It is in the game, but as the editor (so far as I can tell) will not allow you to modify the effects of triggers, it would be a complete pain as you would have to put quite a bit of work into each as it would need to be hand written. Even if the editor worked, it would still be a pain to create each and every lair with events. May I suggest working out a way to define lairs in their own xml file (like quests and goodie huts) so that they can be defined once and then just dropped into a map?

I will be posting about it in the idea board.

Whatever happens with the mechanics, I"m hoping the AI appreciates them the way players do. For example, if the AI doesn't care that outposts cost one food, they're going to build outposts to claim resources just as they are now, to their own detriment.

I have no problem dialing back my force multiplication because the AI can't deal. I don't expect the AI to play at that level, and self-imposed challenges can often be fun.

But when the AI's only discernible strategy is gather resources as fast as it can, every time, every faction, every setting...you're going to get the same game every time, and the minute you can't keep up, you'll fall back on force multiplication, to even out the AIs knowledge and resource cheating advantage. 

How the AI chooses to approach the game is a larger determinant of how I'm going to play than any mechanics. It's understood that Elemental is a battle for territory of sorts. And yes, the fact that with enough research a new city costs you absolutely nothing, and therefore never really hurts you....but it's on overkill right now, and is going to be on overkill, both for players and the AI, as long as the AI keeps setting the pace and tone of each game with its behavior.

I've made the largest maps I possibly can, and the longest I can go before the AI is knocking at my door is 75 turns, so I get about 75 turns of "playing it my way" before I settle in for 150 turns of building cities directly in the AI's path and then working backwards until the whole map is covered. 

So I'm glad that mechanics are being revised to give PLAYERS a reason to slow down their growth. I just hope the AI, which is allowed to cheat and run deficits, understands those rules and tries to obey them as well. Because it's the reason I'm playing Elemental in a way I don't necessarily enjoy right now.

Suggestion- why not have those sort of resources (monsters guarding them) , be some or most of the resources genned up by resource-discovering adventure techs.   

For military tech that mostly depends on the rules in the actual tactical battles.  Right now there are no rules so the tech that "adds the most points" is automatically and always the best.
Without more rules for tac battles, the tech tree cannot do anything but vertical progression.
Some techs also don't offer alternatives but instead multiply each other's effects which doesn't help matters.

Well, without more rules for the magic system (like a resist system that is not limited to physical armor) that isn't going to happen, either.
If these fire giants had a weakness (like water magic or spells protecting units from their fire...) things would look differently.

Right now the unit with the best magic resistance is a company of peasants with full plate armor. Kinda meh.

Fast travel or gates with some limitations built in - sure.  Even Teleport isn't automatically game-breaking when the unit has to travel for a few turns in "hyperspace".
But instant travel? No way.

So far the only one I really liked was Warhammer - Shadow of the Horned Rat. Had a quite similiar setting. Infantry, cavalry, bows, some rather inaccurate artillery.
In that game the battles were the game. And they did it right.   The rest were frontends for buying / reinforceing toops and such.

I'm not sure why people seem to think that 1.1 was going to come out at the end of September.  Maybe I missed a post.

1. The game released August 24. 
2. Stardock has been patching to regularly in the month it has been out (now at 1.09).
3. Brad's post on the release schedule was on September 21.

I don't mind city spam as a valid strategy technique that's used to some extent or other in all 4x games, but:

1) It doesn't match well the theme of a post "cataclysm" environment in this game in particular (however, I also don't think it's possible to match the game to this theme in a practical & realistic way that provides a challlenging AI for a number of reaasons).

2) city spam should not be the only means of victory as some other poster mentioned previously. The amount of time it takes to win with spam & conquest should be about the same time it takes to win on magic, quest, and diplomacy. If this is not the case, it's going to turn the game into a one-strategy wonder, and a weak AI (especially militarily wise) insures that it remains mostly boring.

These things need to be adressed. Nerfing the city spam strategy just for the sake of doing it because a few vocal players don't like is exactly the wrong thing to do. If you nerf it or minimize spam for other reasons (i.e. to fit with the "cataclysmic" theme, then I can understand .. but in this case the "cataclysmic" theme needs to be underscored dramatically in a practical game-wise way that players can directly see while playing, it just doesn't exist in the game-as-is in anything other than a story-line). I don't have a problem with "weakening" the city spam in some way if the ultimate goal is to make alternate game-play strategies equally viable, but frankly I don't see that happening. I mean this whole post is about nerfing city spam to some extent or other, but how is this going to make victory by other means more viable, which hasen't been addressed at all? At this point based on everything that I've read, it seems that the spam-conquest strategy is still going to be the #1 approach. How is going to be any easier (or at least equally easy/hard) to win on spell-making, quest (still have to access those enemy lands which will only happen with war), and/or diplomacy? Especially on small maps.

And btw, how is one level four building with a food, gold, ant material resource going to be better than 4 "outposts" collectively collecting 2 gold, 2food, 2 materials, one metal, and one crystal? ... I just don't see that happening in this game. I'll take the spam cities every time with extra resources & build that horse archer III squad with 96 attack that all the good trinkets that crystal can provide me (but level 4 cities don't).

Easy when the lvl 4 city can build multiple irrigation buildings, banks, money changers, great mills...

"Very special" resources like crystal will always require a minig camp of sorts but that's not the same as building 30 generic outposts just because they produce something (like a food caravan) for nothing.

I don't disagree. I've certainly played enough GalCiv, all the various CIV versions, MoM, Master of Orion, etc, to appreciate rapid expansion as a viable strategy. Not to mention all the RTS games that also allow/need this. However, please note the bolded section: this is precisely my quibble. One of the things that strongly attracted me to the game was the pre-release conceptual discussion published by Stardock's developers - the game wasn't going to be just another "CIV-lite". The way it sounded, Stardock was making a bold effort to redefine the fantasy TBS genre: sort of "Sid Meier meets Gary Gygax". And to a great extent, they succeeded (which, btw, keeps me playing it in spite of its current flaws). Unfortunately, the alternate strategies are NOT currently viable - certainly not as a starting strategy in the early game - at least at higher play levels. Now, admittedly, once you get some breathing room, it's usually possible to switch to one of the other game-winners in mid-game. Of course, by that point you probably have 20-30+ towns (and your economy is in the toilet) because you've been forced to conquer at least one AI opponent to get any breathing room (and you're stuck with the AI's gold or food deficit). Which IMO sort of defeats the RPG aspect of the game that was such a central theme of the concept. After all, by the time you have the "luxury" of, say researching Adventure tech to start questing, the Royal Family is already a crowd of powerful casters with a massive army at their beck and call and the first four quest levels are ludicrously easy. Even the Master Quest is absurd at that point (I ran it once with 3 family member casters including the sov, Sarog, four young dragons, and the rest were summoned giants in a single 12-unit army; it didn't even last a full combat turn).

To make my point explicit: I'm not whinging for Stardock to nerf the city-spam/conquest strategy. That can be fun in it's own right. What I would like to see is some way to structure the AI's approach so that I'm not forced to race up the Warfare tree and spam outposts at the beginning of the game simply because I know that I'm going to be in a war-to-the-knife with the AI within the first 50-60 turns (on a large map - I've had as little as 15 turns before that happened!) or get squished into a corner. IOW, I'd like to be able to explore for awhile, maybe beat up some wandering monsters, run a few quests, and choose my own tech path/strategy right from the start. That is, after all, what the game was designed for (as I understand it).

What if prestige was global and there was no per city bonus so by building many small outposts you would actually dilute your prestige and eventually cause your cities to not grow?

Also with this system you could award prestige with quests and for defeating certain monsters or completing other objectives.

In my mind, there's only two real solution to the problem:

1) Incremental maintenance (city cost x-1 of a certain resource -usually gold- to maintain). So as you build more cities, you get increasingly harsh maintenance. This forces you to develop less cities to keep maintenance at a manageable level, and you'll only take on new cities if you know you can offset the cost. Basically, the CIV way.

2) Development maintenance/bonus, aka the GC2 Model, where colonies cost you until they grow and produce gold. Basically, smaller cities cost maintenance (negative income), bigger cities produce gold. IE: An outpost could cost 10 gold to maintain, a Village could cost 5, a town would be neutral, a city produce 5, a metropolis produce 10. Think of it as tax income overcoming cost of maintenance. In this model, players are rewarded for building real "cities", and not just dropping outposts everywhere and reaping the benefits. In fact, if you do that too early too fast, you'll cripple yourself.

To be honest, I don't know why the 2nd isn't in place, given how well it works in GC2.

No it doesn't, all you have to do is give players 1000 G to start instead of 100. Have them manage that as they start in the red on their economy, it's exactly how GC2 does it.

As to adding 1 food cost to starting cities:

Right now a Kingdom city requires (assuming you've researched Housing):

Level 1 (10): 0 food

Level 2 (25): 1 food (+1)

Level 3 (100): 2 food (+1)

Level 4 (400): 4 food (+2)

Level 5 (1250: 11 food (+7)

Adding a 1 food requirement to the level 1 city and not changing anything else would make the total food requirement for that city 12.

My starting city will, at present, always have a fertile land providing 4 food. Irrigation is a quickly available tech that will give me +25% once built, but that pales in comparison to what I will get from caravans. Assuming I build subsequent cities at least say 10 or so squares away (don't know the exact distance formula yet) each caravan is going to give another +25% at minimum, and I've seen caravan bonuses of over 98%. In other words the caravan boost from any level 1 city founded sufficiently far away will, once connected back to my capital, pay for a proposed 1 food requirement.

Add in an eventual granary, farmer's guild, a few farmer heroes, caravans from other factions and so on and I'll probably have 500% or more on my capital. So even if I didn't find any more food anywhere I'm at 24 total food, enough to make my capital level 5 and support at least 4 level 3 cities. Granted that's assuming I don't build any of the gilder-related buildings that also require food, but you get the idea. In all reality I will have gotten more food tiles from Adventure discovery or just plain good luck, so really food limiting growth beyond the very early game is not much of a challenge, at present.

The numbers are slightly different for the Empire but they get their upgraded housing tech way earlier than Kingdom.