Hello all, just saw this game. MOM is one of my favorite old games and Age of Wonders got at but didn't really scratch the itch. I enjoy 4x games but they aren't my passion for a variety of reasons. From reading, this could be a grail game. Of course it'd have to come out just right which we know may not happen... that said, my number one desire in terms of game philosophy is this, and I'm really curious to hear the designers or others take on this.

My big thing is preventing city spam all over the map, even in the endgame. I appreciate the need for new cities but I don't want the map to look like civ, with a farm or mine on every square and cities laid out in a regular fashion 4-5 squares away--it's a fantasy game in an uncivilized world. If the game is all about a world rebuilding itself, I don't want something covering every square on the map by midgame! For me, there need to be wild areas and areas that aren't worth building a city. Sure, in occasional fertile flat areas there can be a number of cities connected by roads close together. But I want some of my roads built to connect cities through wild areas that either aren't worth or are too expensive to put a city in. I'd like to see my own cities that can be relatively far apart and take time for goods and armies to travel to and fro. I guess that goes with a sense of scale, but it's also a mindset. Anyway, maybe this is way too much to ask and I definitely I know it's way outside the purview of most 4X games, but it would be wonderful to see it in this game.

Basically, it would be nice to have boundaries decided by geography, rather than who can sneak the most cities the farthest.