I suspect that the Goverance Penalties, mentioned earlier by Frogboy, may well fix this problem.

It may work like this:  Your Soveriegn is able to govern some number of cities, perhaps 10 (just guessing) with 100% efficiency.  After that each additional city would result in perhaps a 10% loss of efficiency in ALL cities, so soon a larger nation would crumble under its inefficient government.

From time to time the Soveriegn might be able to increase his goverance ability, thus ruling more cities.

I don't really mind a huge amount of micro management in a game, I loved that Civilization I was able to expand to my desire, where as I thought call to power destroyed the freedom of the game because you were only aloud a certain amount of city's before you started getting civil unrest, which isn't very realistic, Imagine telling a country of today they could only have 10 city's or the people would revolt against them. 

Although having a Sovereign only be able to govern a certain amount of area's themselves makes sense but even so they should be able to appoint governors, because having a huge map is kind of pointless if you cannot continue to expand to the point your control reaches across the world. or being able to control your government's state to increase your control effectiveness. but even mid-evil governments had huge area's of influence in the world at time's, and in reality, money and resource's pile up like mad when your sphere of control grows, as long as your government is decent.

Im not so much talking about micro management (which yes does need to be held in check) but having 9999999999999999999999999999 money and 99999999999999999999999999999 resources! (In other words unlimited power! In Dominions III there are options to cut money, resource, gem production in half which really helps with the giant maps! Helps to slow things down!

Meh, the fun of large maps is trying to put together a huge, and stable, empire.

There's more than one kind of 'fun' for large maps, and for the fantasy genre in particular it seems important to have sustained and engaging game paths that are based on things other than the material luck of map placement or the mundane value of 'efficient management.'

But then again I'm not at all sure that I really understand auboy's concern and I could be just projecting my own interest in seeing Elemental overcome the TBS genre's tendency to cover maps with tediously similar cities/colonies/warrens/whatever...

He he! Agree. That is part of the fun. I loved doing that in Rome Total War.

I have no problems with having governance penalties. Just that i hope it doesn't artificially limit your ability to expand.

Example, i've conquered 50 cities. Uh oh, thats my limit. Oh no, there just this one annoying enemy city with important resource patch there but i can't conquer it because i've already hit my max number of cities. Damn!