Can you understand the simple fact that you cannot ALLOW fertile land anywhere in your territory, or the ridiculous AI will know about it, and grab it?  If you play on ridiculous, please post a playthrough to show us bad players how you win with a couple of cities.

No, the growth buildings are absolutely necessary for ANY land-grab strategy. They are definitely necessary in every one of my games (on ridiculous) and they are useful for anyone who would play Karavox on any difficulty.  Do you need the difference between AND and OR explained to you, or do you see how much weaker your argument becomes?

Check this gem: If the military buildings are only necessary on insane difficulty, OR without a superhero sovereign, OR in a domination strategy, then they are ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS.

See anything wrong with that statement?  Or do you want me to write it down with symbol logic? I'm sure I can unearth one of my old textbooks.

At least for me, any player that I know to be talking about higher difficulties is not a factor in the conversation. If the AI is getting massive bonuses, the balance is already worthless and does not enhance the discussion as far as balancing the game. We have to always balance for when the AI and the player are playing by the same rules. In other contexts it might matter, but when we are specifically trying to balance cities, only relevant information can be used. Just as my mod is not a factor in this discussion. If it were, we would all be talking about how elegantly the problem had been solved.

I think you're confusing Sean's mod with HF's.  As far as I know, Sean is mostly doing a balance mod, while Heavenfall has his amazingly cool-looking Stormworld mod.

Back on track, I agree with Tuidjy.  Right now, city growth is fairly slow, even with Sovereign's Call and high prestige, unless you have only a handful of cities and a fairly high-level hero.  Nothing would really be gained by making cities grow even slower.