I actually like this one. I don't know about the design principals though. Can you provide a link I can have a look into?

It is an interesting Idea, but I personally think of the cap you mention as too hard. Conquest needs to remain a viable strategy. Simply capping the Number of cities seems to me as if it would obsolete conquest as a strategy. A hard cap seems counterproductive and the power growth stages too aprupt.

I don't like the emphasis this puts on the starting location. A good starting location already gives an edge in expansion. This one would make things worse imo. Right now you have the option of rushing for a second city spot if your first one proves to be bad. With this a prestigious location or food ressource at your starting position would mean even more a kickstart than it already does.

Absolutely agreed. A single solution might not be there and few cities shouldn't be a sentence for a player to be a fruit ripe for the picking.

In principal I like the idea of certain buildings unlocked by city levels. Though, right now I don't see that city growth is ultimatly linked to empire size. In fact, under certain circumstances larger empires might have their cities grow even faster than smaller ones, given there are a lot of prestigious locations in reach of the cities.

So basically, nice idea, makes the game more interesting, but I don't think it really tackles the problem of city spam.

 Daccord, but yet again I don't see where this tackles the city spam, as growth isn't necessarly tied to the number of cities.

The growing negative factor doesn't have to be unrest, so this might actually worth a second thought. Yes, it's hard to balance and there are a lot of things to be taken into conciderance. So I can't come up with a final thought on this one.

Granted, it's an approach. I like mine with increasing pioneer costs better though.... you know what people say about the smell of your own

Even a city with 2 food would be able to pop out a settler, they'd just need a garden first.  Also, food cap doesn't hurt growth rate, so what you are saying isn't a problem.

No problem at all Vendetta187, I'm glad you took the initiative hehe.

My thing is, I don't see Pioneer's the issue whatsoever when it comes to city-spam. And I feel making any radical adjustment to the cost of Pioneer's would just overhaul the whole game negatively without any benefits to boot. I don't mind if there is a reasonable increase in the Production required to manufacture them, but to make it so expensive that there are so few, only ends up throwing off the balance of Research-oriented Improvements, Traits, etc.

Also, just giving them a higher price tag doesn't truly fix the issue being city-spam, because the strategy is to ALWAYS build many settlements, whether to simply cap resources, or future specialized centers. We mention what we know motivates us and the AI to pursue non-stop expansion, yet we are not tackling the underlining being the technology tree, the game mechanics area and such that influences factions to thus far simply expand, rather than "go tall" and focus on more manageable empires.

Research costs bloating for larger empires I'm iffy about, but it's an interesting idea to burden over-stretched nations with. We have many potential issues the more we try to "Fix" it.

Frogboy recently stated in the AI thread that monsters will no longer salt the land the first tile a City was settled upon, had he not been known of this, it would frustrate the strategy process of FE.

Our next issue is, we can instantly Raze cities as monsters do too. Factions and monsters should not be allowed to instantly burn an entire settlement down, but in a series of turns, to prevent outright loss in one instantaneous turn session, so we do not have to build an entire city over that took 50-to-100 turns. 

I don't think we should try to revamp the reality that when one faction gets swiped by another, that Pioneer's should suddenly be easy to mass-produce to give them an advantage, especially so far in any game session. I don't think that's an issue to be honest, at all. Most importantly, what would we do with the placement of Outposts? Assigning Scout's to be Outpost-builders is another balance issue that shouldn't be discarded and brought upon another unit in my opinion.

We shouldn't add any restriction whatsoever to cities like the army system, foremost because they're both entirely different mechanics to compare and contrast, but the major aspect of the game is - city settling. I feel an entirely new mechanic at most is required to simply implement Civ-4's City Maintenance system that works exactly the same when it comes to increasing the amount of Gildar you're charged for every city you possess in terms of totality and distance from Capitol. The Unrest modifier should also play an important role in FE, that also operates similarly with the circumstances City Maintenance imparts too. 

One perception/idea I agree the most with both you Vendetta187 and Drusus is the atmosphere of Wild Lands disappearing so rapidly. The idea of the game is that you are supposed to build a fledgling empire that conquers vast amounts of the world, brings back civilization and order to the chaotic charred lands, FE certainly needs more "Wilderness", more "danger" abroad. I'd strongly suggest FE having some sort of dynamic wilderness feature, that determines how civilized your game session is, and how advanced all the factions are, and begins randomly spawning new, harder, monsters around settlements based upon their type. Thus, 100-300 turns in any game, Cave Bears and their Den's will re-spawn near Outpost's, Hoarder Spider's and much harder mid-game bandits will spawn dens near your Town's and Conclave's, and much much more.

Player's shouldn't be punished in their city playstyle, it just needs balance when it comes to one faction gobbling so much territory versus another. We need some sort of mechanic, with series of Improvement's and effects added to current technologies that favor large and small empires. Technologies that reduce the cost to upkeep a softcap limit on cities, and technologies that give more bonuses to empires that maintain smaller, more potent settlements versus their larger variants. And when we begin to give the game some system that not only punishes them, but also rewards them incrementally on how many cities they have in a regulatory format, not in a restricted format, they'll take risks of expanding much more early on or later on. There is currently no reason to ever stop expanding with new cities and outposts so far, only 100% positives, no negatives to pro-and-con with.

For FE, I like a lot of these ideas.

In the upcoming expansion, the "Faction prestige" thing is going away. Instead, city growth will depend entirely on available food and unrest.  The more cities you have, the more unrest you get.

Really happy and surprised you would share that tidbit publicly. 

Just, PLEASE make it so that Non-Champion's can also reduce Unrest in cities by occupying them rather then just heroes and Sovereign's, because it gives regular units another great reason to be used in the game, and complete common sense. Unless I'm wrong, no matter how much Unrest your cities achieve in FE, they won't break away from you? If so, should introduce that too...

I'm not going to miss Faction Prestige at all, yet it was an interesting feature that I didn't mind and did find particularly useful in the early phase of every session. Faction Prestige however, is the perfect example of being rewarded for delicately nurturing a small nest of cities rather than nearly a dozen with some falling far from the tree. Alongside an Unrest penalty that rises against the amount of cities we possess, if we could have some feature, Improvements or technologies that specifically yields factions immediate bonuses upon a flexible minimum-to-maximum amount of cities you can control at a time, that'd be excellent.

Or in a much more simpler adjustment, the Unrest penalty can go "positive". So for example, say with the current Civilization techs you possess in the early game, if you have 5 cities, you get hit with the first level of Unrest Penalty being "-5" (assuming it's global against all cities). If you have instead 4 cities, your Unrest Penalty is "0". But if you maintain having only 3 cities in the early phase, your Unrest Penalty goes backwards and provides "Happiness" that yields "+10" globally, giving a +10% boost to all three of those cities Outputs.

Lastly I want to state, is my fear of an Unrest Penalty getting out of hand in every game session when the player or AI focuses on Military techs and conquering cities. Factions that begin occupying enemy faction's cities should be penalized of course (again assuming it is a global effect), but to have the Unrest Penalty rise immediately and so dangerously, when foreign cities are being ransacked, razed, or garrisoned and in turn their homeland is raising pitchforks because of such, typically wouldn't make any sense. I'm boldly making an assumption this could be over-looked, or not seen as a balance issue, better now than never hehe.

When warmongers capture an enemy city, it shouldn't increase their Unrest Penalty instantaneously. What if through Civilization/Military tech's and Trait's can factions lessen the amount of Unrest they receive as occupiers on a city-by-city basis, and some sort of assimilation feature that Master of Orion 2 had. When you planetary invaded an enemy planet in MOO2, depending upon which government you began your game as, it would take between 2-10 turns to fully pacify the planets alien populace and use it.

The whole point behind an assimilation phase is being both technical and realistic. The warmonger has to deal with occupying an enemy settlement that is resisting its oncoming administrative and military forces taking control, thus for several turns the conqueror can't use the city at all. To balance an aggressor from immediately utilizing it's Output and connected Resources, the aggressor can't assign any training, any building, and receive none of its connected benefits till it's assimilation is complete. When a conquered city is assimilated, it is fully under the aggressors control and acts like any of his cities thus no longer exempted from adding to the Unrest Penalty, as this would "illustrate" it's normalcy in being apart of its new factions "network of immigrating, trading, interdependence", etc. I would go far as to suggest this extend to the switched cities Influence, and while the occupied city is in assimilation phase, the Influence still belongs to the defender to give them an advantage in bearing their magical might onto the attacker instead of anybody, and the attacker. And it wouldn't be burdensome if conquered cities naturally had on an individual-basis, their Unrest start higher to represent the fact the city isn't of the conqueror's culture.

Uuuuhm.... that didn't work that way. It took 2-10 turns to pacify a single unit of population. In the meantime the population unit was set as enslaved and had reduced yields. You could use the population from the moment you had the planet, but depending on the amount of population units, it took different amounts of time, to fully pacify the whole planet. Very nice system imo... but not usable here.

On another note:

Increasing global unrest per city basically reduces research efficiency. And production. And growth (In the coming addon). So, yeah, large empires will be penalized. Good enough. And in the end I think it's more dynamic than my approach of increasing research and pioneer costs. You can do something about it and it ties in with the existing mechanics.

So, instead of adding a new gear, connections between existing ones are made.

Touché

So to Naga:

First, apologies for not thinking through that very point to the end. It's very good when you take every implication into account.

Second, cut the mention of realism. It's a game, it shouldn't try to be realistic. Fun is the word and if it is realistic while being fun, it's a cherry on top.

Problem solved I think. City spam will still be an option, it's just not the only viable strategy anymore.

Only thing I still see here is the feel of a conquered world, but that's really up to taste and can be fixed with other means like a map stamp with less city locations.

I'm looking forward to the addon. You got my money if I have the time to play

Yet, it's a good solution to stop expansion from being the one and only top winning strategy. More won't be always better from there on. Which is a good thing.

Given, it's the usual approach. But is there another way to stop the biggest player from just becoming bigger without any chance for others?

You're a warmonger!

@Alstein:

What Problem is left?

I can live with that. Not the most exciting method, but it's proven. Just curious why we have to wait for the expansion for that though?

Except that's actually already in the game sort of. Cities that aren't contiguous with your empire suffer -15% or something unrest. It's more or less the same mechanic used by other games but handled a little differently, both discourage dropping cities all over the map before you have expanded to those areas.

Agreed.  This is the way to go.  Forcing players to make serious strategic choices between growth/unrest, and to spend their time creating buildings that reduce unrest that they just ignored, before.

Yeah to be honest I have a similar reaction. Sounds like the Civ3 response to city spam which was to hit the player with massive corruption which in turn made empire building unfun. Civ4 had it much better because the penalty for city spam was purely financial, but because finances also drove research you really couldn't afford to expand without having a plan. But if you did have a plan and built a really strong economy then the reward was you could expand quickly. In other words, it rewarded good play, which is the goal of most strategy games surely?

The only way I could see unrest working as a mechanic to control city spam is if there were lots of ways of controlling/reducing it (including global ways), but even then I struggle to see how it could work as smoothly as a Civ4 type system.

P.S. Getting off topic but the Civ5 system is a great example of how NOT to build an anti-city spam mechanic. The global happiness system is a disaster on many levels which have been well explained by others in other places (Sulla being one).

*In response to Mistwraithe

That's a strong valid point in that Unrest actually affects everything, being cities Outputs. Meaning, if you gain to much Unrest, you practically destroy your entire empire's efforts to do anything, instead of just your researching and revenue gaining capacities as Civ4.

Truth is there is plenty of ways to reduce Unrest currently, with many ways of reducing it via city Improvements, than the spells, Traits, can't think of anything else. When you come around and think about it further, we won't truly know how this all works out till we play with it - UNLESS you sat around all day thinking about it like I can

I actually forgot that I mentioned that when I was on my City Maintenance tirade in the AI thread, that City Maintenance of Civ4 didn't affect everything which I liked a bit.

The way I see it thus far in this upcoming expansion, is if you expand to much, you have to sit around researching Civilization technologies while badly handicapped by Global Unrest Penalty crippling all your cities Output's having to get superior Improvements to reduce Unrest, or from the Magic tree too. I'm actually more mind-boggled if with enough ways to reduce Output Unrest, will it to greatly reduce the features premise which I can see being balanced by availability of resources and technologies to reduce Unrest.

---edit--- I was typing this whole thing up last night and just posted it now, so I like completely forgot my trains of thought, will come around to it though***