One question to those who have mentioned that they could not build up cities due to a lack of buildable tiles - did you try to have your sovereign lower or raise land before you built the city?  That can dramatically increase the buildable area available.

I've started about 10 games so far and have finished none, so perhaps I'm missing something here, but I think I'll next try a strategy of only building cities where there is something valuable to justify their existence, and then totally specializing the city around that resource.  If I explore and found fast enough, that might be a viable strategy.

As for the AI, I haven't seen much AI aggression towards cities yet.  I did see some critters or bandits attack resource squares, but not in recent builds of the game.  Mostly they go after my solo observers and those don't last very long.  I send my sovereign out but he can't be everywhere at once.

There is. I see negative values for gold production on most of my non-gold mine cities after a while. Not sure if it's maintenance for all buildings, or tied to specific buildings.

There's also a guild building which reduces city maintenance by 25%

I don't think you can. Cities can't build within a certain range of other cities. Not sure if it's prestige based or just the 5 tile limit though.

Math is wrong. Elemental takes base, adds all modifiers, then multiples. So it'd be 1 * (1+ (.15 + .25)) = 1.4.

But that's the reason you don't just try to make every city big. It's not worth it; you can't expect to make every city useful that way unless you spam cities. And you certainly can't make every city do everything. However, you may want them big to control resources. Some cities may very well just be used to hold resources; is there something wrong with that? As well, if need be, you can leave resources out of the city - they won't be considered a part of the city and won't take up tiles but you will get their resources. They'll be vulnerable to creeps but that's a trade off.

On a side note, depending on when those resources appeared, you could have -saved- quite a few of those huts and such. And even now, you could certainly re-arrange buildings to make it more efficient/free up space.

But in the end, some cities will be outposts, some cities will be big, most will probably be best at just level 2 and funnel resources to your other cities.

It's funny cause the math still came out roughly the same lol

Basically, you shouldn't be hitting your city limit unless you're trying to put every resource in that one city and want all the resource modifiers for that city. When you spawn, don't build a city right where you start, build it a little further away, that way you won't get those uber resource cities which seem cool until you find the tile limit.

EDIT: Sounded too serious in the first part lol

I've had a neighboring AI at the top of the power graph declare war on me while I had no military at all.  50 turns later, when I've still not built a single combat unit, I've not seen a single enemy stack enter my territory.  Only after I built an army and started taking it's cities did it fight back at all.

If that's not passive AI, I don't know what is.

Yeah sure, I love wasting turns moving to place my city in a less than optimal spot so that I can actually utilize the resources around my start area.  Not to mention I love having two cities on top of each other.  Sounds like awesome game design to me.

well, it honestly sounds like awesome game design to me... 

The math is more prominent when you're stacking multiple modifiers or resource nodes. 12 x 1.15 x 1.25 x 1.25 x 1.25 = 26.95. It's 23 if you add the modifiers first.

And yes, there isn't any real reason to build everything in a city. Especially if you have resources available. If you have a Lost Library available in a city, you don't need a Study. You get more benefit out of stacking mods on the 5 than the 1; the Study (and similar) is best used in cities you never intend on improving to begin with, that have extra space after wards, aren't producing anything else, or to bootstrap something. You need to get a 500% modifier to make a Study equal to a Lost Library... but for that same cost, that Lost Library will -also- produce 5x more. So you can either try to spend space and money going from 1 to 5 or the same to go from 5 to 25. What's more efficient to you? Even without modifiers, a resource node is still much much better than the base building. Especially with city level up bonuses; if there's not much production going on in a city, the tech, arcane or gil bonus won't do you squat. The guardian unit is potentially useful but only on border towns where there aren't resources; it's a cheap way to get a unit on a city that isn't worth much and that you'll probably raze anyway after the war is over. 

Heck, if you have extra food and are in a jam but have lots of extra spaces, you could very well build many small cities with a single hut, get the guardian unit, and then raze the city. Likely not a viable strategy for long term warfare or defense, but for the cost of a pioneer and a hut, you could potentially get something useful (brigand archers are nice at the early stages) well beyond the cost of that.... or at least, cannon fodder to inflate a stack. Plus, it can push back the fog of war/tame lands between important cities to avoid random spawns popping up in a pinch.

As far as spawning city, don't think of it as a capital city. THere's no such thing in Elemental. Consider it just aanother city. The only reason you should build up a city is because the resources are available for it. For instance, if you have a refugee camp near a spawn, that's a good place to make a big city since the refugee camp is equal to 2 to 3 huts (3 food). That 3 food and 3 space you save is equal to a market place, an irrigation system, or other 25% modifier. And that 3 space you save is almost enough for a 2x2 building or worth higher level smaller buildings (more mods). Thus by knowing which cities to build up and which are fine at level 1 or 2, you can really maximize your cities to support the sprawl.

And, once a city is maxed out, if you have spare space... hey, go ahead and add those lesser improvements at that point.

What's also important to consider is city location within your empire. If the city is right in the middle of your empire with plenty of space around, there's not reason to wrap defenses around the resource; it's protected by other cities and there's no fog of war for monsters to spawn in. It's also worthwhile to think of cities as a resource, not as an important location unless it is strategically or economically important. They are ways of turning food (the fundamental resource in Elemental) into almost anything.

Another alternative use is to block off land. If you have a mountain pass, you can build a city and use improvements to cover the width of the gap, forcing any one trying to get through to try to get through the city (complete with defensive bonus). Helmsdeep didn't have anything special about it - no resources, had little in way of size and such.. but it was important as a means of defense.

Yuo

You can't flip them, but you can wipe them out with influence spread. The city will just disappear.

Personally i've only built cities near resources and seen no absolutely no benefit to building it with nothing nearby.

just doesn't seem worth the cost to manage cities that don't give you anything.

nice!  ...influence nuke.  less realistic, but this is fantasy.

I've had the AI attack and destroy unguarded cities.  So I wouldn't believe all the crap coming from the forums.  It has happened in TWO seperate games.    I do think that the other AI players are a bit under aggressive however.  Of course this is only my observations and so far the game is pretty good and I'm enjoying it.

The reason you don't want to build cities all over the place is simply lack of food.  A level 1 city, unless placed next to resources, can only grant you 1 Arcane/Tech/Gold/Materials per turn.  Unless I just haven't seen extra buildings for level 1 cities further in the tech tree yet.  Level 2 is barely better and from level 2 onward it starts taking food to build them up.  Building lots of cities means you have tons of near useless cities who don't recoup their costs for a long time (between cost to build those initial buildings and the pioneer unit).  Unless you find the food mecca.