One of my biggest worries about this game so far!

I think that has something to do with the 1000 gold you start with now, which makes it very easy to spam.  I imagine in a more proper game you would start with 0.

The biggest problem with the economy system is while you START with a very large buffer, it takes a very long time until you have any decent income (in gilder/turn). And by decent, I mean more than 10 gilder/turn or so. Starting at 0 would make the game unplayable, since houses require 10 gold, so you'd have to build a Workshop so you can build a Farm and a Merchant so you could build a House.

The large initial gold pool lets you easily hire lots of champions and not worry about your economy much at all, and it encourages a "quick start" rather than a slow one.

Increasing the minimum tile distance would help with city-spamming and slightly reducing the resource density (it's quite high right now, but I like it high just not... too high).

However, I think that they need to implement a better way at increasing your gilder income. A "tax" system would be good, in that each civilian in your entire nation provides .05 gilder per turn (20 civilians to a gilder). Though this does encourage city spamming even more, in a way, it also increases the incentive to invest in Prestige. Doubling your prestige effectively doubles your tax rate.

However, I do think that they need to increase the cost per city by maybe 50 per each.

I'm with BlackhatHedgehog on much of this.

Each city costs more to build than the next. It's just that you start with so much $$.  

I popped it up to 1000 to start to give myself a little extra time to start doing a proper job on the balancing of the cities because, the economic buildup is ridiculously slow right now.

There won't be a "tax" system per say. Instead, we need to reward players more for building up fewer, bigger cities.

Part of the issue is how the AI builds cities at the start.  They build a lot of cities and almost all of them ringing the human players first city.     It is a problem for them long term as they do not build cities on a good location - they build them around the human city regardless of the terrain.   This skews the AI play away from a successful strategy and forces the human player to focus on city position above all in the early game.

I am not sure if you will have the expected result when you need to snake your city to get those nice ressources.

I think that mostly lies in the fact that the AI doesn't do enough exploring. I can walk right up to an AI's capital and they will still have T1 goody huts all around it. It doesn't built cities far away or in good locations because it never "looks" far away for those good locations. 

Edit:

I also do really like starting out with as many resources as we do now. I think it's pretty awesome. I do think that taking it down to 750 would be a nice number. It's large enough you don't have to really "budget" it but it's small enough you can't just go crazy either. 

I think that increasing the rewards of goody huts and loots from monsters would be a good way to make your early-economy based off of (similar to Civ). 

Mid game, I feel like the rewards for exploration should be diminishing and instead you're mostly using money-buildings or Merchant Champions for your gold income. (The Market is a huge huge building for gold production. I've found once I can place a market in two of my cities I can actually DO things. If I don't have that market and I run through my gold buffer the game becomes much much slower). 

Late game, I feel like gold should come from pillaging or conquering enemy cities as well as your cities themselves generating a lot of income (and not just through buildings). But things like Trade, Taxes and other various sources of income that benefit mostly from large cities that are somewhat spread out as opposed to just lots of little cities. 

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I think that unit upkeep is a problem as well. Not only does it take forever to build a single unit, regardless of it's strength, you pay .2 gilder per turn for these typically mediocre units. It stifles the early and mid-game economy even more.

We really just need a way to build units faster (maybe we can have a "slider" for everything. A larger group of units takes longer to train. A better quality level of units takes longer to train. But, you can drop your quality to "conscript" for level 3 and above cities so you can train faster, and also you can drop extra cost into the cost so that they train faster) and then get our economy up and running faster, and also, regardless of what tree go do down. Diplomacy gives trade pacts, Exploration gives larger and better goodie hut bonuses, Magic offers magical ways to generate income, Warfare enables pillaging or sacking enemy cities or minor factions for income, Civilization offers "mundane" ways to generate income such as markets. 

There should be pros and cons to each tree. Exploration gives lots of large rewards in the short turn but after the mid-game it shouldn't offer much of an income at all. Additionally, it's also inconsistent in that you have no idea how much you'll get from this next goodie hut.

Warfare requires you to be warring with your neighbors (or at least, conquering/subduing minor factions).

Diplomacy gives small bonuses initially but the longer the pacts last the more and more lucrative they become.

Civilization requires an upfront cost (materials/gold/tiles) in order to generate income.

Magic might take a long time to generate income, or only do so in small amounts (though not cost as much as an equivalent Civilization income building. Eg, both a Market and a "Magical Market" generate 5 gold per turn and take up 4 tiles. The Civilization Market requires 10 gold and 25 materials to build and is built in 3 turns. The "Magical Market" doesn't require any gold or materials but instead takes 15 turns to build).  

I definitely like the idea of higher build costs with each successive city. It should be very costly and expensive to build a city and not free! Also maybe some sort of pollution penalty the more cities you build? Maybe some sort of immigration system where you need a certain amount of population before you can build another city? Also agree here that players need to be rewarded for not city spamming. Any of these kind of ideas definitely help! Thanks for listening Frogboy!!!

It is already the case. the cost is something like : 100 * number of cities you already own.

its already been stated theyll change it allowing to build on rarities without having to city upon them

so the frog idea is perfect big and fully developed towns should be rewarded

even though im not sure its enough

what would prevent the player (or ai) to build +n cities equally big?

also with new lvl up its easy to pick food and have enough food to support many towns

dunno, i cant think of something apart from a malus preventing millions of cities

I would kiss you for this, if you were a girl .  EXACTLY.  Rewards should be provided for fewer, bigger cities as well as some kind of reward system for cities that specialize (combat, research, economics). These changes are critical to making city building more interesting and strategic.  Lots of threads on specialized cities...

If you ever played Civilization IV you would know that they implemented a "maint" cost increase for every new settlement a player created to the point of too many settlements not enough income to sustain them. There was also corruption in Civilization and this had to be solved by building governmental buildings to increase law & order and lower corruption. Of course MOM had a very simple system based on population and taxes but it didn't really stop city spamming by the player or the ai and was easy to overcome with shrines and religious buildings. Distance should play a part as well in keeping control of settlements far away from the players capital. This could cause some swings of settlements to other players/npcs as they became closer to them than their own faction and influenced over to other faction cities with higher influence values. Nothing should remain set in stone sotospeak just because some player built it or found it. Some players spread out too far and too fast in most empire games and should be punished for this until they have the proper government and policing units and buildings in place.

Right now what is the main criteria for founding a new city?

So far I've been looking for resources and using that as my main condition for putting another one down.

I like the idea of cities forming some strategic layer. With the way the map is and its natural features the strategic potential of the map is huge, especially when you throw in spells.

I do not like the idea of cities being spammed for research or gildar purposes. I would prefer fewer specialized cities did the job better.

Food production though - am I missing something or is it extremely hard to spam cities? It seems that without the food production to support it spamming a bunch of level 1 cities is a waste of time.

In one of my test games, my city reached a population of ~1200 and was producing a large surplus of food. In a world devastated by a magical cataclysm, this would surely be a hub of civilization able to exert influence all over the world. I like that epic feel and hope cities aren't simply clones of one another. Some cities *ought* to do better due to nearby resources and conditions.

I would like to see (if it isn't already the case) a means for city population to continue to move upward with some kind of reward for doing so. Perhaps increased income from trade or an increase to prestige for other cities for being part of such a state. I really enjoy bringing life back to the world and nothing says life to me than cities and roads!

I like a more realistic setting with few power units (dragons, balrogs, sky drakes (you get the picture) and more low to medium class units as in reality would be present moreso than hundreds of power high level units. So, keeping city populations down and not allowing city spamming can keep the game in this limelight. Nobody should be able to run about the board with stacks and stacks of power units like dragons and balrogs and sky drakes. Perhaps one or two IF they find the SPELL that can create them and then IF they have enough resources to cast them too. Games should be epic with many balances on how one can WIN the game not on how one can spam cities or make stacks and stacks of overpowering units. In fact someone with one city who can build up a mediocre army and go around and find all the elements to casting the SPell of Mastery(Making) should be able to win the game just as easy as someone who's running around the map with power stacks.

A feature I would also like to see is Invisible castle/city spell. That way even if you are weak you can keep yourself secluded and the other players either have to step upon your  doorsteps by one hex or cast a view area or view world spell instead.

We need the city spam in order to make food for our larger cities currently.

What has to be managed carefully though, is if you add maintenance costs per city "owned", how do you reward a player for taking and keeping "captured" cities vs forcing them to have to Raze every one he/she takes over or risk tanking their Economy?

Will captured Cities be dinged for maint. costs as well?

It was that way once but I don't seem to notice it as much in 3A but then again I spend all my time trying to rid the map of the thousands and thousands of Goodies Huts, that seem to appear on the map now, despite a limited amount of Adventuring tech being researched. No need for the Magic Mushroom spell, just tech some in the Adventure Tree. LOL! 

Another point is that the AI currently doesn't grow it's cities very well, or seem to want to. After 900 turns I discovered an AI City and it had only reached L2 or L3 Max. and contained very little population. How the hell will they be any challenge?

Yes I know, the AI is not "IN" yet but let's see some of that AI magic in 3B PLEASE!

This could be solved in the following way: Make founding outposts relatively cheap and allow them to grow into villages or even towns but prevent them from growing into cities unless the player grants the settlement a "city charter", which allows it to grow but results in a steep increase in upkeep/maintenance.

This will result in village spamming, but the player can then choose which ones are useful to promote to city status from a cost/benefit point of view and which ones will stay villages. This would also have the advantage of producing settlement patterns that look more realistic: a few large cities, several towns and many villages.

How is changing "city spam" to "village spam" a viable solution to.. spam? Besides, Frogboy already outlined the solution: resources play a much bigger role (meaning, your cities don't magically make stuff out of thin air), and in return you can claim resources in your own territory.

No spam needed.

It's a semi-solution. You still get the few great cities the player cares about and many villages that aren't much different than the resource gathering operations that pioneers can set up. The difference is the player can decide as the game progresses which ones of them turn into a city and which ones wont as opposed to having to commit early on.

On the other hand villages are targets for looters. Losing a village probably results in lost stuff, gildars and prestige. There's a trade off between the potential income and the costs of protecting the village, and there's a trade off between even higher maintenace costs and the possibilities the city grants if you think about upgrading a village.

If villages produce little influence and you risk to lose them to a competitor (like colonies in GalCiv2) that too would reduce the incentive of setting up a village close to a competitor's major city.

That just means one would want more territories quicker to avail one self of those resources. City creep is quite slow currently. I cannot see it getting much faster but still in order to get that resource that is 7 tiles out can take a while. How long are you willing to wait for creep if a Pioneer can go plunk down a Village for instant resource gratification?

The only "real" solution to true "City Spam" is a very heavy maintenance cost. So bad in fact that everyone will bitch for months about how bad it is. (sadly, NOT FUN!)

Otherwise, curbing income sources may help as well. (sadly, still NOT FUN!)

Which.. is actually no longer city spam, as you're scouting the map for prime locations to build cities to harvest resources. This is much slower than putting down cities everywhere you can because you can build a bunch of improvements that generate food.

Expanding your territory is not spam. Spam is putting them down everywhere because their improvements generate resources you need to help your "main" cities.

A way to handle the city spam is to remove the “instant” upgrade of a city once it reaches X people.  Perhaps a step could be added where you have to pay X amount of gold to implement the upgrade (call it infrastructure costs for more populace, etc.).   To increase the emphasis on less but more powerful cities, you could make a vast number of the improvements occur after a city is upgraded certain levels.

For example, to upgrade my first city in the current system, all I need is a workshop, houses and a garden.  Then I sit back and wait until the city automatically upgrades to a “village.”  Under the system that I’m suggesting, you would get an in-game prompt that asks “Do you want to upgrade the city, then pay X gold.”  As a player, you want the city upgraded to unlock the higher level improvement tiles.  But you are going to be required to preserve enough gold to enable to upgrade.

This might not alleviate the issue of several “level 1 cities.”  However, without the useful improvement tiles offered in “level 2+ cities,” the player/AI would just be wasting their own time and money by using the city spam tactic. 

I apologize if this idea has already been mentioned, but I believe it is an easily implemented way to resolve the city spam problem.

Paying to upgrade your cities may be a partial fix. It still encourages "village' spam rather than city spam but since Prestige is hopefully going to become more important then it was before. Plus, I think gardens are a level 2 improvement?

Brad already has the right idea here; there's no need to punish players for spamming cities. You just need to give players a better option instead of building new cities, such as improving existing ones.

Say I have a level 5 capital, two level 3 cities, and 500 gold to spend. I can spend that gold on a new building for my capital, or spend it getting the 3's to a higher level, or found a new level 1 city. To cut down on city spam, you just need to make the first two options more effective than the third.

So what if, for example, there were a bunch of uber buildings only available in level 5+ cities, each of which costs 500g and produces oh, say +20 of some resource, more than you'd get out of an entire level 1 city. As long as my capital has room left, I'll be saving my gold for those buildings rather than spamming new cities. And when my capital is full, I'll be spending my gold on the level 3 cities, getting them up to 5 so they too can have their uber buildings. Sure you could spend that gold on a bunch of level 1 cities, but it just wouldn't be the best option for improving your empire, players (and well designed AIs) will generally go with the smart choice.

If city spam is happening, then it's probably because it is the smart choice - you don't need artificial limitations to fix this, you just need to rebalance the game such that it's no longer a better idea to build a new level 1 city instead of improving existing level 5's.

Practically speaking, I think the main cause of city spam, right now, is materials* - unless you take the lumbermill trait, the only way to produce materials is a bunch of little workshops any level 1 city can build. Materials and gold are the primary 'economic' resources used to make the buildings that produce more resources, and while level 5 cities can produce several times the gold of level 1s (thus providing an incentive to level up cities rather than spam them), my level 5 capital still produces 1 material per turn just like any level 1 city - this is a problem. So even if I really, really want to develop my capital fully and I really don't want to spam a bunch of little cities, I still have to city spam just to produce the materials to develop my capital with all those essential economic buildings. This isn't a flaw in the game mechanics, it's just a lack of material producing buildings above city level 1, easily fixed by giving everyone lumbermills back and making the trait do something else (a third material boost on top of that, faster build times?).

Now, materials aren't the only problem, just the biggest one at the moment. There are other changes that'd help - increasing the cost of new cities, starting with less gold, adding more buildings only available at higher city levels (like the hypothetical 500g uber building mentioned above), there isn't any one magic change that would fix city spam. But these are all easy changes to make, and such balance fixes are all that's really needed, not new game mechanics like city maintenance costs, paid upgrades, taxes, etc. I'm not saying those are bad ideas, just unnecessary when a few balance fixes to existing game mechanics would accomplish the same thing.

*Edit: I'm deliberately ignoring another major cause of city spam, building level 1 cities just to get some essential resource - because, I hope, this'll be going away anyway with the promised changes to resource gathering.

I haven't really paid attention to how this works currently but building a city should have a population cost as well.  That would be a good way to help curb city spamming a little as you are taking your people away from your other cities this hurting their growth.  Also if you limit the how low the population can go you can set some limits, especially early in the game.  The only problem with this is that pioneers are used for building resources also which you may not want to limit.  Just some food for thought.

I can understand why a tax system can be hard to balance, but wouldn't a tax system actually favor larger cities over small cities spam? Since food is scarce, and higher level cities have access to denser population buildings (like the slum or houses versus huts), restricting yourself to a few cities with a lot of housing will net you a lot more population than using food to make a bunch of level 2 or 3 cities. Having a source of income proportional to your populations then discourage cities spam (although it doesn't prevent the player from leaving his spammed cities at level 1).