agreed

So do I. Even if I can't use it, prevent my enemy from using it.

I'm indifferent to city spam. Pretty much every 4x game uses this strategy to one extent or the other. I would like to see more diversity in the cities, city walls & fortresses that actually function as city walls and fortresses for example. The 1.1 patch is supposed to change things a lot, so I'll hold off my opinion until I see the game at that point.

I'm not against city spam per se.

I am against city spam being the most effective way when the game does not support the management of multiple cities.
City governors, building queues (even if you do not meet the requirements for building X just yet), management screens.
1.09 already has an info screen but it's completely separated from the game. You can not do anything in there.

It has to be either one or the other.

the problem is faction population growth, as i've said everywhere. this needs to be tied to a resource (eg food) rather than the number of cities (currently, you get 1 guy per turn per city). this way if you build lots of cities and give them all the same housing provisions (hard cap) then you should expect them to grow more slowly and stop growing at an earlier point, than if you built only a few, or limited some to hamlets by not building housing.

so long as both population growth and the ability to maintain a population increases with the number of cities (due to caravans and nature's bounty) instead of with the available resources, then it will always be in people's interests to spam settlements.

the current system of charging food for housing is a clumsy attempt at doing this, but is ultimately flawed and restrictively simplistic, because it is a only a building requirement, not a population requirement, and determines only capacity instead of growth itself.

just do it like this: https://forums.elementalgame.com/397376

if you determine population growth this way then the mechanics will incourage a mixture of big cities for generating gildar and small villages for controlling resources. much more fun.

near-minded short term fixes like increasing the minimum foundation distance and increasing pioneer costs are not going to cut it.

I would like to see the bandits and monsters come back as well.  I am probably in the minority, but I actually want to see less resources or perhaps a slider to pick the level of resources.

Sethai does not agree but I think a further minimum distance between cities would also help quite a bit.

it would help in the short term, but it is quite an arbitrary distinction. i think the bandits and monsters would help. but they whould be mostly a barrier to expansion rather than a threat to civilizations. they should be more aggressive in killing pioneers but less aggressive for attacking settlements.

The problem is that the monsters are one of the main reasons I feel I need to spam cities in the game.

If I have two good cities that are not close to the other, and I send a caravan between them, the caravan will most likely be killed (many times) unless I fill the gaps in the area of influence with tiny useless towns.

The monsters don't spawn in the AOI, but they do enter if they are spawned outside.

I'm not sure how complex the AI is and if they try to attack cities or just wander around.

But yes, I think that having a city is generally safer than having an empty area.

Thanks for the information, random_target.

I can see why monsters don't spawn in your Area Of Influence - it could be frustrating when your city would be attacked with no warning. In Master of Magic, only lairs and nodes generate monsters. You didn't have to put a city between 3 ruins. However, if monsters are not aggressive enough towards cities, then it bothers me. Why in the first place can you afford to paint the world with cities ? Settlers in MOM don't come from nowhere - each group substracts 1000 people from originating city.

b0rsuk---towers of wizardry spawned monstors as well

Sorry the pic is small above.  Basically I had two decent size cities going and then the Quendar plopped one down right in between them.  The city spamming is actually getting worse in the games that I am playing.  It takes away from game play and ruins the aesthetics of the game.

Lol yeah, i guess that would help a lot.

In my humblest of opinions, it needs to get fixed for the long term play of the game.

I havent played Elemental for a long time now. The main reason is the city spam. It ruins the atmosphere. A fantasy world must not be crowded with urban life, that's more SimCity for me.

So I am eagerly waiting for a good fix on this. We need game mechanics that punishes city spam severly. Not small changes but radical changes needed.