Govenors? I can certainly see a use for them. I would prefer they just be AI controlled units needed to be able to run my cities at full capacity and for, say, every additional 3-5K pop.(pick a #) growth in a city and additional Govenor be required, with a ssalary cost taken from the cities coffers to maintain said cities max. growth potential/output.

Outlying camps is brilliant. I would ask, politely, that Farms (wheat), or specialty crop areas (Orchards), be able to be expanded, strickly the resource though, by use of Essence (at reduced levels to that of city creation) with additional huts and perhaps some minor defensive structures, provided to keep Pop. requirements equitable. The bigger the farm, the more farmers needed to harvest and tend to said farm.

A Mine, that is strictly built for the ore therein would tend to have a restrictive Pop. component built in, unless more than one tunnel is active at a time.

not sure if posted, but divide the map into countys or whatever and set the amount of citys to one per county and each city could support 4 towns and outposts.

It occured to me that one other way of limiting city spam would be to limit population growth.  After all, it's not a city without people. 

Population growth in Elemental still seems a bit funky at this point, especially growth that happens by attracting the natives.  If there are benefits to having large cities (which there probably should be) then spamming small cities might mean it takes a very long time for them to grow larger.  In most games having more cities grows overall population faster, we can tweak that.  If attracting the natives is to be a primary source of people, then population growth could be less tied to how many cities you have and be based more on how much land you control.  Those are related of course, but not directly.  There will still be incentive to expand, but it could be beneficial to maximise space between cities, rather than minimizing it.

So simple. And yet it would instantly fix everything. If the countys can be generated in a reasonable manner then it fixes everything.

One of my ideas was to make food scarcer. Your population should in theory be limited by what you can feed. If you can't get enough people to turn every settlement into a huge city, then the problem largely goes away on its own because building a new outpost is taking food away from somewhere else. (Of course, it also makes fertile land resources EXTREMELY valuable.)

What about a design philosophy that says you won't be able to use all the resources on the map because of your limited number of cities, and you have to pick a subset of resources to exploit out of the resources you get?  In the long term, you might be able to eke out another city, but in the short term, if you want a new resource you have to fight for it.

I continue to believe that a low city cap is crucial to making cities interesting without making them a chore (particularly in the endgame).

Now this idea I like.  It's not a pain in the ass abstract that makes no logical sense and blows up game mechanics for other things, causing endless exploitation of the breaks and ruining diversity of choice.

It takes a couple other states to feed New York.  Want a megopolis?  Feed it.  Want lots of cities?  Take over enough territory to feed them.  No "well I might be attacked by a dragon and I can't stand losing infrastructure so it just has to be guarded by stone walls and a standing army!" arguments are required either.

The problem with footprints though is that you can end up in odd sitations where citys clearly should not matter to each other, but the footprint blocks the city from being built.

Perhaps instead of a fixed footprint, there is an average distance between citys you need to maintain. This way you can put the citys very close together if you need to, but you must put the next couple of cites way out from everything else. That way you can stack them in when you need to, but it also forces you to keep lots of open ground in your nation.

Maybe too complex. The footprint idea seemed to work well AoW, even if you did end up in odd situations every now and then.

I have to agree. Its the most elegant suggestion so far, and the end effect is the same as many others. Nothing wrong in borrowing what has worked in past and expanding on it.

I can see food footprints interacting interestingly with the resource system.  Presumably the biggest cities will need access to plains, but certain resources will only be found in the mountains.  Perhaps you can get horses in your metropolis, but you'll need a tiny mountain town for your iron.

Now, there's an idea, Cerevox!

Let's say I want 5 cities, and I want them close for defensive purposes.  They all have a point score associated with them; following psychloak's idea of having a certain number of tiles that must be allocated to each city to "feed" it.  I have to have a vast ring around my "quint-cities" area that's providing the resources, so I need to set up the infrastructure around them.  If a city is within another city's working radius, both city's growth rate is hampered.  And it costs more essence to put cities closer together than it does to spread them out.  The more closely packed, the more area around must be reserved for "feeding", the slower the individual cities grow, and the more essence it took to set them up. To me, that's a great "guns v. butter" choice; close cities for defense at the cost of spread out cities for resources, growth, and essence.

And both those cities will be competing for the same land, so building more cities only serves to have smaller cities. This should help to solve the dilemma that Boogiebac brought up with healing the land. Sure more healed land means more cities, but if you want a huge city with all the perks, you'll need to build less cities to support it.

Governors

I'm on the fence about this one.  They seem like added complexity without, necessarily, added fun.  I'm convinceable, though.

Preventing City Spam

City spam could be controlled for the same reason ancient civilizations conquered more than settled: it's cheaper.  Expensive as armies are, a successful offensive war could be very profitable for the conqueror.  Creating, and upgrading, cities should be a serious investment.  I like the Essence expenditure to get things going.  I think it should take considerable material resources (gold, wood, stone, food) to get a city to increase level.

Prevening Snaking

The solution of "undefended resource gatherers" is excellent.  It also has a dash of realism: outlying farms and settlements were invariably more vulnerable than the towns and cities that protected them (or nominally protected them).

Something which might  work: Level 0 settlements (outposts) can be placed on top of resources within X tiles of a city.  I liked someone's earlier idea that the "area of control" could be based on city level, though I'd add terrain to the equation.  However, they can't ever get any bigger, unless the tile is evenually outright absorbed into the city.  Outposts don't get walls, can't have governors, can't recruit, and--if on Barren land--consume food from the "host" city.  They can house garrisons to maintain order and stave off bandits, but without a proper fortress...perhaps allow them to become fortresses at considerable cost.

Thoughts?

I actually like the food-print idea. Seems elegant & logical. And I hate city spam.

Perhaps some cities could ship thier food and even commercial produce to other ones, and help to support the growth of "important" cities.

I just believe that all cities should be like they are in fantasy. having like multiple massive metropolises is absurd, and not even very fun. A great empire should have a few, but every kingdom shouldn't be lined with them. City spam isn't the issue so much as productive city spam is.

By the way, I see folks referring to the "+3 resource radius" of a city for undefended resources.  I may have read it wrong, but I thought Boogiemac's original idea was to have that radius increase with the size of the settlement.  +1 for a village, to +5 for a city.  The food ring should extend out considerably past that, maybe 2x the radius?