What most people seem to forget, is the tax slider.

There is actually a pretty good way to control unrest right now. If it get's a little love and balance, like smaller steps and actualy unrest reducing effects on lower settings.

Comparing this unrest system to civ 3s corruption isn't that good I think, as civ 3 had a lot less ways (if any) to control corruption. Unrest is far better integrated into the rest of the game.

So, let's see what the future brings before we damn the system.

As always... it's about the right implementation...

For other games that's usually not the case though, all of them I can think of eventually allow you to control cities across the entire map. You just need appropriate tech and luxury resources and to make sure all cities are connected. FE's system is indeed the same IMO, it's just extremely simplified, due to the fact that there's only a tiny fraction of that amount of empire control in the game.

Anyway I'm not saying I like that system or want it more fully implemented in FE, I don't, on both accounts. Doesn't really make sense to me. Hawaii is not an angry place.

Maybe the natural counter to expansion is to just make all the monsters want to exterminate you.   It fits the setting and even some of the random events and dialogue text.

Plus it makes holding onto the cities you have more rewarding instead of meh, I have another conclave, or oh look I have another fortress.  When a horde of butchermen come shuffling over that hill and your cities just barely hold them off you'll be like, YES!

I think it's relevant and I see a way to make it work. Basically everyone could start in a bubble big enough to hold maybe 3-4 cities, everywhere else on the map could be something like a giant wildland that can't be conquered. You can settle in it without doing anything special, but monsters could constantly spawn in this area and group up to attack any units or cities inside it, perhaps increasing in strength the further one invades. So you could expand into this area, but you'd have to dedicate a lot more units to defending every city. Something like this would also make the current wildlands more useful as well, since after conquering them that territory would be as safe as your starting bubble. That's how I'd do it anyway.

Only problem with that is it would require a competent AI that wasn't immune to off-camera monster attacks and could understand how to defend it's borders.

The original game (WoM) initially had a great mechanism for countering city spam -- essence.  We started with a limited amount, there were limited amounts to be gained, and it cost essence to found cities (well, cities outside of existing 'reclaimed' land).  It also cost essence to add spellcasting to champs (many/most champs didn't start with spellcasting).

Unspent essence helped power spells and had other uses (as I recall, it's been awhile).

It gave us a choice -- which is good game design -- to go big (many cities and spellcasting champs) but sov. power-weak, or go powerful sov. (magic puissance-wise) but few cities/spellcasting champs (plus sovs when in cities could cast spells in remote tac battles IIRC).

Never understood why this was removed.

Another reason it was a great feature is that it fit the lore -- destroyed land being reclaimed (via essence).  It gave purpose to the 'green fertile' land vs. the 'dark ravaged' land -- which is still in game but has no purpose whatsoever (really!  there's no functional difference in the 2 land types, it's just a holdover that has no friggen purpose game-wise, it's as if they decided they spent so much time to implement it and didn't want to remove it or give it another purpose -- like having green land give better bonuses to Kingdoms and dark lands to Empires).

Does anyone get the feeling in FE that the old lore -- destroyed land being revitalized -- is occurring?

Yep, this is yet another lament for great features FE lost...

This worries me.  Global unrest sounds a lot like the Global Happiness we had in Civ 5 and that was a major reason that game was ruined for me (see Sulla's demolition of that idea )  Of course it will depend on exactly how you implement the Global Unrest per city, if this value is small it will have little effect and we will have a situation similar to now (or worse without the Faction Prestige restriction) and if the value is large we will not be able to build / capture many cities without severe penalties.  Then we would simply swap one problem with cities for another and have a game that is no fun to play.

I like the current system with Faction Prestige as the way to limit city spamming by diluting growth.  It should work a lot better than it does and encourgae multiple strategies for city development, but it seems it doesn't.  The problem is that the amount of population required for large cities at level 3 and 4 is not offset by the entire capability of these cities when compared to level 2 and level 1 cities in terms of production, gildar and research.  This encourages city spam as it is not worth restricting yourself to a few cities and concentrating the vertical growth instead of spreading it among many smaller cities.

For instance it takes 400 population to give either a single level 4 city or 2 level 3 cities and these will give about the same amount of basic gildar and research. But it takes only 4 level 2 cities to give the same amount of gildar and research and they take only 200 pop.  So the 400 pop originally coming from Faction Prestige is far better spread among level 2 cities and then gives twice the basic income in gildar and research.  And in fact it is worse than this since each city can only build one merchant and one study which are both cheap buildings that boost gildar and research even more.  Having 8 level 2 cities and building 8 merchants and studies means they massively out perform a few larger cities with the same population.  It is this imbalance between small cities and large cities that makes city spamming so very attractive in the early game versus concentrating the growth (limited by Faction Prestige) on a few higher level cities.

To rebalance the effectiveness of level 3 and 4 cities against level 2 it would take at least increasing the population requirement for level 2 to 100 instead of the current 50 pop. 

But I think a lot more difference is needed.  It is just not that important to grow most of your cities as most of the benefit comes easily at level 2.  The special free buildings at level 3 and level 4 are important but they don't make up for the relative weakness of larger cities as far as gildar and research are concerned.  Also many small cities will have much more total production than a few large cities and this will result in faster development of the local resources such as iron mines and shards.  So it seems we need a way of linking the total production, gildar and research of all cities to total population to even things out.  Maybe Global Unrest can be shaped in such a way that concentrating population in a few large cities is a viable strategy for faster research and development but it has a lot to overcome.

JJ

I like a lot of what UncleJJ and Vendetta have said.

A big part of the problem is that cities can access 90% of their power on reaching level 2, which takes very little time. Getting to level 3 and above takes an age (particularly for Fortresses and Conclaves - I've never had one of these go past level 3 from scratch) and adds very little. I like from a flavour and a gameplay viewpoint the reward from investing in and building up prime cities that form the core of your empire.

A 'carrot and stick' approach along the lines suggested by Vendetta would seem to be a good solution. The carrot being improved benefits from higher level cities (and easier ways to grow), and the stick being a small empire wide penalty to unrest. Depending on how you rework the pop growth model, you could include a pop cost for pioneers and/or make new cities start with very little pop.

I'm also in favour of making the world a bit more dangerous, a la Sean's Masters Affliction mod. Previous posters in this thread have asked for this and if they haven't already tried the mod they should - they will be in for a nasty but pleasant surpirse! The danger levels don't need to be as high as MA, but spawning off pioneers into regions that you haven't fully tamed should carry more risk that the city will be overrun than is currently the case.

On that topic, I  prefer an approach where if a monster defeats a city, it kills some pop, destroys some buildings but doesn't raze it (unless the pop is very low). So it's a setback but not a disaster, which I think helps in upping the threat levels from wandering monsters - (i.e. increased risk of occurrence but offset by lower damage).