Yeah, I'm a bit bothered by this too.  Its an interesting idea, but can become a royal pain when your empire gets larger or your sovereign is simply overcommitted.  Having to zigzag across your empire to found minor cities doesn't appeal to me much.  It might be a better method to allow the sovereign--- through an early spell--- to imbue settlers with essence and then let the settlers do the work.

I do agree that this is a bit of a problem, but I'd rather see scouts come out sooner rather than create settlers.  I don't think just giving the sov the ability to bring back the land is that great because unless I am very far afield I'm going to want to creep cities toward the resource rather than spend essence.  Part of this is just personal preference as I think I'll be a bit of a stay at home sov myself.

Another possible option would be an early game familiar of some kind.  It could be an early, easy summon or even be something you start with.  That would make the early turns more interesting and possibly be another way to differentiate among the factions and possibly even help balance them out (if you start with it).

yes, the GUI doesn't quite make it clear yet. Make sure to adjust the colors in visual settings so you can see the subtle hues and shades that indicate a different environment type. The areas surrounding a dragon statue for instance are already life magic infused you can found cities around them for no essence cost.

I was thinking that too. Great idea.

We don't really need a settler unit. We're supposed to be able to imbue units to create new channelers anyway (probably as the magic system gets flshed out), so once we can do that the solution on land that needs essence already exists. For just building on already fertile land, maybe any unit should have the ability to found cities. (Or just the imbued units, either way.)

Functionally though, for most of these kinds of games there is an almost overwhelming need to place cities close by for defense reasons. Having cities that can support one another in defense is almost too valueable to ignore. Unless founding a city without resources actually harms you, I would expect to see a fair amount of sprawl as the norm.

You might alleviate this need with early game magic teleportation, but that could have some negative consequences as well.

I have to (humbily) disagree on this point.       Part of our goal is to make a world that 'feels' like a traditional fantasy RPG setting. When you play an rpg, you have some considerable distance to travel between cities (even when those cities are part of the same empire). The moment you have 5 settlement crammed into a corner, that 'rpg' feeling is broken and it just feels like traditional TBS city-spam.

So, if you're finding that cities are a good 10-20 tiles apart and it takes a few turns for units to get from city A to city B, then I feel we're doing something right, not wrong (again, IMHO).

Oh, i would def prefer for cities to be farther apart, the city sprawl in civ always did annoy me.. and in that regard i think our right it would be more like an rpg. What i guess i should have said is that im concerned about a nations borders being separated by cities of other nations because you were out exploring on the other side of the continent...  

For example:

----= blank land/tiles

A= city of nation A

B= city of nation B

C= city of Nation C

[ ]= borders

Like this would be preferred:

[---A-----------A---][------B-------B-----]

where this is annoying:

[--A----A----A----A---][---B---B----B---]

but this is what im afraid of:

[----A------][----B-----][-----C----][----A----][----C----]

I agree with you Boogie. The problem I foresee though is people building cities too close together so they can grab up resources. This is why I think it will be necessary to allow players to build on improvements (Mines, Shards etc etc) without the need to build a whole city there so long as a city is close by.

I really, Really, think you should consider that option.

Lol, this is a very good point.  While you grow early on, you might feel coerced to keep your sovereign nearby for fear of another sovereign plopping a city between your own cities and using it as a means of splintering your transportation and trade.

To further explain the defense benefits, imagine that your city aura can give you a 5 turns warning that a city will be attacked. If you have three cities within a 5 turn march these three cities can all be defended with the same army.

If you have three cities that are farther than 5 turns march from each other, then you need to maintain that same size force in each of them individually to provide the same level of defense! In this case you are maintain 3x the number of troops!

I humbly disagree that when 5 settlements crammed into a corner, that 'rpg' feeling is broken.   What if those villiages are just small fishing villages along the abundant coastal resources,  or in an relatively crammed area that has tons of irons to mine but has minimal food to support a large city?

Large city should has its own adv & disadv. against smaller settlements.   IMHO, a smaller settlement CANNOT grow into a large city no matter how much time or $ you throw into it improving infrastructure WHEN its location is not meant to support a large population.    Let me use an example to illustrate what I meant here.   Assume you need "Advanced Market" being built first be4 your city evolve to a high population one.  And in order to build this adv market, you need to have at least 3 different types of "Local" food sources within a radius of 5. 

I'll like that whether you can build a large city or not depends mainly on its location.    If the random map generator gives out tons of food, I don't mind playing a game with tons of large metropolis.   If the RMG gives little food this time, everyone plays with their smaller towns.

Give us variety, a possibility to build cities depending on map resources.  There is nothing wrong with crammed nor sparse cities, when the underlying condition is right (& a mechanism to prevent micro-nitemare)

[---A---][--B--][---C---C---][--B--][--A--] feels a little bit strange in my opinion. On the other hand, you have to spend essence, so you can't spam cities everywhere. If you place you city in the middle of enemy's territory, you will probably lose it, wasting 5 essence and the time, which could be used for the sovereign to do something else.

One more thing to remember, is that there are couple of things not implemented into the game, yet; family tree, sovereign's role, magic system, etc. It's hard to discuss founding cities without these things in place, imho.

How do you make a city larger? What I mean is ... if a city grows to size 2, will it gain an extra tile? Or do you decide its tile size before it even HAS a population?