On this. Seeing as we currently have a faction that gets a Seafaring/?(forget) based starting Bonus, it can be assumed (I know, I know) that water ways and oceans will get some real love before to long.

I am hopeful that 1G will be that love, so we can at least test the benefits of being that faction for good or bad.

A Simple Point (haven't seen it mentioned yet) - Allowing the player to grow each of their cities to any size (which has already been mentioned) is to some extent self-balancing anyway -

- A few large cities is playing a higher risk game, as the opponents can capture a lot just by taking one

- Many small settlements will take longer to capture, but will not individually be as productive

So I think the player should be the determinant of city 'size' - not an arbitrary 'footprint' that comes with growth levels &c. Essentially a player should choose in what size/direction their city attempts to project its influence. Like a real city-state.

Smaller cities will be inherently weaker than larger cities though. If someone invades, yes, it would take longer for them to seize all the cities, but you would be unable to defend them all. In order to match their army you would need to concentrate your forces in a few cities, leaving the others exposed. A few large cities are easier to defend. The only tie you would lose a large city would be after your army is beaten, but with small cities you would lose numerous cities before the other player even has to fight your army.

moving along .... double post

Well, regarding to WildBoarPie, that is kind of the point. The one exception is that part of the Idea (in my opinion) is to limit how large those "many smaller cities" are. And another part of that idea is that size exponentially increases the usefulness of a city.

If you were to simply try to farm the land ONE city has acess too, and if its GOOD land, I think it should only allow that city to grow to Size 2, and if they farm excessivley (say 50% of the city's land or so) they *might* be able to get to size 3, an, d thats only if they are REALLY good cities.

In order to reach size 3, 4, and 5 you will need to capture fertile land beyond your starting location and Divert it towards your cities. Or rather, you would need to use the food from an area of 3 or 4 (size 3) cities in order to fuel the food needs for one Size 4 city. An area of "fertile land" able to sustain 10 size 3 cities should be needed to support the Stomachs of a level 5 city. On the same coin, each city level should increase by double or triple effieciencies starting with the upgrade to Size 3. Size 0, 1, and 2 cities are probably fairly easy to attain and so do not need much more differentiation other than the ability to build on more land, and hold more people.

A level 3 science/military/magic/housing building should be, on minimum garrison, be 50% greater output than a fully maxed level 2 building of comparison. A fully maxed level 3 buliding should be at least double the output of a maxed level 2 building.

A level 4 building should be triple the output of a level 3 building of equivalent usage. A level 5 building should be three-four times as productive as a level 4 building.

Simple doubles *might* suffice, although this particular proposition would include the caveat that it takes over twice as much food/pop to reach the next city size, and the productivities of the next generation of Building X increase MORE than that (as many as 3x or 4x that of previous size ... add to that the increased building room, and your size 5 city will easily be 5x as effective as a proportionate size 4 city). Hence the reason why there should be a significant investment in farmland in order to get a level 5 city. Possibly 10 or 20 farming towns and villages to support just one size 5 city. Does this prevent spamming? Not necessariy. Does this make raiding a city's STRENGTH a viable option rather than direct conquest?? CERTAINLY.

Fair points all - but most depend on how combat works. In any event:

Smaller cities May be easier to take (depends how much of that small city is fortification!) - but if there are many of them they are also easy to Retake. - have experienced this in other games such as MoM/HOMM - where the enemy has more cities, progress is slow because you must stop to garrison/fortify before you move on. - HOMM players will recognise this - wherever I move my killer stack to take the next town, the AI has a puny stack waiting somewhere in the wings to retake the last one I just overwhelmed.....

This mirrors a well known engineering trade-off - one large town = single point of failure but v efficient, many smaller towns = redundancy but little failures all the time.

- As player, we could -choose- which trade-off we want?

(Later: NB: I was answering Cerevox's points, though out-of-sequence)

I was under the assumption, again, that one Size 5 city, say if it didn't build any new buidings, and was simply using upgraded versions of the Size 4 buildings, would be about 2-3 times better (or more)

so with new buildings, ect, efficiency could increase to 5-6 times better for a specialty (or more)

and then assuming, as I have in previous post, that a size 4 city is about twice as good as a size 3 city, but then add extra buildings and it goes to 3-4 times better.

Using max values, One single Size 5 city would be better than 24 Size 3 cities, and would only require about 8 farm cities or about 10-15 farming communities (or less).

This, taking out the equation of military action, would make using larger centralised cities at least Mathmatically superior, which is what I THINK we are trying to achieve in order to make City Spam (as in maxing out Cities based upon how well they can support themselves) less favorable, effective, or desired.

In addition to this, the idea that a Self-Sufficient city on average soil (proper proportions of Housing, Farms, and Specialty structures) could only ever achieve size 2, unless it only focused on Farms and Housing in which case it *might* achieve the size 3 threshold. Now, about 10 size 2 cities, with just barely enough housing to reach size 2, and everything else maxed out as farmland (according to the average arable porportion within your average city) could send all their food to some City X with minimal farmland, and City X could grow to a size 5 city.

That is the theory to allow centralised Super Cities .... and to make them raise fortunes in comparison to a Village-Spammer, who could only ever field lowly troops to defend a larger and far less efficient empire. I suppose people could trade food as well, although as Food is seeming like a very important resource, I don't see anything other than a Role-playing aspect for a Nation to be an exporter of food (maybe they were CoOerced to be a Breadbasket nation, like Ukraine, or perhaps it was part of a more peaceful Vassalage agreement).

The use of these assumptions are to Portray my idea. And that idea is that Higher level cities are exponentially superior to lower level cities.

You make the assumption that he bothers to actually hold the city. What if he just rolls in and razes them? Or dosen't bother leaving any defenses, just keeps attacking until he finishes you off? I know in Civ at least i would almost always raze any city i took, typically because the AI was horrible at city placement, but it also meant that my entire army could keep advancing and that if my army got beaten, there was nothing left for the person i attacked to retake.

Assuming you have the same size army in both situations, a few things will always be easier to defend than a lot of things. To my mind, there is no trade off. One option is clearly superior and anyone choosing to go with many small cities is just asking for someone to invade and raze their stuff.

Whoa!! You almost always raze any city you take? - Aha, Ghengis, you have been spotted despite your cunning Manga-esque disguise!!

  - Easy balance method - International Criminal Court feature!!!!! 

I'd usually raze captured cities in Civ as well, unless they had something really worth keeping. The way Civ 4 worked, taking a city required putting a garrison in it to quell the revolt and to keep it from flipping back, especially since the other cities of the person you took it from would put massive cultural pressure on it until you took those too. It was usually easier to burn most of them down and keep a few.

I'm really liking the food ideas, though I think I already said that. They use a simple mechanic, but it's pretty powerful and they create a lot of tension on the map because fertile land is a VERY valuable resource. Losing it is a big deal, as opposed to losing iron mine #6 where you just shrug.

It seems to me this is exactly what we're looking for: a mechanic that isn't complicated but adds a lot to the game.

But in Elemental the population = military.  Will it be so easy to raze a city if a population can fight back?  I suppose weapon control laws are a hot political issue in elemental.  Historically kings kept the populace unarmed due to fear of rebellion and armies could completely trample over entire (defenseless) kingdoms.  It would make a nice civ trait choice like egalitarian.  Choose to raze cities and the populace will be forced to defend themselves afterward, fight or flight.  Consequences for your actions.  Like the Geneva conventions of today.

To solve the city quality vrs. spam/wasteland restoration issue, let's knock out 2 birds with one stone by setting different levels of restoration.  For example we cast the essence restoration spell and its epicenter, gold level, indicates the healthiest lush restoration and can support hugenormous cities.  Next in line, green level, is farther out from the center of the essence restore spell, supports normal cities.  Further out let's say that you have yellow and red.  There, at most, you can establish those mining resource outposts because they can't support a real population.  So in the end the world is mostly a yellow zone.  It graphically looks restored but you can't actually use it for anything other than maybe a troop stregnth territory bonus at most.  It's not perfect but it's an idea.

BTW the previous comments of randomly putting in graphical patches of wasteland with restored land was clever.

Some cities might be able to produce militia if they are attacked, but i am going to assume that trained and well equipped soldiers will always stomp all over militia.

Only after they're trained.  Until then, they're just soft squishy things.

Not a problem, I'll attack with my dragon. Take that, peasants! 

It would certainly be interesting to have alternative options for using a newly conquered city. Either simple occupation, in which you get small losses of city population (larger if seige was used) and small plunder gained. Loot/Pillage, and Enslave are similarly equal in that they give alot of money. Pillage gives alot of money at one time, and Enslave gives a decent amount of money over a long time, as well as either A) temporary increased pop growth for your nation or B- the ability to sell your slaves to cities with a low pop growth (prestige) yet high capacity ... for a city that wants to quickly fill up its pop capacity and is willing to pay you. This transaction would remove you of your temporary slave resource, which was only going to last for 10-20 turns anyways, slightly increasing your own Nation's growth rates. Perhaps slaves could also be used to construct buildings faster, and this would burn up the Slave resource even faster (killing them off instead of slow assimilation/getting bought by nobles). Option A is how Rome: Total War does it, yet Option B would have diplomatic and moral consequences for using Slaves as either Fast-construction workers(at the loss of their lives) or trading tools.

Those were the *easy* options, to simply occupy or to make boocoodles of money off of your recent Aquisition. The other options are Extermination, Dismantling, and Destruction. Destruction is the easiest, it can only be done magically, the entire city and population are wiped off the map a la Volcanoe spell et Al. Dismantling would be similar to dismantling a Dungeon. You kick the people out and take your time (several game turns) to remove all stones and timber ... the population can partially flee to nearby cities, and partially flee into the wilderness once more. Availability of relevant materials like Stone and Timber will see a Temporary nation-wide Increase. Chance that the people will form an armed revolt as opposed to running for the hills. Extermination is trickier, as there are MANY ways to accomplish it. Magical ways cannot really be met with Civilian resistance. Either the entire City is burnt from the inside out (killing the population and destroying Wooden buildings but leaving the Stone), or the City is flooded/frozen in ice (killing all people and damaging all bulidings) or the City is affected by magical Plague/disease (all people are killed, buildings left alone). However, the more mundane ways of doing this will likely also include burning most wooden structures ... or AT LEAST the houses, farms, and schools. (maybe not the farms if you want to capture the city for its food). This option almost always results in Armed Revolt, and the people usually die or route quite quickly unless every citizen has a GUN or something (late game tech?) ... or if its a very militaristic society and everyone takes part in the Martial/Military effort, in which case the people will in general be stronger and better organized. This is one of those "Nation Customization picks" where you decide how good your people are at fighting before the game starts. As a general rule, merchants don't make good fighters, so the Softer a people are the faster they will make gold and research. On the other hand, you CAN have both eggs in one basket, but buying both Hardened Citizens AND merchant/researcher citizens cost significantly MORE than the sum of its parts (would cost at least 50% more than the actual total of citizen perks). In addition I think all "have the best of both worlds" options should cost at least 50% the sum of their respective parts. Perhaps this could be accomplished by having a Perk's opposite number automatically increase in cost by at least 50% when you buy such a Perk.