Ok, well then let's say 7 outposts then. The point is, at some point I'll be even with you on with my multiple small towns vs your one big city. The difference is I'll be covering a much larger area (influence wise) than you will. I'll also have N times as many caravans with N times as many roads and the potential of building N times as many horse archers who can book around on those roads anywhere I need them gaining N times the experience & loot fighting N times as many monsters. That's not even to mention the extra teleportation hubs (which I rarely use anyway given the increased cost & the fact that I can do the same thing with multiple strong armies).

Also, there's not infinite resources available in this game, especially when considering crystal & shards. I can assure you, Ill be making a beeline for these resources as part of my spam (they're top priority in my spam-expansion, especially crystal since it affects military squads dramatically), and who's going to be more likely to find them: somebody sitting on their butt building up gotham city as well as it can be or someone massivly expanding as much as possible? Outside of obscene luck, the guy expanding would be the guy finding these extremely valuable resources first & harvesting them.

It is a 4x game after all.

Also, I'm not going to be completely ignoring building up cities. I might have fewer built up in comparison, but I typically make a beeline for that mint of Ravenna, which helps a lot financially at midgame, so I'll have at least a few cities that are being built up. Endgame is usally no problem finance-wise as I always take gildar increase, resulting in endgame of 100+ gilder per turn typically.

Of course, depending on how 1.1 is, or how much they nix city spam, it might make your approach more viable. So, it's all just wait and see at the moment.

This is actually what we had during the betas and it was a nightmare.

v1.1 is going to be dramatically different economically because population returns to being a proper resource.

10 small cities will still probably beat a single big city.  But 10 outposts would likely get wiped out by 1 metropolis fairly easily.

Frogboy, it sounds like you don't want to go down this path... but let me suggest it anyways!

Again, I haven't played the game yet so I don't know exactly how this stuff works but:

What if each population point costs 1 food to maintain, and your population won't grow unless you have enough surplus food to support more population, and your pop will shrink if you have negative food.

Then all you need to do is re-balance food production by creating a larger output for large cities. IE let the large cities make 1.5 food per farmer where a small city might only make 1.1 food/farmer (i.e. 1 new citizen every 10 turns, but farmers cant produce goods or research). This allows larger cities to generate enough food to grow itself more quickly than smaller cities, and also allows you to support new cities eventually. You would have to use caravans to link together cities so that excess food can go from one city to another.

A simple system like this would solve all the problems I think, since now small cities can't significantly produce goods/research unless they are connected to a larger city or they happen to have a food resource. This adds much more strategy and makes it so you have to choose carefully which cities you make since they aren't free anymore.

Now that I think about it... this is basically a modified version of Moo2 system... I think its a good way to go... but note that it doesn't require specialists to implement... you just have to factor in percentages of the total city population...

Actually here's a question- should there be a penalty for negative food?

Such as population loss?

One idea- when you conquer a city, it has to rebuild its population for mostly scratch, (maybe CHR*2%).  Excess housing is destroyed in the takeover randomly.  that might solve conquering= negative food.

Currently negative food halves gildar income in all cities (or at least it did in 1.07).

Don't forget the 10 to 1 caravan limit.

I'm not sure if you guys are changing anything else, but with the existing mechanic, outposts can pump out the next to highest squad size (8 or 9 guys). While it doesn't have the same power as a 12 size company, when multiple outposts are pumping them out, it's very hard to compete against with just one build queue unless you abuse stacking training time to build everything in one turn (I consider this a bug though). This is ESPECIALLY true for empire outposts, which can build 2 training buildings.

In my mind a lot of this can be boiled down to 1) how the game distributes resource tiles across the map, and 2) ensuring there is little economic incentive to founding a city that will never have an associated resource tile.

Personally I had to move away from tiny and small maps because the worlds would quickly run out of uncontrolled space where monsters would spawn, and darn it I like hunting monsters. I didn't play MoM to see how quickly I was going to beat the AI, it was a forgone conclusion I was going to win no matter the difficulty. I liked going around and clearing out all the nodes and dungeons and such, because they were way harder than the AI's cities. Same applies to Elemental at present, we are all probably going to win, it is just a question of how interesting the ride is. For me part of that ride is the unclaimed forests that spew monsters.

I had this great game going where there was a large swath of monster forest, but then Ceresa went and ruined it by founding THREE cities in that area, and the only resource anywhere in that whole area was a SINGLE clay pit. Three cities for one resource tile, and one of the least useful ones at that.

I can't imagine (outside of every map being custom-made) how complex the programing must be to make the "just right" mix of clustered resources, but not TOO clustered, and also leave somewhere in the world some space where absolutely no one would want to settle. But that's what I want.

And with population as a resource, doesn't it seem like founding a city anywhere, even with no associated resources, is going to be a good strategy (or rather, even better than now)? I mean then I can assign those specialists as more troops or whatever. It sounds like the player is getting "something for nothing" in that hey, as long as I have the food to support the housing that I need for population growth, then I can have infinite population with enough cities and caravan routes (as I pointed out in my post above regarding food production).

There needs to be a penalty to a city with no resource tile - maybe it takes a prestige hit, or extra turns to produce buildings. And if the overall Kingdom can support that, OK. But at least make the player/AI think about it long and hard.

Side note: pre 1.08 it seemed that resource tiles that were "discovered" through tech would always spawn within your existing borders. Now where they appear seems weighted towards your current border, with a strong chance of it being outside your current territory. While it is annoying for my researched stuff to appear in my neighbor's territory, it is the opposite that needs to be balanced for the AI; my last game I had two ventril mines and crystal crags appear in MY territory that the AI researched. Great for me, bad for AI.

Never. Right now your options are far too limited: attack, cast / ability, move, and (for heroes) retreat. Disciples 2 removed movement making the battle less tactical. What it needed something like Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic with lots of interesting abilities and where you move is very important.

Higher difficulty AI are allowed to see everything.

There's one key thing Elemental does that kind of throws a monkey wrench in everyone's perception and approach to the game.

And that's research.

Research basically says, on all fronts "whatever limitations are inherent in the system can be completely broken with enough research."

That's why in current game, someone who maximizes food research never worries about food. They just forewent all the other goodies for the time being. But they had enough food to expand rapidly, and that's one key part of game play everyone notices.

Since the game currently GUARANTEES you the 1 Food and Gold you need to get started, it's really just a matter of time and choices on the player's part. That the AI has a set priority, while the player explores, balances their tech, and does flavorful stuff, is what creates the dysfunction in the overall system. The AI researches prestige like, immediately, once it gets it's legs under it. It's cities grow exponentially fast compared to a player that doesn't do that. The AI seems terrible at focusing on Ag research though, so it craves every single food resource on the map, and goes into a death spiral if it's food needs exceed what it get it's hands on.

(i.e., I've starved AI empires into tranquility by just building my empire across the heart of the map so they can't expand anymore. Rather than continually researching Ag, as a player would do to get a TON of food from one bit of research, the AI just sits there. Lonely. Hungry. Bored.)

So where exactly is the problem in a game where the limitations and ratios that define balance in the conquest/city game can be researched into triviality? The problem is up and down the game. It applies to weapon research, army building, all that. I can see where I can like the system, but because so much rides on how the player chooses to progress and in what areas, the question of what's balanced is really....hard to nail down. The fact that almost all the important expansion researches are under Kingdom/Empire means that players who opt to research other things run the risk of falling drastically behind the AI. I sort of do all the trees one level at a time, and that usually leaves me leagues behind the AI in expansion, but far more capable of mounting a solid comeback. It's just the game you have to deal with if you do that, dozens of AI cities and trying to beat the AI to the punch on your own turf, gets old after you do it two to three times.

How about this to limit city spam: the level and size a city can reach is dependent on the size of its hinterlands. 

If you have a bunch of cities crowded together, the highest they can reach is, say, level 2, before the supporting hinterlands are exhausted.  If you space cities apart some they can grow to level 5, the rationale being that it takes the production of a large area of hinterlands to support a large city, which is how it works IRL.

With this, the player should have the option to limit city level.  Even with a bunch of cities spammed togather in a small area, if all of them are optionally kept to level 1, except for one, that one remaining city should still be able to grow to a good, high level.

If you have a level 5 city every few squares, that runs contrary to common sense and may be the sources of the problem here.

Mechanistically it would go something like this: when the city is ready to grow a level, it would require a baseline number of contiguous (diagonals okay) unoccupied tiles surrounding it, within the zone of influence.  It would then "own" those tiles as its hinterlands and other cities could not make use of them.  If it has the requisite number of tiles, it would be allowed to level up.  I'd say level 0 outposts wouldn't require anything, level 1 maybe 2-3 unoccupied tiles, growing exponentially to level 5.