Actually in CIV and I've played them all except CIV5 which I intend to get soon. Corruption never detered me at all from building cities. What did deter me was that settlers ate up population when creating so I had to plan. And to tell you the truth out of all the yeas I played CIV I never knew until 2 months ago the corruption was linked to the number of cities you have.  But then I was always pretty good about keeping corruption down.

Well, I would propose the same way as another one said in this topic: Give the prestige an Empire wide effect to attract X/Turn pop to your empire and then divide the population by the number of town you have. Also, to encourage big city, just make prestige more important by level. Ex: Lvl1 city = Give 1 prestige to the pool. Lvl2 city= Give 4. Lvl3 city= Give 9 etc. This way, a lvl5 city will compensate for 25 lvl 1 city AND they will get 25 pop in 1 city insteed of 1 for 25 city. With the bonus (+ 20% per level of the city for a ressource of your choice) one big city can be realy effective. If you add the special building that only high lvl city can construct: it's pretty clear that some big city will perform better in the long run than a lot of smaller city. So, city building will only be made to capture some ressources. My 2 gildar .

Same here. I have about that much and I have food tiles not taken, but in my influence border and one wild wheat I intentionally passed up because it was "too close" (for me) to my capital.

And I've never made a caravan.

These no-food, low resource games, I'd actually love to play one, so that I could use the "uncover resources techs" in the Adventuring tree to get up to "average" instead of being so abundant that I don't care about blowing 170 gold on 4 archers.

Yep, I was talking with this concept too . And, I wrote in the end that city building will be used to capture ressources, not expending the AOI or to gain more prestige. But, like I said, only my 2 gildar .

It seems to me that the concept of "specialists" is a more flexible way of giving building slots to cities.

instead of say,

lv 0 outpost - 1 building slot

lv 1 city - 3 building slots

lv 2 city - 6 building slots

lv 3 city - 10 building slots

lv 4 city - 15 building slots

lv 5 city - 21 building slots

combined with a building upgrade system, example: lumberjack gives 1 matt, upgrades to mill gives 4 matt, upgrades to "guild" gives 10 matt etc

slow down population growth a bit. 1 per turn is too fast in the beginning.

prestige can increase this rate, higher city level can increase it too.

pioneers could cost about 3 population, this would encourage the choice of using that population as a resource for something else, such as  a building or levelling up your town.

this also maintains the potential to turn your outpost into a special type of fortification or garrison building specialized to training units - this would help stop spam as well by giving more choices into troop training (could train faster than towns do for example)

there are lots of options, you don't have to rewrite the whole system because something does not quite work the way you intended it.

Disagree with OP. Lots of resources and economy change made the first cities development challenging and fun. What bugs me is later game city development which is quite boring. Every city looks quite the same. There should be much more types of buildings, even buildings that grow on it's own (I love how the suburbs appears in Civ5).