Never complained about pioneers tying up my queue. Because I don't spam them, then I lose.

My point exactly.

 But Guess I'll go find something else to do. Its gotten to  the point where my feedback is causing people to get all pissy and call me a troll etc.

Let me see whether I am understanding you. If you cannot win the game by holding 1/3 of the land the others sides have, and having no more than 1/2 the production facilities, and wasting your mana on resource gathering, and starting wars of aggression without having the AIs gank up on you.... it's not a 4x game? 

Well, I guess I would not know how to start answering this... except that I will say that at the difficulties you seem to play, I could probably win just by rolling up the AI with heroes.

I've never started a war.. now you're placing words in my mouth. And yes you would think there would be another viable optoin other than spamming pioneers.

I guess if we all min/maxed then we would be playing correctly right? Silly us thinking that doing anything other than min maxing and spamming pioneers would be viable. Who knew that they put so many options in the game for us to NOT use them. They should just make us all play like you and take out the options. Since its apparent that the only viable playstyle is yours anyway.

But personally I feel that either the growth penalty isn't balanced properly or that high level towns should gain more to make the growth USEFUL. Since right now spamming cities is the only viable strategy. Of course the AI dog piling on you because of a low power score due to having only a few cities doesn't help either.

 Pure and simple.. at this point you gain ALOT more from building more cities than you do from not. Which would be fine in a normal 4x.. but we have limited spots, monsters in the way, wilderness areas, not to mention the occasional bad start which can lead to you not having any room to expand. Point is if they are going to leave so much up to randomness then they should make a viable way to still play and win when you get stuck in that situation where you can't expand. Or reduce the random crap so we don't get stuck in those situations.

Please don't make any changes to this, it's fine.  I already feel too much has been done to curb city spam, we are limited by distance and arable land already.  It's enough.

Of course there are mods that address city spam by making high level cities more powerful and harder to get. Well, really just the one.

I dislike the way Civilization penalises you for expanding. That's one of the Xs in the 4X and having game mechanics working against it seems unnatural, at least aside from natural stuff like the actual production costs/monster danger.

Sure, I wouldn't mind having some faction traits that made it more worthwhile to have fewer cities (there was a faction in Ffh I believe that could only build 3 or 4 cities but got a lot of bonuses and they grew larger etc..). 

But that can be accomplished by adding factions/faction traits etc, which I'm sure will happen anyway. No need for more game mechanics that punish expansion.

I think part of the problem in this argument is that the person who started this thread was not present earlier during the beta when expansion was a lot easier to do and population growth was faster. The game is trying to balance on a needle point where there is equal opportunity to win the game with three town versus a strategy of many more towns.

currently my favourite strategy involves a conclave town with high essence that i use for troop production supoorted by two towns that provide gold and food. I will raze enemy town to deny them resources. In order to do this i need to have henchmen garrisoned in my towns to support my armies with magic while i have an attack stack roving around.

Holding land with 3 cities isn't a problem.. That is what you have outposts for (and the resources )

But relying on a few mega cities should be a viable strategy... 

I understand you like to play the game your way.. But there should be other ways too.. Right now it's this way or the highway..

The easiest path would simply to create a map that suits your playing style.

I'm still not sure, what you consider spam. How many cities are okay and when are they considered too many?

I'm currently playing standard Yithril on challenging/challenging difficulty. It is turn 98 and I have six cities. The sixth one has been settled last turn, and number 5 about ten turns ago. I have ten outposts and am currently considered the second most powerful player (which is going to change as soon as I start my troop production). The most dangerous monster I had to kill were a Bone Ogre (guarding the location of my fortress), an Obsidian Golem (guarding the location of my 5th city) who almost killed my champion, and a River Slag.

Is this already spam?

It used to be that outposts developed resources at their own.  My first posted play-through had one city (large map/ridiculious difficulty) and it was over 1200 population and 200 production by turn 100.

This strategy no longer really works, because now you have to use your city's queue to develop the resources. Whether it's a good thing or not, I am not sure. I enjoyed the game before, I enjoy it now. Now it plays a lot slower.

But I assure you, changing something as important as this will have great repercussions for balance. 

But I still do not see the point of this thread. It seems that we are arguing whether making 4-5 cities is spam, while everyone on the other side says that 3 cities is A-OK.  Are we fucking haggling over whether ONE or TWO cities push A-OK into GAMEBREAKING?!

I do not understand why expanding for as long as you have room is considered wrong.  This is what everyone in the world has ever done.  Humans, animals, plants.  Why should an artificial strategy like "I will not expand beyond three cities" work?  Why is no one arguing "This game sucks, because I have to research past tier one"?  Well, actually, you can win without researching, but hey, it's as good an argument as "I should be able to win on the largest map with 1/20 of the cities"

And heres your issue. No no one said it was wrong. We simply said there should be other VIABLE strategies. Its not wrong.. whats wrong is that we HAVE to  do the same to compete. The fact that if you don't spam your own pioneers means you WILL be weaker and you WILL lose against the AI who is doing it.

3 cities isn't a problem to hold land... but you aren't going to be able to do anything BUT hold your land because the AI is going to dogpile you.

At what difficulty?

Normal, large map, epic speed 6-8 AI. Quests off, sparse monsters.

I've told you my settings like 10 times now it seems.

But i'm sure you have some min/maxed sov that will just run through them all at the start to prove me wrong eh? SOOO the other option is to just rush them with a min maxed sov.

OK, and the third option to roll everyone with a nation min-maxed for troops is probably not to your liking either.  Any OTHER options you want to take off the table?

Because you have already taken away expansion, conquest, and Master Quest.

I mean, are you asking me to win a game with a research victory, without enough cities to do research in?  And while being small enough to look like a juicy big steak?  Because I am pretty damn sure I can do that on normal, but I will be damned if I have to slog through it on 'slow' pacing.

And of course, I do not know what the hell that will prove, except that a good player can win even with a shitty strategy.

You just said that NOT SPAMMING takes almost all viable strategies off the table yet you continue to argue that it doesn't.

You know what.. sure.. you're grand master of FE and if people don't play your way we suck. The game is just perfect made to force you into spamming cities for all but 1 strategy which requires a min maxed Sov. I'm glad they made a game just for you and to hell with the rest of us right?

If you have to MIN/MAX to win on normal the game is just great and functional.. its us that are the problem, we just aren't properly min/maxing for normal.

 We should have known that in order to win on NORMAL we would have to min max our nations/sovs or spam pioneers.

I haven't found a style of game-play yet that the combination of a custom sovereign and a few tweaks to the world creation options didn't foster.  Playing with the XML is even more fun.

Edit: Don't miss seanw3's post; perhaps Master's Affliction is more your flavor?

Even though it does appear that the base game is more than satisfactory for most people in this regard, there is nothing stopping you from tweaking the settings a bit more to your liking.  Just a few small changes can make quite a difference.

I'm going to disagree to the point that city spam is the only viable strategy,  At least on settings below challenging anyway.  (I suspect on the higher setting it is likely the only consistantly viable strategy to win.)

I've seen the AI in my games (usually on challenging or normal) do very well with only 3~4 cities, you can keep your power rating high enough to fend off the AI from declaring war and focus on either a research or quest based victory. Really the number of units you need to fend off the AI hordes isnt' that high. There really is 3 paths I've used to victory.

1.  level up your Champ/Sov, get cool equipment, and challenge the Epic quests.  

2. Research up and build a stack of doom

3. expand resources with leveling etc and overpower the AI through conquest.

based on Tuidjy's walkthroughs, (those are very cool BTW thanks) he prefers playing option 3. 

Personally I like all three and will change which tactic I use based on my starting position what the map looks like.

Now the land grab as the begining is really somewhat essential for all three to be viable. but I'm with Tuidjy in that I don't consider the first 4~5 cities to be "spam"   thats pretty normal from any strategy game (RTS or TBS) I've ever played.  The inital resource buildup at the expese of miltiary units or research is pretty standard across the genre.   Once you have that though the other two options are very viable (again at least on Challenging or below)

for the first you need to do the land grab at the begining to put quests and monsters in your range to be able to level up quickly and find the cool swords and armor that allow you to take on the dragons or epic quests.

Reserach also requires at least 4~5 cities and a little luck but you can focus on a few units to keep the AI's at bay and do some other stuff while you are waiting for "Dance with Dragons" tech or the "game ending spell" (cant remember the name of it) generally you can defend well enough and still get there ahead of the AI since they never seem to try for anything but a conquest win.

I play vanilla sovs.

I play on hard/hard.

I play with large maps, 6 total factions, dense monsters, normal pacing, random everything else.

I play successfully with various strategies: teching, magic, rushing, conquest, etc. 

I usually do not city spam, mostly because there are not enough settle-able locations to build cities to consider it spam.

I'm sorry you're having problems with the game.  Maybe take the difficulty down a notch or three?

First of all, there are dozens of threads on this very forum which make it VERY clear that I do not think everything is peachy.

Second, I have six play-throughs of different versions, which include 1. A single city win 2. Two pacifist challenges 3. Two standard races 4. A race suggested by someone else 5. A race designed for 'in character reasons'

Third, I do not even always min/max on ridiculous, and I disagree that the 4th city one builds takes him from "Master Strategist" to "Cheesy City Spammer".

I have probably tried every setting but "epic", because to me, it just means "slow".  It's bad enough that the game has been slowed down with every version, I have to play with dead time between turns?  Because on top of everything else, you want sparse monsters and no quests. I'm sorry, but clicking the [End Turn] button does very little for my enjoyment.

I keep telling you, I am not playing a SINGLE strategy.  On ridiculous, I play EVERY strategy (expansion, production, combat, research) because otherwise you lose.  It's ridiculous to expect that you can win at high difficulty by playing a crippled strategy like yours (weak defenses, research goals with few cities)

Note that I believe cities, as they are now, do not bring enough bonuses as they grow. I have posted numerous suggestions as to how to improve things to make big cities more appealing.  But what you're pushing for is how to make numerous cities less appealing, and that is very wrong in my book.

First of all I was going for conquest but I COULDNT expand due to only having one way out of where i was and a dragon in the way. (and no i wasnt a sov min maxed to kil the dragon on turn 37 or whatever like you)

My strategy wasnt to only have 2 or 3 cities.. but i got stuck having only 3 cities because my pioneers couldnt get out.. and i could barely scratch the dragon.

So I was stuck until the AI dog piled on me at which point i held my cities for about 100 turns.

At this point if you get a bad random start.. or get blocked by a strong baddie from expanding and you are stuck with 2 or 3 cities you are screwed.

Second of all the second part of your above quote was my point. If the extra growth I was getting actually DID something then i could have built enough troops to maybe remove the obstacle. AKA dragon from my way and continued expanding.

Even 1 more city would have made the difference. But by the time I was strong enough to even think about trying to get rid of the dragon the Ai had already taken up all spaces around me. then proceeded to march around the dragon and kill me. I put up a mighty good fight.. but a 3 city nation vs 6 AI with 3-9 cities each is a losing proposition. 

As long as its possible for us to get screwed by randomness into having very few cities.. then it should be possible for us to actually win when the game puts us in that situation. Losing due to random= not fun.

next game was similiar but with a dark sorcerers army blocking my expansion, so it wasnt a one time deal.

(p.S. I never advocated the OP idea of tying them to techs, again you put words into my mouth)

Well it's not spamming if you build 200 cities.. As long as there was a reasonable amount of time before each city.. 

For me atleast that is the difference between spam and not spam.. If you are at turn 50 with 5 cities that 1 city per 10 turn.. Spam.

If your at 5 cities turn 100 - 150 then that is better.. Think about it it funner (for me at least  to scout ahead looking for a good location and then planting my city.. right now if you want the best chance to win you scout ahead once you find any cluster of rejuvenated land you immediately create a pioneer and boom new city.. or else you lose.

It would be nice to have 2 different que's but I don't think one can mod this in. You could however double your production rates for your cities and have the equivalent speed to which two ques would give.

That is one thing I will add, it does seem to be stupid that you have to build cities. instead of outposts they should be settlements, settlements would not need to be built on resource tiles, they will use the closest city as their supply, they can have one attachment built on to them which would provide a place of secondary training. example, you build a settlement with a barracks, you can now train militia independently of the main city, but to balance it a bit, one you unlock higher tier military units, the settlement will not be able to produce them until you upgrade the barracks