You are right about the "resource ring" expanding in range with the size of the city. However, I think that food is considered a resource, and thus it would be within that same range, not twice as far. (In fact Boogiebac specifically used the farm in his example).

The food footprint could be seperate from farms, similar to how it is in Civ.

Im sure most of you know this, but just so we are all on the same page....in Civ, all tiles produce food, even the undeveloped ones. It all depends on their land type with more food in grasslands, but zero food from deserts. Building a farm on the tile increase how much food was produced. Special crop resources (wheat, corn ect..) were scattered throughout the map, and building a farm on it would give you access to that crop (plus a lot of food). This is similar to how the current farms act in elemental.

So the food footprint could extend 2x or more the radius, but building a farm on an actual crop resource would be limited to what Boogiebac mentioned. The rest of the land within the cities food footprint can be tapped for basic food resources (if available..wasteland would give you nothing). This can be visually marked on the map by making the land look like its been argiculturally developed ..similar to the TW games once you develop a region agriculturally.

Yeah, my proposal was to have it be separate from harvesting resources.  It's just a method for determining how big a city can grow based on the terrain in its region and whether or not it has to share that terrain with other cities.  The idea is to address both city spam and city size issues with a single, natural approach.

Im thinking with food footprints and the fact that cities are not regularted to just one tile, there would be less concern about placing a bunch of cities close to each other. They all would draw and compete from similar footprints, effectively castrating each other. It would be a waste of space too, since you'll now have redundant duplicate forts taking up valuable tiles.

Even so, I could see placing them close to each other useful for defensive purposes. (My main concern is how the AI would handle it.)

You will still need a way to transport excess food from farm towns, to these hungry larger cities. In a past dev journal, I beileve the concessus in how ot move resources around the map was to use the "merchant option", which  was a mix of one option that was similar to civ's automatic transfer of resources and another one that had every resource act as an item that the player had to manual move between cities (similar to Civ4:colonization). 

So here is my suggestion

Simply add 4 options in the city managment on how to handle excess food. The options are as follows:

"Sell to local markets" which will continue to increase local population.

"Store food" which will halt population growth and save the food for a latter day

"Import food" This will flag your city as one that will accept food from other connecting settlements. Maybe have a slider for varying levels of import priority incase you want a particular city to recieve goods over another. "Import food" can be choosen along side either "store food" or "sell to local markets" options

"Export food" This will send the excess food to connecting cities that are flagged as food importers

Lets say for example you have CityA that needs food. Its connected by road to FarmTownA.  FarmTownA is also connected to FarmTownB thats located even farther out from CityA. The FarmTownA will set its food excess option as "export food" and so will FarmTownB. CityA will set it as "Import Food" and "Sell to local markets". FarmTownaA exports its excess food, but only CityA is flagged as importing, so all of FarmTownA's food goes to CityA. FarmTownB tries to export its food, but its only connected to FarmTownA and its not flagged as importing. The player noticed this, and then clicks on FarmTownA's option to "import food". Excess food from FarmTownB is exported to FarmTownA. Since FarmTownA is also an exporter, all the food from FarmTownB goes directly throuhg FarmTownA and into CityA. A player can have a detailed network of food trading but with minimal micromangment once it is set up.

I don't like food-prints. It's just too abstract, and use a different layer than the one we already have.

What are the causes of city-spam ?

• More roads, and then more resources
• More population, then more units to build
• More population, then more research points
• More population, then more gold
• To get improvements (forest, mine, shard, farm, etc.)

Tapping improvements doesn't resolve the other points. Let's discuss each point at a time, with bearing in mind the BoogiBac quote from sid meier : "Simple system with interesting relations"

• Roads : More caravans = more resources. Maybe limit the available roads to only connecting town of at least level 2(village), and get a bonus from bigger cities. Now you get 10% of the city resources. It could be 5% X city level, thus connecting level 5 cities would get caravans of 25%. If you have more interest in bigger cities then you will avoid to spam lesser cities.
  
• Population : units to build. Give an edge to bigger cities. At the moment two cities with 50 population and 50 population have the same possibilities of training as a city of 100 units. How to give an edge to the 100 population city ? At the moment, bigger cities will "replenish" population faster, and if they are bigger you'll have probably more barracks, thus improving training time. Maybe it's enough. No need to change. But if you want to give an additionnal edge, then you can say that a bigger city will have "better" instructors, then give a little more HP to units from bigger cities. For instance 3HP X city level. That's a little bonus, but it can do the difference early on.
• More population, more research points : Each turn, a city might give you a little bonus in research. Some kind of "Owww.. We accidentally found something". Bigger cities, more chance to get something by accident. So a simple thing : each turn, a city has a (city level) chance to get (city level) more research points. So bigger cities means better chance to get a better reward. Instead of 5 level 1 cities you better have a level 5 city.
  
• Reverse thinking : instead of getting better results, getting harsher results with lesser cities. There is an interesting game mechanic in "advanced civilization", the boardgame. If you have 4 cities you take 4 cards of resources. 5 cities ? 5 cards. It seems that you get better things ? No. Because resources can also be civil war/volcano/flood/disease/pirates and the like. So. the more cities you have, better chance to get negative events. We could use other systems : the chance of getting bad quests (like peasants revolt, a peasant that claim he has power, etc.) should be higher with more cities. More chance to get a magical problem if you have more cities. More chance to get a "bastard" if there is so many little towns where they don't even know your face
• Gold : If you use the first idea I had, then you will get more gold from bigger cities (better %age from high level cities) Moreover, some buildings shouldn't be buildable with a low level town (a bank shouldn't be built on an outpost)
• Get improvements : the idea of "you can tap improvements within a certain radius of the town" is something good. Level 3 governor would let you tap an improvement within 3 tiles from your city borders.

How using other system effectively ? I really like the "a building has a city level requirement". Outpost should only be able to build mundane things like houses, (no estates), mines, farms, lumbermill and that's all. But ! A good governor could reduce the needed level of buildings.

For instance a governor could get bonus from diplomacy resqearch or quest research or magic research. you could research available perks for governors :

• "Adventurers friend" (adventure research path) would let a city build inns earlier than allowed. If an inn is a level 2 building (meaning you need a city level 2 to build it), a city with an "adventurer's friend" could build it in a level 1 town.
  
• "Xenophilic" (diplomacy resea&rch path) would let a city build embassies earlier. If embassy is a level 3 building, then a "xenophilic" could build embassy in level 2 cities
• "Archmage" would let city build magical pit, schools earlier
• etc. You get the idea

One last thing about city growing. I don't like being stuck with a city that has not enough population to level up, and no more place to build. But it's a paradox : to build more, ... I need to level up. But too level up I need to build more.

So I propose one thing : you can always build houses (not estates) and farms, even if you don't have tiles available. SO if you want a big big big big city you can with a loooooot of houses, but special buildings would still be limited by the city level.

Last : a civilization research should allow our cities to get to any level we want. Even 40 tiles isn't enough if one day I need a 41th tile. Or a dynasty system : the higher level of a city would be the sum of governors level (and you can add more governors to a city with better research in the diplomatic research). you have a governor of level 2, you can only have a level 2 city. But ! If you add 2 more sub-govbernors of level 1, then you can get the city to level 2 + 1 + 1 = 4. Research 'diplomatic ? Civilization ? the two ?) could unlock more slots for governors and sub governors.

A city that has a higher level than the overall level of every governors would get a malus in trade, higher chance to separate (civil war for the win !) and a lesser birth rate due to the overall sadness of citizens.

Thanks for reading

Hello, first time poster.  I've read enough about this game to be excited, and it inspired me to download Master of Magic to relive my childhood (I know it's not a sequel, but it's the closest thing).

I wanted to respond to this post because it seems some grievous errors could occur, but I may be wrong due to my lack of knowledge.

How common are heroes?  To me, heroes are special because they're rare.  When a hero in MoM pops up to ask to join me, I'm excited (unless it's a lame hero...).  It's a rare occurrence, and I had to do something to get this request (increase my fame through battles and city building), but it is still fairly random.  So, if building a city requires a hero, are there a lot of heroes so some can fight and some can govern, and does that make them too common?

Most important to me, it seems like the GAME is deciding when I can expand instead of ME.  And this is beyond resource limitations or terrain limitations, but just random chance.  Anything that randomly takes choice away from the player is bad, and it would be frustrating.

So, it seems like there would have to be a balance that would never be perfect and never make everyone happy: enough heroes often enough to found cities when you want to, and keeping heroes rare so they are unique, interesting, and exciting.

A couple questions: are there territorial boundaries?  Are there worker units to build roads and improvements?  If so, why not just make a resource outpost improvement?  Or, make that extended-range city improvement that was stated.

This will limit the growth of cities that are close together. However, it does little to discourage building new cities. It fact, since the only way to acquire new "food points" is to build a new city, it encourages expansion by building more cities.

I don't really like the ideas of governors. It seems to put an arbitrary limitation on the number of cities you can build based on luck. It also sounds like you would have to shuffle governors around on a regular basis as your empire grows. What happens if you want to build a city in a newly discovered strategic location but haven't got any governors left? Do you have to give up other cities? That will get annoying very fast.

You can do this indirectly already just by using housing. If you build houses it means you want the settlement to grow. If you don't build houses, you don't want it to grow. If it's got a food resource, that means it will either use the food itself if its got housing to grow, or export it if its not. If it doesn't have a food resource, it'll import if you build houses to grow.

Same results, only there's no extra options or mechanics required.

Tiefling, then again there are lots of opportunities as well. You can arrange mariages to make it so that if a ruler from another race dies, you get to be in control of the city he governed. This will allow for a lot of intrige (is that an english word?) and plotting which may be as much - if not more- fun as questing. With a little bit of manipulation you may even become very good at these manipulations so that it is actually a blessing.

Which I think is exactly the point.

I don't think we want to restrict buildings new cities outright, but only to prevent dense city spam that becomes a headache later on.

I still think the fundamental reason you get city spam in some games is that:

1. Big economies always win.
2. You need lots of big cities to have big economies.
3. It's cheaper to build than to conquer.

Address these three items and city spam goes down.  Item #1 is already being addressed by the different victory conditions, at least to some degree.

Stopping city spam should be easy.  The devs only have to do 2 things, which I'm surprised not many people have mentioned yet:

A: Make food limited and localized to specific types of landscapes.

B: Make food fluid and moveable.

Basically, food would be limited to certain fertile pockets or crescents along rivers.  So let me illustrate (don't get hung up on the numbers, this is just hypothetical.)  The vast majority of regions on the map would have a diversity of resources, but not have any "fertile ground" that can accomodate food production so food from fertile regions would be shipped in.  So let's say you control the Teullon Valley with it's 5,000 available food resources, with each food resource accomodating 1 citizen.  There are 4 regions surrounding the Teullon Valley, only 1 of which has a food resources (1000 available).  If you wanted to spam all 5 regions wall to wall with cities, you'd need 100,000 food resources.  First, you naturally colonize the fertile region.  From there, you are left with a variety of decisions.  Do I colonize the Orgonian Mountains to exploit their rich metals?  Do I plunge into the Moonglow Glade to exploit its exotic animals and wood?  Do I colonize the Wind Swept Coast to pick up those extra 1000 fish food resources, even I have to spend a hefty amount of research to do so (and the magical fire coral there isn't as valuable to me as the metas of the mountains.)

Add essence to the mix in order to build a city and you end up with some interesting choices.  Maybe you don't want to waste the essence to thoroughly colonize and exploit the food resources fo the Teullon Valley.  Maybe you just grab the "low hanging fruit" and build small cities throughout the four regions, exploiting only key and strategic resources.  This seems like the most intuitive, simple, and realistic explanation. 

The problem with Civ was two-fold.  Food resources were generally evenly distributed across the landscape, meaning you had cities everywhere.  To make matters worse, food could never move so cities always popped up around food resources.  With my solution, there simply isn't enough food existing on the map to make even 25 percent of the world colonizeable, even with tech upgrades and spell bonuses.

Yes you do. Exporting is automatic, food is exported to wherever demand for it is if the city producing it doesn't need it. Why would I need an option to enable that, not exporting excess production just doesn't make sense and nobody would ever do it.

If I build houses, I'm telling the city I want more local demand, which will mean less exports.

Same with importing. Every city without fertile land is *already* importing food, in the current beta. It happens automatically. Building more houses means I'm telling the city to import more food to supply the growing population. If I don't build houses (or go and demolish a bunch), I'm telling it to import less.