New functionality will always require some rebalancing. I dont see any problem with that.

To fix city spam, what needs to change is:

1) Make it worth while to have high level cities. Currently nearly all the buildings that require a high level city only allow for you to have one.

2) Make it a bit harder to make cities, and given the fluff it would be good if this was magical in nature, and require that pioneers may only build on your native terrain (though this does not mean it should take essence or mana upkeep, either a one time cast spell and/or being able to divert mana income into restoring the land beyond your zone of control for settling would do).

3) More stuff to do early in the game other than build cities, research stuff, and train units. Letting sovreigns start with some attack spells and/or decent equipment would allow for an early game that feels like you are having to fight against the destroyed and dangerous world.

4) Make having lots of cities less of an advantage; my favorite idea is one I have posted a lot and will do so again.

Besides magic being needed to expand your realm, both 2 & 3 could be dealt with by having monster lairs that need to be cleared out. It would be especially good if they were near or on resources (or have quests that need to be completed before the resource and be used). And more valuable resources such as shards would have lairs with stronger monsters / harder quests. If monster lairs are included, the at a certain point (say when a player or AI move units too close) they could "activate" as start spawning creeps that will attack near by towns. Some of my favorite maps for AoW:SM have strong independants that need to be beat before you can move forward, and it can really make a game interesting even if the AI rolls over when you start fighting them seriously. In fact, the Majesty games (at least the first ones) are based on fighting creatures to build up your realm. It would also give the AI time to get to good units and be challenging... at least for a while till its forces have finally been smashed up.

Point one simply requires more buildings to build at high levels that provide large advantages. Another thing would be to have buildings be required for good troops / gear in the town so that outposts take longer before becoming an additional building queue for your best troops. Of course, the cost of building up a city verses the bonuses a well upgraded city provides should be balanced such that cities with one or no resource tiles will remain outposts and villages, those with 2 to X resource tile or rare resources (crystal and shards) would be level 3 and 4 cities, and only the best placed cities would be worth becoming fully upgraded. The point of this is having all cities be metropolises would be nearly as bad at fitting with the game as have dozens of towns everywhere.

These are good posts and I want to add some of my own issues too:

#1 N^3 game mechanics.  These destroy any hope of a good AI. A game having ONE of these would wreck the AI, Elemental has multiple of these. Specifically:

a. Enchantment slots that are PER caster.

b. Individualized mana pools PER caster.

c. The requirement that one must control map resources and those resources combined with the ease of building cities which requires the AI to spread its forces making it vulnerable to force projection (AIs are awful against defending against force projection -- that's the real reason why game designers hate "stacks of doom".

d. Multiple technology paths that result in game winning results with no counter enabling easy force projection.

e. No counter-spells, making the AI vulnerable to force projection even more.

Anyone one of these 5 things alone would make it very hard to have a good AI.  All 5 need to be addressed.

If anyone is tempted to ask "Well, you designed the game! How come you didn't see these?" you now know why most games are sequels. It's hard to design a new game (and MOM has multiple N^3 mechanics too which is why its AI would never be competitive).  But all 5 of these things we are going to address in Elemental v1.x.

#2 Lack of player control over pacing.  It's all about resource getting rather than city strategizing.  Elemental needs to hand control to the player.

#3 Lack of a means to move around the map quickly late game without cheese.

#4 Tactical Battles are not fun for me.  I haven't found any game yet that I like tactical battles in. I've turned over the design of tactical battles to others on our team because my distaste for them really showed up in v1.0.

#5 Trigger system lacks sufficient conditions. This means I can't easily create random events to spice things up.

All 5 of these things are required to be addressed.

So, what is being done about all of the things you listed?

I still think the basic GalCiv equivalent to resource gathering per city would be a quick fix, but i fear it would be a huge overhaul requiring way to many resources for just a simple update. 

While i am hoping for this to modified soon, i hate to think SD having to use up so much time on this. I dunno, i love Elemental but i am still itching for GalCiv 3, even better if it uses the Elemental engine.

One can dream

Different things for different issues.

First, let me detail what an N^3 mechanic is.  It's a mechanic in which a player can exponentially increase their standing with relatively little effort.

For instance, if I can imbue a hero and that hero can now cast fire giant then it makes sense to imbue lots of heroes. In short order, I can have an army of fire giants.  There is no realistic counter to that strategy and it forces players who want to play at their best to essentially go down this strategy for best results.

Basically, it's "getting something for nothing".

So how do you fix that sort of thing? 

In Elemental v1.1 we're doing the following things:

1. Mana is global.  All casters have to share that mana.

2. Summoned units have a per turn mana upkeep.

3. Imbued heroes have a summoned per turn mana upkeep.

4. Mana per turn is generated by controlling shards.

5. Buildings require population to fill them. 

6. An Outpost requires 1 food to maintain (thus you better be bloody sure you want that outpost).

7. You can build multiple of a building as long as you have the population and city level to do so. Thus, lucky resource placement is not so overwhelming.

@Frogboy - looks interesting.  What do you mean when you say that buildings have to be occupied...  like in GalCiv and over building without having the necessary population?

Well, I think that (to answer to Frogboy too) your sovereign should be the one to "gage" your power to. What if your sovereign "spawn" ressource like food AND need to protect the new settlement with a magic (that need essence too)that allow this settlement to counter the "nuclear-magic" wind that   the magic war have create? I mean, you need to level up your sovereign to gain essence in turn to do 2 thing: create town and ressource OR keep his mana to cast powerfull spell. You can be a one army man or can share your essence to create an empire. So, the only thing you need to balance (or code) his the "personnality of the AI like: the empire tend more to make strong sovereign with low town and take the ressource from the kingdom who try to establish themselve. If you focus on the "make your world greener", your sovereign is basically weak, but have a lot of people to back him up. If you are half/half, your sovereign go to war with his men to support them. If you choose to have only a very few city, you are like soron or gandalf: very powerful as individual but nearly alone.

If I elaborate a little on the subject of creating a new city, I see it like this: you need to cast a spell that repel the residual destructive magic that float on the land cause by the cataclysm (I see a bubble like spell). Then, you need to place a building to focus your power into a building (create from magic (cost essence)) to keep this bubble and expend it when your city grow. The good part of it is you can cast spell through this building to affect a single city(because this building will have some link with the other) or you can target your whole empire with strong magic.

@Frogboy, this is sounding really good.

Unless population growth is also under going an overhaul, this will not be enough (neverminding caravans, which would need to be changed).

Currently more cities = faster population growth. Given the info we have been given, more people equals more production meaning more food to found more cities that generate more people...

And then there are caravans and the issues with starting up if outposts cost food (putting you in the hole as soon as the first city is founded). No mechanic for limiting city spam that can be overcome by building more cities is going to work (especially as building cities results in exponitial growth income growth while the fix is a linear cost [N^3 > N]), so I hope more will be done to fix the problem than what has been stated so far.

The guy with lots of low level cities will get creamed by the guy with fewer high level cities.

This is bloody genius. All resources could have "sited" monsters (a la D&D). Players - and by extension the AI - would have to defeat them before being able to take advantage of whatever benefit the resources provide. Add in the "activate" or spawn when an outpost is too near as you mentioned and that puts paid to the AI's "free pass" when trying to spam cities. Very nice indeed!

Tweaking the food math just seems like tweaking tax policy; there's always going to be a significant minority who hate the changes. I've been a homemaker and a political scientist, so I appreciate the value of unending tasks like laundry and struggling for tax reform (whatever your idea of 'reform' might be), but this city-spam question makes me want to offer one more mostly-shameless plug for a return to early-beta roots:

I never understood why so many folks early on seemed to dislike the original idea of requiring a sov to spend essence to restore lands that could support a settlement. My only gameplay problem with that in the early betas was that it made the luck of finding randomly-habitable land extremely advantageous. That problem could have been easily solved by simply removing already-good land from the map, and I'd still rather have my sov required for any founding and have engineer units who could build things out of town instead of pioneers.

The business of how many resource tiles should be on a 'normal' map and how settlements connect to them should have been fully secondary to the business of restoring the post-Cataclysm wastelands to meet Kingdom or Empire habitat needs. But the elimination of the imbuing land mechanisms was basically an elimination of the best possible candidate for 'good anti-city-spam' for Elemental. By "good" there, I mean both interesting at a game mechanics level and engaging at a decoration/story level.

Back when these forums started, the habitat-costs-essence ideas looked like the path to some real innovations in the fantasy TBS genre, especially alongside notions that essence could also be imbued in champions and consumed to help fuel Big Deal spells. That looked like a whole new way to approach 'epic' magic costs in a TBS, a set of mechanics that could make it 'normal' to have a land-based TBS game on a ludicrously large map with only a handful of cities per faction, and a really neat way to have two distinct but related core magical resources. Now, with land-viability being so highly abstracted (and rapid for Royals), essence seems less essential. I miss that trade-off between imbuing a champion I intend to wed and founding another settlement, even though I never actually got to experience it in an actual game.

+1 for me.. I'd love the game to head down this line ala MoM/Majesty in this regard..

+1 to the changes that Frogboy has proposed also..

implement these ideas and i might be enthusiastic about the game again..

Here is my list of turn offs.

1. No day one multiplayer.

2. Constant take backsies on 1.1 patch eta.

3. Complete lack of understand of the direction of the economy in this game. See patch 1.08 gutting gold from creeps then 1.09 adding it back in. Food for merchants etc. This practically forced city spam for caravans which as the devs pointed out many times was not the intention of the game.

it'd be better, but it's not a long term fix.

only way to do that is to charge food per population instead of for buildings and units and then have the ratio of food:person then determine population growth. this way more settlments = slower growth and less people/city and the player has to choose between lots of settlements and territory, and having highly developed, income producing cities. of course, if you have enough food, you can do both.

reposted for the bajillionth time:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397376

really, everyone seems to be suggesting fixes within the current system that move the game closer to handling things this way. why not just go the whole distance and do it properly?

having smaller settlements to control resources is a good idea. however, you do not need to introduce gamey "mini-settlement" to do it. if you just switch to a food based population growth model you can do it within the existing mechanics: just don't build houses at those smaller settlements and you will loose little for building them. of course, because they're smaller they won't produce much except those resources or be able to defend themselves and will need the big city's help to do that. as it should be.

really, i'd bet my own mother this will fix the problem and make the game fun again. please just read the thread linked and think about it. that is all.

Sethai: It's a game, there is no "proper" way.  Suggesting that we completely toss out the existing economic system in favor of a totally different one that would have its own challenges isn't really viable.

There is nothing wrong with having population growth tied to prestige as long as higher level cities provide more of a punch than they currently do.

1. Granted. Very annoying. Unfortunately, there were unforeseen technical issues with the base game.

2. October has been the v1.1 ETA since the release of the game.

3. Creeps were never intended to be the basis of your economy.  They weren't added back in v1.09, they were just boosted based on spawn rating rather than flat.

An "outpost" is just a city, so I take it this means all cities will cost 1 food in addition to a pioneer in the future? This still makes no differentiation between town types, rather just makes them a bit more expensive. This will have little effect when you can get 98 food surplus with 50 cities & 50 caravans.

Re Tom's idea, that's a map generation choice.  Players could, for instance, do exactly that -- you can create monster lairs now. It's part of the base game.  We just don't currently create randomly generated maps with resources guarded by monsters (though this is, indeed, an interesting idea).

If city levels provide more benefit than they currently do combined with better balancing of the amount of food in the world, you end up with a scenario where you can choose to build lots of cities that are low level or few cities that are high level.

That may be your goal, but unless there are other changes that have not been mentioned it will not work like that. Currently a pioneer takes 8 turns to build and one person is deducted for the population. Cities produce at least one person a turn. Therefore a city pumping out pioneers would only have its growth reduced by 1/8th, less if it has more than one prestige. Once the city is built your total population growth is increased by one.

Specialist sound like food is now, only it is for production buildings and providing military and is produced by having high population. Therefore the specialist(s) needed for the pioneer will be returned after the city is built. Because of the economic cost of having less procuction early in the game it might limit city spam then, but later in the game is another story as  I do not see it providing enough penalty to overcome the benifet of spamming cities.

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EDIT: I see you have posted more while I was typing. I will be looking it over.

This is all very good stuff and is essentially what I was getting at from a different angle. The choices the sovering makes early in the game should have huge consequences & determine the type of game the player plays, either:

 1) sovereign poor but empire rich,

2) 50/50,

3) weak empire but godlike sovereign (having high level "nuke" like spells that cost 50 mana would be kool for this option as well).

Does this mean static increases for all cities (e.g. more prestige), improved / reworked level up bonuses, or more building options at higher levels? Or some combination of the three?

Sounds great, looking forward to it.  I am really looking forward to moving my cities to higher levels.  Like this quote implies, right now once you get about 10-15 level 2 cities you are pretty much good to go.

A couple sliders to determin food and resource available in the world could help satisfy both sides.  People who want (or like) the city spamming could crank up the food and resource count.  People like me who want 5 high level cities that are "miles" apart could turn it way down.  A couple things would have to be developed, like guarded caravans--they could even have different levels that come with differing amounts of troops.

A "Palace" city would also be cool.  This has nothing to do with the thread I just think it would be cool.