Well, here's an idea I'm going to propose, just because it's 1 am and I can't sleep.  Feel free to tell me it's stupid.

Perhaps what's needed is a more natural way of limiting city spam and city size.  In the real world, the limiting factor is the land.  It simply can't support more than a limited number of people, be they in a handful of metropolises or dozens of small villages.

Proposal 1: Each city has a "food footprint."  This is much larger than a large city itself, and larger even than the proposed +3 radius for harvesting resources.  Each type of terrain then produces a certain number of points.  The best types of terrain are plains and rivers, lakes/forests/coast are medium quality, and mountains/deep ocean are worst.  The size of a city is determined by the number of points in its food footprint.  If two cities have overlapping footprints, then they have to share the points from the shared squares.  I know it's very Civ-like, but that may be okay.  Civ allowed city spam because the food footprints were too small.  Developers can fine tune how much city spam there is simply by adjusting the radius of the food footprint.

Proposal 2: Just a variation of the above.  All land within your borders produces food based on terrain type.  This goes into a pool of food which gets distributed among your cities weighted by how much the terrain around a particular city is contributing to the overall total.  However, you could "lock" a particular settlement, indicating that you don't want it to grow beyond its current size.  This would cause its extra food to be diverted elsewhere, to cities that you were allowing to grow freely.  The total population of your kingdom would be limited by the land you control (as it should be) but you have some control over where you want to encourage that population to reside.

The problem of limited tiles for cities isn't still taken care of.

Cities are spammed because :

• You need more resources 
• You need more gold, then you create more cities for the roads that are created
• You need to control a chokepoint on the map
• You need to expand your zone of influence

So, if for all of those reason the player has a better way to achieve that, he won't spam cities.

What cities are for ?

• More population, in order to get more research points, more units to train
• Zone of influence

So, some ideas :

• More resources and zone of control : you can only tap improvements that are within your control borders, but you can only expand your control borders with a special building that you can only build a limited times. BUT, you can expand that number with research (infinite research). Each new city would only control the city hub and the 8 tiles around it. You couldn't build on a land that isn't revived, but you have no cap to the number of buildings you can build around a city, thus YOU can decide how big the city need to be. Or maybe a soft limitation like number of housing and population like now.
• Gold and caravans : Caravans shouldn't be created for every new city hub you build. But only from cities with at least : 2 housing, 1 market and 1 building that produce thing (like a farm, a wood, a forge, something that can create things you can sell). Automatically only cities that are well developped would produce enough gold, then city spamming would hurt your wallet. Morover, with the "you can only build on revived area, but cities don't expand automatically without a special building (limited in number)" you can't have a lot of well developped cities.
• Chokepoints : What about improvements that player can create ? A fortress ? An outpost ? Walls ? Maybe engineer units could create "defensive place" or "offensive place" where you could then place an improvement (if at the right distance from a city) like a fort, an outpost, a trebuchet, a magical gardian, a firethrower, a lightning tower, a magic hub, etc. Defensive improvements would need a "defensive place" and offensive improvements woudl need an "offensive place"

My 2 cts.

Right now it seems like they're spammable because players have nothing else to do with essence. What we really need are competitors for that.

On the governor system boogiebac proposes: if you can assign heroes as governors - which is something I like very much indeed - I also see a system where you can assigh heroes not only as governors but also as count - or whatever noble title may be more applicable - of an entire region. It would be very nice indeed to have bonusses to overall stats to an entire region if you can assign a hero as lord of a region. Maybe this should have drawbacks as well, for example in the sense that you can then only tell a region what you want it to do in terms of paying taxes and delivering swords or troops, but you lose full autonomy.

I am unsure if this would be a very good idea or if it carries a bit too far to go that way, but it sure would be fun to have options like these.

I don't really know how many times people have to repeat themselves on this. City spam doesn't require essence, because restored land radiates outward from existing cities. Rushing cities quickly requires essence, after that in the restored area you can build as many as you want without essence.

And why not creating a system of regions ? After some times you can create a region : it would be composed of some cities and some area you design around it. then you can sassign governor not only to cities but also to regions. you could have then some more options to control your towns : give them general orders or get a synergy bonus or some wall around region, or lesser maintenance, better resistance against enemy culture spread, things like that. Mid or late game you would have a map divided in regions like in total war for instance (or hearts of iron)

You would have country borders that would slowly be set in stone (like todays countries) and get more option to govern your cities. Maybe options where you can "attach" little settlements to big cities and control them as one entity.

Wow, I should stop dreaming.

Just let us for one moment take a look how other games (e.g. CIV 4) solves similiar situation:

- each cities cost a certain amount of money to support and each add. building increases this amount => this reduces the risk of spaming of cities in the starting phase of a game

- later on there is the corruption in CIV 4, but I don't think that that concept works...

So how about the following:

every city you want to found will cost more essence (something in the way that the power of evil is concentrated in a smaller area and needs more power to remove from the land)...I think this will take out the city spamming issue in quiet a good way.

The second way is to have regions of control, e.g. a new city can not be founded for 10 tiles around an existing city center.

So how about resource grabbing: how about the concept to be able to build a Fort, which will not grow, be will cost quite some money to support and has a fixed number of tiles for improvements.

Then in the end you can decide for yourelf what you need more: control or lesser maintenance + other bonusses for having grouped regions.

I think that we could be really be on to something here. Domintation victories would be really easier if there also would be some system where you could unite non-nationcapitol regions under your banner, so that creating a region of your own would get you two regions, the one with your capitol and the new region. The one region you created might then be assimilated by another nation so you theoretically run the risk of losing the region. That way you may really spread your efforts and influence to unite regions rather than spreading your power by the sword.

IN the end for the system to be cool and for it to work, there is a need to really encourage the player to create regions because it has some major benefits, and also there should be drawbacks like running the risk of losing the allegance of the region and reduced control over the region.

I like the idea where there is an option to grab a resource without building a city. Call it a fortress or a mining colony or what have you, but the option of grabbing a resource without building a city is solid. It quite naturally avoids the issue of city spamming.

Psycloak started to make a really good point on the tie to economic model that city planning has.  I'm still not 100% sure how the economic model works (beta doesn't play for me past a few turns); I thought we left this at "cities produce a small amount of resources, and having a resource node attached to your city increases that production rate".  Is there perhaps a benefit to a resource for being connected to a city, whereas a resource node that is unconnected (but still close to a city) does not gain that bonus?  This ties into caravans, of which I'm also not sure of the mechanics.  If you're harvesting a resource in a city, it doesn't need a caravan to move it.  Does a resource unconnected to a city require a caravan to move goods to the city?

Asked another way, there's many ways to limit production; limit the resource itself (which is our current model), limit the transport of the resource, or limit the rate at which the resource is converted (also part of the current economic model).  Where do you want to have the throttle for production exist?  I'd argue that, in the real world, that limiter, until the last 50 years, was transport. 

This sounds awesome, however throw in family trees for Heroes so if the Gov dies his first born takes the Gov title, even without your consent, then the only way you get to choose is if he has no children.

As many mentioned founding of a city on transformed land does not cost any essence any more.

Still the funding of a city should cost something and not be free of charge.

This combined with some way of scaling the costs for more cities...would also help to remove the risk of city spamming.

Thumbs up on the OP idea.

I like the 'Heros as Govenors' concept.

I like the 'Lose the Gov and the city flips if you cannot replace him/her' idea very much.

Simply reproduce all you can and have excess heros available to both replace your losses and to govern the cities near the edges of your neighbors' kingdomes once they cannot replace their govenors.  This makes the dynesty system even more powerful, if you can get claims to neighboring cities thru marraige and then, um, see that your neighbor's heros are unlucky then you can cherry pick their cities without war.

This is logical.

So, we would be able to place on the map:

-cities (size/etc. dependent upon administration skill of governor)

-resource tappers (upgradable to increase efficiency of extraction?)

-fortresses (upgradable from outposts --> somethings --> fortresses, requiring specific building units and building technologies) to hold territory (in and of itself, such as mountain passes, etc.), guard resource tappers, etc.

-roads/etc.

Add in an essence cost for cities (as the idea of continually expanding the reclaimed land for 'free' seems wrong -- especially as games can last a long long time) to limit their being spammed and to allow small/powerful empires to compete with larger and necessarily less powerful empires, and are any of the points in this thread left unresolved?