In the currently released beta, the essence expenditure is to restore life to the wasteland, which lets you build on it. Over time as the city grows, the "restored land" spreads out from the city. In that area, you can build another city without spending essence.

It's not a terribly fast process, but since essence is scarce and the radius around a developed city is pretty big, I've managed to build a lot of cities without spending anything.

I'm not sure making a city build always cost essence is practical, given that you need a city to harvest resources right now. It would be, if you used a colony system where you can build small settlements without the essence cost that can gather resources but not grow.

Problem I forsee is cities capping out too soon.  Because a city it limited to a certain number of tiles, and your city is basically your buildings, you'll be unable to grow in power without gaining more cities which means... you need to build as many as you can... and if you can't build them to due to essence useage, then the emphasis of the game turns toward... conquering new cities.  And now we're back to the same problem we're trying to avoid.  Cities need to be able to grow in a way other than through extra buildings and tech.  I made some suggestions here.  Something along these lines I think would allow you to continue advancing your city and giving them a unique quality without hard caps or stringent "this or that" decisions.

But as it is, it costs essence to build (unless, from what I understand, the place is right for city building without the use of essence, but I suspect it'll be difficult since you state you want "large cities but only a small number").

I actually like some of the ideas you've introduced in Elemental's city building, but I think some of the posters here raised some valid issues, and gave good ideas of potential solutions/improvment. I like the "outpost/colony" system one of the posters presented quite a lot. It would allow for the player to have both a large empire and many strategic objectives to defend, while keeping the core, the large cities, to a small number.

Another issue is the hard-cap on city size. Whether it's in the real world or in fantasy worlds, even major urban centers varied wildly in population and size. Late-empire Rome was a 1 million-people sprawl, 10th century Paris was below 100k. As it is, now, in elemental, all cities have the same size - the maximum one. Not in population (because you can always increase the number of houses), but at least in "townsize": cities. It would be nice to implement a city growth system which would be slower than the current one (early game cities should be small), slightly more demanding, and not capped, or with a cap that's hard to reach, to introduce some variation and the need for players to make tough decisions in the game.

One of the posters proposed a system in which the difficulty of increasing city size would become exponentially harder at each step. It is an interesting idea, but it encourages the creation of a large number of small cities, which was one if the things the devs wanted to avoid (with good reasons, IMO). What about making the beginning hard, then have an "easy sweet spot" where cities grow to an ideal size (which could even be random or a function of environmental conditions!), and then it becomes increasingly harder in an exponential manner...

Since Frogboy and company are such fans of MoM and various other 4x games, why not have cities as some suggested have an area of influence around them. This area of influence as seen in Civilization and Master of Magic that caps resources around the city plop, or whatever you wanna call it, be introduced here?

It would mean as your villages eventually transform into cities, you'll have choices.

Say for example, at level 5, your largest city has wheat fields within the city limits and wheat fields in the AoI outside the city limits. You'll still gain food bonuses from the wheat inside your walls, but it will not prosper as much it will in the AoI because as your city grows larger, resources of all types will need to expand. Thus in early games wheat fields in your walls will be fine, but in the long-term, having more resources out in the open will be more important. This could be the trade-off as enemy units and you can disrupt and destroy city "villages" on outlying resources.

I prefer city building similar to GC2 or X-Com or Alpha Centari.  Not a big fan of the Civ style city building, although it is simplistic and makes it easier to spam cities.

EDIT: I like the idea to be able to continually grow your cities.  So that you can have a 20x20 square city at some point say 1000 turns into the game.  Truly massive, although it shouldn't be done in a vacuum.  If one city is growing that means that others are not, since there are only so many people in the world, and only so many people in that area.

My one hope is that there is an option that allows you to change the growth/building turn speeds of settlements in bigger games. For some reason games developers are very unimaginative when it comes to difficulty options. I'd prefer more than just 'easy' 'medium' and 'hard', give me custom options, damnit! (SoaSE was on the right track). I want to play a huge map that takes me real-time hours to build cities up, it helps emotional investment as well.

Resource Management...  I think it was in CIV 3 that a player could send a Worker unit to a strategic resource, such as Iron.  There, the Worker would be transformed into a Colony.  As long as that colony was connected to a city via a road/harbor, without passing through enemy lines, then the player owns the resource!  Of course, this colony was susceptible to being culture-attacked, but it was still a wonderful way to grab a resource in a crappy location, without going to the trouble/expense of founding a city.  I hope Elemental will allow for this method.

More regarding resources... Sometimes I like to micro-manage resources, so I have to mine, then parcel out x tons of iron ore to a particular city, so that it can make the best weapons.  Other  times, I like the CIV 4 method- once I own Iron, then it is automatically available in all connected cities.  I can enjoy either, so long as the implementation is fun!

I agree with slot based, especially if actual building location has far less strategic value than in an RTS game.

....I need to stop reading all comments because those I don't like just work me up....

Some things need to be stated right away:

If a university produces 2 research points/turn then I DON'T want to keep track of having enough population to "make use" (lol....) of those universities. They're just some friggin buildings that give researchpoints!   Realism is a nice thing but absolutely non-essential.

by BoogieBac: Perhaps that's just me though

NO! Me too

Now, about the topic at hand....

Just don't copy MoMs foodsystem since you could only have like 1 stack of troops if had a village there. It was so restricted. I want to see large armies of lowlvl units a viable choice like in Age of Wonders.

Limiting the amount of cities sound good but then we need something else to build around a map. Like in Age of Mytholgy where I build military structures at several places around the map to deny my opponent access to resources (goldmines in particular), secure territory and to have newly produced troops join the fray earlier.

....Imagine a huge map in Elemental where you got 4 cities on one side of the world and you have to trek with troops AAALLL the way across the map to get to the enemy capital....I'm certain that will not be the case though.

No, it's not. This works me up because its a comment I don't like. Balance can be done with anything, regardless of whether the system is "gamey" or not. Gamey is referring to something that is obviously unrealistic to the point that immersion takes a hit. I'll agree that complete realism is not necessary. But there needs to be enough for the player to be immersed and feel that they are part of an actual world.

What most people complain about in the Civilization games is the unrealistic combat simulation. This is because it is a "gamey" system used to make it "simpler". If they would have done something like tactical combat in Civ, it could have been balanced all the same. It would have made it less gamey because there would be an actual reason you lost a battle rather than just one bad luck percentage roll...

The point I'm trying to make is that I understand the need for simplicity. Because simple systems can come together to make a deep game. However you shouldn't just sell it short. And selling it short is making a system "gamey" for simplicity's sake rather than just fleshing it out and balancing it to fit in the game. I'm not saying Elemental is going to be like that, I'm just referring to the fact that being "gamey" is NOT a good thing...

"Gamey" comes from "gaming the system," which means to use the rules in a way that wasn't intended or forseen by the creator of the system, for the purpose of bypassing the spirit or intent of the rules and gaining an advantage.  It is not a good thing.  In practice, it usually involves doing something that would otherwise be considered absurd, but which the rules unintentionally allow or reward.

Actually, I always thought a better idea for outpost/structures/resource extraction point is a similar concept to the structures in Heroes of Might and Magic 3 - They are not obviously cities (And for HOMM3, not buildable.), but once you own them, they will produce a steady stream of whatever they specialize in, be it gold/money or resources.  Age of Wonders had a similar idea, but you can not build them and they only produce gold and mana.  However, AoW avoided the dumb problem with HOMM3 of having some structures require you to send an army (The number of which you were limited to by the number of heroes you had.) to collect the said resources.  Also, AoW1 had structures that served as factories for units, and HOMM had 'dwellings' you could recruit units, from canon fodder to the most powerful units in each faction, every once in a while.

Alpha Centauri actually had a very good idea for extracting resources that are situated outside the radius of a city, by allowing you to build a unit that would go out, setup on the target square (Any square.) and you could choose what resources you wanted them to extract and convoy to the unit's home city.  Obviously AC's execution will not work here, but it seems worthwhile to look from.

(I never had much problems with city spam, namely because I just put my less productive cities producing income.  Having lots of cities is something that favor.)

Perhaps the simplest expedient for encouraging people to not upgrade every city is cost with diminishing returns.  if you really only need a mining outpost, why spend capital on building infrastructure that doesn't support that goal?

I like the notion of trying something new.  The Civ model is fun, but... been there, done that.

I also really like the notion of limiting the number of cities.  It reduces micromanagement, it adds more character to individual places, and it makes players evaluate trade-offs--I LOVE computer games that make me make tough choices and live with the trade-offs, rather than having enough of all things.

I wonder how they'll balance that with conquest?  What happens if each player only has a half-dozen cities, and you start conquering them?

I think that Civ IV actually had a very good dynamic for limiting the number of cities--you just impose a massive "corruption" tax on any player who builds too many cities (e.g., upon building your 5th city, every city pays 2 gold per turn, upon building your 6th city, every city pays 4 gold per turn, etc.).  It's entirely reasonable to me that a medieval civil structure couldn't support governance and taxation of 25 major cities, and the Civ IV folks came up with a solution that was simple yet elegant.

I also agree that cities should have a mix of wealthy and not-so-wealthy types.  The game is ages old, but Imperialism 2 did a great job of tying resource production to loftier classes of citizens.  Luxury resources were key to transforming peasants into citizens, and citizens into merchants or nobles.  This could turn into a micromanagement fest, but you get the idea.

Lastly, I love cities that grow organically.  The Railroad Tycoon series did this nicely.  It seems unreasonable to me that I, as ruler, could dictate exactly what structure gets built next.  Except for totalitarian governments, you have to rely on the citizens to build their own mills, smiths, etc.  As a lord, you can finance the construction of individual buildings, but only a small handful of them.

Based on the discussion I've seen, it sounds like that's a design decision that the Stardock folks have already moved past and it won't be included, but I wanted to make the suggestion.

Limiting the number of cities is a good idea, yet then I feel like the AI should also have the same penalties a player would. In Civ there are quite a few cases in which the player finds himself boxed in on a continent between two AI, where on another continent an AI has enough room to found 20ish cities where every other AI and the player all have 6 to 8 cities. When you play on deity and you meet the other AI - who has become quite a powerhouse - you know the game is over well before you ever get to the end of it. Only in rare cases you can win a cultural - if the land allows it - or diplomatic victory - if you can conquer the rest of the world and the monster AI holds less that 40% of the worlds population.

If the AI has the same limits as the player does, then the AI that expands like mad would get punished severely so it can never grow huge and be advanced. It can then be huge with the ability to grow strong given enough time, but there will be the option for the player to check the AI, stopping it's development into a monster. As it is in Civ, the AI can just become a monster with the player on the sidelines. You can do nothing about it.

Elemental would need a system where the AI has limitations like the player does, without choking the AI so that it can never ever keep up with the player. Meeting the AI and knowing you are dead right from the start is hardly the way to go imo.