I just want to say what whatever else we can do with our essence had damn well better be good enough to make a city-spamming player with an army in the thousands seriously reconsider his decisions.

Though I'm a bit afraid to see what it might be if it is.

Maybe we could forge the One Ring, imbuing it with our essence.

I do believe, long ago, they mentioned being able to imbue our heroes with our essence, making them very powerful.  Dunno if that's still the case though.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.