Point of fact, the research for each level is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Of course that is not really the bonus we are looking for from city level. We want better city specialization, not better research.

This.  Essence of 2 or 3 on a tile pretty much demands a city.  Unless you are missing the relevant strategic enchants you can shape the city to your will regardless of the tiles grain and materials.  

The mechanic is awesome, as is the flexibility.  I don't advocate changing anything major, but this is something will definitely need some tweaking in Beta 5 for balance.  Right now the flexibility of Essense trumps all.  

I think of the choices presented, the 3/3/2 tile. 

I also think that when it comes to essence, could look at having more essence tiles and ways to get more essence.  To mitigate the fact that everyone is screaming how huge it is vs not getting any at all.  I also don't think there's anything wrong with the flexibility.  Essence is one of my favorite features about FE since it started appearing. 

Grain only matters in as much as city levels matter. Since city levels don't currently do enough, Grain doesn't do enough. Since we are apparently sticking with city level as the main benefit of population, it would be untoward to see any new game mechanics that don't follow this design goal. If you want to add multipliers to resources, they must come from city level. It's too late to turn back now.

So they buffed the bonus slightly in .952? Nice, but not even close to enough.

In previous versions (0.92 and before) the population gave 0.1 production and research per person, so a 100 pop (level 2 city) had 10 bonus research and production.

It doesn't matter if the bonuses comes from the amount of people in the city or the level up process, but they need to come from somewhere in order for it to matter.

I would just like to point out that in the current balance, basing city progression on level-up is flawed. As many people stated, bringing a 3 grain city (which is quite low compared to most locations) to level 5 is not very hard. Assuming the game drags to late game, most of your cities will be level 5, and have enough population for level 6 and 7 were they implemented. Thus I believe that the population should be the base, and level up be a nice bonus (say, extra 20% to the population bonuses per level and a unique building).

my vote was for max essence,food is nice, material better, have found in some of my games a 3 essence, and very definitely GRABBED and defended as hard as possible these locations, the 2 essence gets good defence also the one essence also kept, one sessence also defended reasonably well but 0 essence gets the scrying pool and light defences only just to tempt the monsters to attack it (but they never do any more).

harpo

I might put level 5 at 1000 and level 4 at 700. I like the food numbers, but city levels are a little too easy to get everywhere.

You might be neglecting Towns then. Each one adds a ton of Food to all your cities.

And if you spam only Conclaves, you get no level 5 cities. Seems rather balanced to me. But in regard to the other things, obviously I agree about Towns and Fortresses being less good. They need, well, they need alot of work.

I absolutely love essence and the fun it adds to cities. I live in fear that it will be nerfed down to impotence. Of course I'm confliced because nerfing it hard is possibly the only logical step for Stardock to take because of how powerful it is.

Anyway I agree that essence is way more important than the other resources, with materials coming second (because while you can increase your hammers per material there are very few ways of increasing your number of materials) and grain coming third (because there are more ways of getting food).

So 3/3/2 it is.

They should really have population tied to pioneers some how, I think Elemental is the only strategy game I've played where the settler unit doesn't effect the city producing it