Can you elaborate a bit more, please? I'm not truly sure of how heroes/family can do as governors and the consequences.

If you build your first city, you have no heroes or family. Ergo no governor except your Sovereign, who could not explore, being forced to stay in the city to allow it to grow.

And what happens if my grown but not maxed city loses its governor and I cannot assign anyone else? Silly questio, I know, but I'm going to suppose that the city remains as it is (not losing area but neither growing more).

Just how common are heros going to be? This system would only really work if they were extremely prolific..... and who or what decides the hero's governing value?

This particular aspect gets a huge thumbs up from me.

Me too, it would allow raiding if pillaging is implemented, and therefore the option to garrison important resource improvements.

And if we want to let a governor to go out for trouble ? Is he obliged to stay in the city forever ? Can't he go sometimes outside ?

I still don't like the cap from the level of governor. If I need an outpost to harvest a shard and I want to build some barracks and a wall to defend it, but I don't have the right governor ? I can't ? I want to be able to do it AND pay the price. Maybe instead of a governor, we could "attach" a unit (or more) with the right requirement. If I can build warfare units, why can't I build "civilization" units ?

For instance : I design a unit, with nothing special for equipment, but with the special training "governor", and maybe the trait "versed in warefare" that would allow him to build a barrack for free, even if you don't have the necessary available tile to build. I attach him to my shard-outpost, and when he gains the level 2 of governor then I can't build some more tiles.

I like the fact that a city need someone able to build more buildings, but we should be able to plan what we need. HEroes and births are just too random for something as important as governors.

Maybe special buildings can only be built with a governor with the proper traits.

Hum, the governor system would seriously reduce cities spamming (a big plus in my mind). I guess the channeller will be considered as a governor too, so that you always start with one.

As for only allowing ressource improvements from being built away from the hub, I would suggest allowing all buildings to be buildable away from it. That way you reduce the number of exceptions in the rules, and you allow watchtowers to be built in reasonable locations. Of course putting your houses outside the city walls will be a bad idea, but there are no reason to explicitly forbid it.

I like most of what you've suggested, but I have a few issues. Either heroes will have to be pretty common, or they will have to be entirely non-essential to city function and able to act as 'governor' while off fighting wars or adventuring for extended periods. That said, I like the idea of a trade-off between bonuses granted by having them sitting in the governor's office (I'm assuming city resource bonuses in addition to the certainty that the hero will be present to defend the city if attacked) and the benefits of the hero questing or going to war.

I also like the idea of larger cities being able to reach out and 'grab' resources without having to snake houses to them. I'm sure you know how frustrating it is to have your entire empire unable to grow because some small farming colony can't reach a high enough population to build enough improvements to reach that second patch of fertile ground a tile away. Food can be a pain to acquire in the barren land of Elemental, and acquiring food (among other resources, but mostly food) seems to be the primary factor pushing towards cityspam for me.

I would like to suggest, though, that the outer resource improvements not be completely helpless. Yes, they're outside the walls and all, but I would like to see an option to send a force out from the city whenever such an improvement is threatened. Something like "sire, scouts report an army advancing on our farm to the south. Should we dispatch troops to protect it?" with the option of selecting some or all of the units garrisoned in the city to immediately move to the farm in question and enter a tactical battle/ quick resolve rather than just lose the farm. Essentially, an attack on the farm would still be an attack on the city, but the defender could choose to fight the battle without the aid of his city defenses, or just let the attacker have the farm.

Last, but not least, I have to say that the idea of governor succession, while sounding cool, may be a bit too much. Unless the succession system is very transparent and it's relatively easy to insure that your cities won't flip back and forth every time someone gets killed in action, it could really ruin the fun for some people. Perhaps we should have the option of choosing between a simple 'assigned' governor, in which case the governorship is simply empty upon death and may be reassigned, and a 'hereditary' governor (maybe call it baron or duke or whatever) in which case the governorship follows rules of succession similar to the sovereign. The player as sovereign would have the option of encouraging (or disallowing) the governor to marry off children to other lands in order to secure alliances. 

The more I think about it, though, City flipping through succession should be quite rare. I'm pretty sure historically if some French guy happened to be the only surviving heir to a chunk of land in England, that land was still considered part of England, and paid taxes to the English crown, etc. So it should be in Elemental. It would be most interesting, however, to set up a system by which another player's hero or sovereign can inherit governorship of a city while the city still belongs to its original owner. The governing player would of course control whether the governor is present providing his governorship bonus to the city or not, and might even have some control over the city economy. (though its taxes and produced units would still go to the controlling empire) The governor would gain some benefits from the city (a salary from the city's coffers, perhaps the option to have the city produce 1 or 2 units as personal guards) and should somehow be encouraged to govern it well, even though it is not of his kingdom. Perhaps this would put a hero without lands in his own kingdom in the position of being willing to switch sides, with the right influence applied. 

In fact, it would be amusing to be able to offer another player's heroes hereditary control of a city in order to entice them all away. Their employer could of course refuse to allow it and insist that they remain loyal, but then the heroes might become unhappy and ask pointed questions about why heroes in other lands have their own cities. Similarly, if a governor decides to defect, or the governorship of a city is inherited by a foreigner, the sovereign should have the option of stripping the governor of his title and giving it to someone else, to prevent loss of control of the city. This should have serious consequences (making your hereditary governors uncomfortable at the thought that they too could be removed on a whim, perhaps even being considered an act of war by the country/hero deprived of his rightful city.

I'm going to call it quits before this becomes an essay and see what others think.

I read the OP to mean that a champion-governor can be anywhere as long as he or she is alive & the site's OK, but most of these units would grant bonuses when you have them at home base.

That's only true if you want city spam. If you want city spam, max out the frequency of champions and the speed of breeding in the setup options.

I confess that I've wanted champions as at least optional governors pretty much forever. But tying site development to champion recruitment and family building seems completely brilliant to me. Seems worthy of a 1G.1 patch between Thursday and Beta 2.

I really like the idea, I think the problem alot of people have with it is they see the governor as a static object attached to the city, however the post even said he could be off doing things. Honestly though, I don't think thats restrictive enough. Maybe heroes have to be a certain level? People want a game where each nation has 10+ amazing cities but think about fantasy epics in the past... Often times the capital city is the only city that meant anything to an empire, while the rest were just minor settlements.

I also think that the resource-outpost idea is a good one, but perhaps the outposts could be walled seperately? I just can't see an empire leaving a massive farming area 50 miles from thier city without even a basic garrison fort.

this is a damn good idea i wouldnt mind though if the cities got massive to a point of course because it would just look awesome on the map. Imagine your roaming new lands and you see a new city taking a chunk of the map up compared to your city taking only a smaller chunk of the map up "oh shit" ha such a great idea comparred to the your city is one hexagon no matter how big it gets idea of other games *Cough* hope you stick to your idea and get it to work out.

As far as the sucsession goes i like it. Makes your champions much more precious and therefor you wont want to simply throw them away but if a succsesion grab came into play i think the player who currently occupies it should get a loyalty advantage that say adds a 10% chance that it goes to one of your people.

I also like what was said above about defending buildings outside of your city defences you should be able to send your garrison out to defend them just that they will now have no defences to aid them. This adds some strategy to sieges.

I have to disagree with that suggestion because it doesn't make sense logically if my resource improvement, 5 tiles away from its controlling city, can instanteously be defended by the cities garrison. Furthermore, it makes the game less strategic and more gamey. Everyone should be allowed to harass an enemies resources outside the city limits like Hannibal sorta did to the Roman's throughout Italy. Allowing that would take so much fun away from strategically breaking down anothers ability to wage war and force them to actually leave the city. Think about it.

I definitely think this is the way to go Scott. Remember when you and I had that conversation about city tiles and spam and improvements? This is exactly what I was talking about, and by allowing the ability to get resources outside of the city proper fixes that perfectly. Well done.

I like the governor system as well. The only addition I would make is to make sure it works without a governor as well but you get bonuses like you describe while using one.

Well done brother. It's also nice to see you knew exactly what I was talking about without me needing to make that Jing post.

Keep up the Great work, my friend.

Erm, unless Boogiebac edited his original posting that is just what you can do:

I would imagine there could be some items that you can equip units with to boosts their governing stat.