It was... People ignored it, I have said before that I personally Do not need snaking, I do not really enjoy snaking and only does so rarely when it is overly beneficient due to map setup, (sometimes im forced to do so because cities are too close).

you could make so there are city hubs, so only few "accesses" to the city "barracks/governing seat" few meaning one or 2 tiles, rest is just to show where the city is, and hopefully change combat maps, so you will have yourself walking through the city streets with heroes and monsters, and enemies invading your cities will be forced to choose from among a few sieging options:
1: Take control of the city seat, by killing the city garrison, and therefore taking direct control of the city.
2: Starving the city garrison, will take some turns which in where reinforcements will probably be sent from other cities nearby, but in turn you will face a damaged city garrison.
3: Razing everything but the city barracks and city governing seat, pillaging stuff around the city putting it back to the stone age, the effects ofcourse will be you wont get the city, but when you leave there is not city left to take anyways, just a little fort with some walls.

Another way to solve it would make you able to walk insidethe city, removing the city garrison as a whole (of course there will be basic defending militia) this will also needs some re balancing due to not every unit in the city should be able to attend the defensive ceremony , but with proper adjustements would create some epic city battles, and also meaby with the correct settings bring the player time to reinforce his cities, so city capturing wont always be a blitz krieg, but one player with the proper units/tech can try to acheive a blitz krieg by rushing the defenses and taking down walls fast.

The 1 city tile option (like civilization 5), not the one they choose to use but where the city is just one tile could also help the problem, if you ofcourse make it cost something to exit the city, or improve the unit into city interface, This is though a thoroughly chewed piece of cloth, and I won't really go into details here since most players know this model from MoM, Civilization, or practically any other game, That said meaby it is so "over used" compared to other models for a few reasons (graphics, memory, ease of use, scale, and meaby a few others).

The 1-5 Tiled city, which is Actually the approach in which the have put up in a post, which is a new version of the 1 tiled city, IT WONT help unit teleportation unless they still change the game mechanics around the cities, although it may limit it a little bit, (most cities will probably look like a 5 tiled line of city blocks). This create a focus and emphasis over each single piece of map square's graphics, and would probably raise the graphic level over cities alot, that said it still requires the artists to rework the city graphics, and does not really remove the teleporting "problem", just limiting it, though it probably like the 1 tiled city would help on graphics, ease of use, and SOME people's sense of scale.

There may be others, but these are the most interesting I have seen (except the 1 tiled city) so far, each with pro's and con's, (some with more cons than pros ).

I know which one I prefer
Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Hmm, at some point in the next beta I think I will poke some modder, and which should help me make the minimum distance between cities twice  as large, Think it would benefit gameplay in alot of ways.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I was just about to suggest this exact thing.

I don't like the idea of one-tile cities.  Being able to see your cities physically sprawl out and expand as they grow is probably my favorite visual element in the game.  And it seems like every time Frogboy talks about the game he always gets excited about how you can physically see all the equipment you put onto your units.  Removing that level of details seems to strongly oppose the overall visual style the game has been built towards, not to mention it would waste a lot of existing art assets.

I'm not a huge fan of hard-capped city improvements, either.  City specialization should be encouraged organically through other mechanics, not hamfistedly forced through artificial limits.  Specializing my cities because it's physically impossible to do otherwise isn't a particularly interesting decision for me as a player.  It also favors large numbers of cities instead of a smaller number of huge ones, which I thought we were trying to avoid.  And even if you were going to go down that route, having the improvement limit based entirely on geographical proximity would cause huge problems once you consider rivers, forests, resources, and other things that take up space near your cities.

The only real problem is the abuse and general goofiness that results from snaking, and you can fix that just by making improvement placement semi-random (weighted mostly towards sticking near the city's center of mass, of course).  Or, if anyone is really passionate about being able to manually place buildings, you could achieve the same effect by just barring you from putting anything in a 2-tile radius until the 1-tile radius is at least 75% full or whatever.  A dramatic overhaul of how cities function doesn't seem necessary here at all.

Once, I was pretty excited about placing buildings on the map. The excitement faded when I saw the end result. Individually, the city buildings/improvements are well-put together and attractive. At the end of the day, though, a large city looks confusing rather than bustling. It is just a series of intricate and different looking buildings sitting next to one another with no meaningful connections or visual continuity. Rather than being connected by streets and wandering pedestrians, it is a discrete series of modules. As a result, even the appearance of the city isn't enough to offer an incentive to thoughtfully place a building, which is unfortunate because the only other reason to make a purposeful placement is to exploit teleportation or link up resources. I just click the building I want and mash the mouse around my city until the game realizes what I want and I get on with my day. Just an opinion on aesthetics.

I can understand the desire to want to preserve the current mechanic because it allows for better defense of resources and chokepoints, but I think that says more about needing better mechanisms for defending resources and chokepoints than it does about needing to maintain the current city construction system.

I just want big well built and highly populated cities to look MASSIVE on the map, compared to 2-5 people cities.
I do like bigger cities, I do still think some of the city parts should be walkable, while some of it should be garrisonable, meaby its just a sillyhead liking his own ideas .

I do hope whatever stardock chooses, that they COMMIT to that decision to an extent to make it feel integral in the game, and make the cities feel and look unique (not to eachother, but apart from other games).

I know I shouldn't expect the world and 200 golden spoons from Stardock... But I do anyways So gimme all the coolest graphics with the most awesome sprawling-looking cities, with the least perfomance cost! .

Jokes aside, me thinks its waay too debated out for me to put more proper comments in.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

So you are saying that we should get rid of the mechanic we have that works fine, is fun, and makes sense, and create another one to replace it that will do the same thing?  I am still for the life of me trying to figure out why so many are jumping on this bandwagon to change the way cities are laid out to some 1980's mechanic?  The reason Civilization was that way was because of technological constraints.  The Elemental way is better in most ways, yet we want to go back to the old archaic ways?  Why?

City building (well planet building) was better in Gal Civ 2 than any other 4X game I have ever played, and I have played a lot (including the original Civilization back in the late 80's).  I was disappointed that E:WOM didn't carry over the limited space, yet specialized tiles approach of GC2.  The ability to stack effects was an awesome gameplay mechanic that made city building fun (unlike Civ where it was very boring, since 95% of all your cities would build the exact same buildings, probably in the same order).  But at least now we have a tactical placement mechanic that actually affects how your influence grows, which is an AWESOME mechanic!  I wish we had that option in other 4X games, and I am depressed that it looks like we will lose it.  What was wrong with that mechanic?  It forced you to plan out your expansion within the city itself, instead of just on a macro world level like all other 4X games of this type.  The biggest change I would like is to limit the spaces you can build on to those that have material or food available after the city is built, and allow for stacked buildings (additional workshops to gain extra material, extra libraries for more research, or extra grainaries to allow extra food, etc. at the expense of other buildings.)

I actually think the cities look pretty nice when you build them with that intent.  They could look better with more organic links between buildings, but they are by no means ugly in their current form.

I like this idea and I kind of thought this was the plan for the original one-tile-per-city concept floated by Stardock. Cities would grow a little based on size, and the artwork would be based on the specialization of the city. This would significantly shrink cities (which I think is good), allow larger cities to look more impressive than smaller ones, and allow the player to see what a city is good at by looking at it on the map which is something that can't really be done now.

This idea has my vote.

Funny, its like some people likes to see this, and some doesn't, going to be a hell if StarDock is going to listen to both ideas

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Why force people not to 'snake'?  If you don't like it, don't do it.  The only adjustment needed is in the snake-haters playstyle.

I don't really have a problem with having limited amount of districts instead of "buildings" on the map, if the end result is still somewhat similar. Although IMO, the districts need to do something more than just be some visual cue for the city (they can be, but that shouldn't be their only purpose).

I'm gonna go on a limb here and toss out some ideas on how districts could be reworked into the current system with some minor changes:

Let's start with the basics, let's say a district is one fourth of a tile. Every city starts with 1 district, and gains the city level's amount of districts when it levels. So a lv 1 hamlet would have a max of 2 districts, a lv 2 village would have 4, lv 3 town would have 7, lv 4 city would have 11, and lv 5 metropolis would have 16. So basically the biggest city in the game would span a total of 5 tiles (if spaced that way, but may spread more naturally if desired), which SHOULD drastically reduce any performance issues (most cities would be about 3-4 tiles). This would also limit the snaking and gaminess of the system, while still allowing it to a certain decree so that you could defend choke points or grab nearby resources. All this is done pretty easily with tile limit in the current system, you'd just need a separate screen for improvements (that will no longer shows up on the map). Although it might be a good idea to give districts it's own build queue (to emulate natural growth), you could just assign the district like a city planner and the district would grow organically over time (let's say 4 seasons per district).

Now, before we go into how to make the system interesting, let's define some very obvious types of districts:

1. Civilian - Influences Growth and Population Limit. Let's say a normal city only grows to lv3 normally, and you'd need some Civillian districts to grow further. You can always build more to grow the city faster, or to increase the population to be taxed.

2. Military - Improves ATK/DEF of Trained units, lowers their training time, and city defenses.

3. Magic - Improves Magic value (Int? Not sure with stat changes) of units (to train magic units), and Magic resist of trained units. Provides magic defense to the city against overland spells (a resist chance?) and for defenders.

4. Industrial - Improves City Production

5. Commerce - Produces small amount of Gildar and increases amount of tax raised.

6. Science - Improves Research

Each type of district has 5 levels(I-V), with higher levels requiring the previous level along with the city of the same level. So a Civilian V district would require Civilian IV + a 5th level Metropolis. By having 5 of each type, you can make thematic looking cities without it looking like copy/pasted buildings (thus avoiding the repetitiveness of the housing issue in EWOM).

I hope you can see where I'm going with this. With 30 districts to build, and only a max of 16 that can be build in a city, you force the player to make some hard choices about their cities, which naturally leads to specialized cities. A player might want Industrial/Military cities to produce higher quality units faster, or some Civilian/Commerce cities to pay their armies, etc... all the while making a few high level cities valuable and competitive with city spamming.

This system can also be a flexible counter strategy mechanic simply by allowing the player to redistrict their cities to deal with problems/demand. Maybe you are having a lot of trouble with enemy mages, so you scrap some Civilian districts to build a few Magic districts in your troop production cities. The city would grow slower (or not at all) and produce less tax (less people to be taxed), but now the troops you train from there have better magic resists. All this would just take a few seasons for the new districts to grow (and maybe a flat demolition/districting fee). Or perhaps you are in the red on your ledger and needs money... it might be time to replace some districts with Commercial ones on your populous cities. Basically, districts would be city mods that you can put on/pull off to suit the situation.

To spice things up a little further make wonders and special buildings take up a district (you want those things out on the map anyways). Suddenly you have to make some real choices on whether you want to build that wonder in your best cities (but reducing the city's potential in the process), or maybe put it in a less important city... thus making those also important, or perhaps not at all if you don't really need it. Need more room to build? That neighboring city looks ripe.

If that wasn't enough, toss in some special districts, like:

Gilden, who needs lots of metal for their armies, might have a special mining district that generates a small amount of Iron, that they can only build into mountains. Thus, a Gilden player might value mountains way more than most, and might want to build special mining cities against mountains to support the construction of their armies.

Tarth might have special forest preserves that gives them bonus food and gives bonuses to their archers. Of course, these can only build on forest tiles, so a Tarth players would value large forests and would look for it to build their cities.

So now when you fight a Gilden player, you might want to go after their mines to disrupt their heavy troop production, or, if you were a creative magi, maybe toss a lower land spell on that mountain before the war starts and watch Gilden falls before your armies. Just the same, a Gilden player might want to take some Earth Magic to raise some mountains in a safe corner to mine without having to worry about defending it too much. The same can be just as true for Tarth and forest tiles, not only does it serve to slow their enemies, but it strengthen them in the process... yet a little brush fire never seems so dangerous... perhaps they might want to be on good terms with that Fire mage next door, or pick up some water spells just in case. Now you have some real strategy playing with elements on the map, not to mention some serious creative usage of terraforming spells that would otherwise be neglected for the always trusty fireball.

Not only would something like this address some of the fundamental problems that the current system poses, but it also make the game more interesting as opposed to just cutting out one of the games defining feature. Best of all, this is completely within the realm of possibility with only some slight modifications to the current system (moving individual improvement/buildings into a separate window), and this is just me throwing some ideas together. I'm sure that if you guys wanted to, you could make something way better out of it. That's exactly why it's so disheartening for me, and I suspect many others, when I see you talk about just throwing it all away for a 1-tile system.

Edit: Wow, that was way longer than I thought, apologies for the book.

I really like being able to place buildings - for no logical reason, but simply to see cities expand in a tangible and player-influenced way, this is something truly unique to Elemental (among TBSes anyway, it has a bit of an RTS vibe). I'm with Cruxador - don't remove snaking, address the problems that snaking is seen as a solution to, and snaking will disappear. Let us build walls to cut off chokepoints, and have entering and leaving a city kill a unit's movement (so enter city -> leave city -> continue moving takes 3 turns) so it's no longer better for movement.

I've been staying out of this convo because I'm of mixed opinions here. On the one hand, you're absolutely right about the snaking and exploits and the fact that the size of cities doesn't make sense when scaled with everything else. On the other hand, the most interesting things to look at in the game are the cities (ok, some of the quest locations are pretty cool too). I like zooming in on the special buildings and watching my minions toiling away (it would look better if disabling the zoom limiting would actually work).

Maybe Frogboy's districts could work by limiting the locations the city can be built. Each time the city leveled up, you'd gain a new district of x number of tiles which are the only squares that city can build on. Depending on the type of district it can give bonuses to certain types of buildings. It can prevent snaking (district placement required to be within certain distance of starting tile location, or some similar type of restriction), still shows the building artwork, and adds a dimension to city planning. Perhaps additional bonuses can be had from putting a district next to a resource, which adds another element to city and district placement.

It still doesn't solve the scaling issue, but at least it helps prevent cities from reaching out and shaking hands to minimize distances units have to travel. (within the limits allowed, I assume there's still some limit to how close cities can grow towards eachother like in WoM? I don't usually snake my cities so much that I push the limits)

It does take up a build slot... but that's not necessarily a mechanic that needs to be kept. Or maybe that's a tradeoff for getting the bonus.

I'll give you it may cause some slowdown in older systems, but I'm not convinced any slowdown I've experienced is directly attributed to having 5 large cities.