It doesn't actually give you "more strategy" though. That's the whole problem. It's the illusion of "more strategy". In truth, since you wind up with more tiles for ranking up the city then it cost you to do so in gardens, you come out ahead for garden spam. If you're coming out ahead for it, then it's the best thing to do when your access to real food resources runs out.

Much like in the research discussions, it's not a real strategic choice if of the two options, one is flat out worse then the other.

Based on Brad's OP, you'll probably have one garden in the city, but that one garden will be stronger then it is now. So that'll let you grow the outpost some, beyond which you'll need to go capture and allocate some real food (or let it stay a village).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0bdOXOkxdc

That's the latest one I can remember off hand. About 5 minutes in he says "in this game you're not really supposed to have a ton [of cities]."

I know it's been mentioned earlier though and to me that's what made the game stand out.

Just because a map is big doesn't mean you have to fill all the empty space with cities. That's again a civilization thing. Big empty areas could represent wilderness, where powerful monsters spawn and ample quests reside.

I agree that making finding food resources important to growth is dangerous. Any feature that gives a large advantage to starting luck is one that will turn me off.

I found that using the current system made it unwise to create more than 3-4 large cities. That's because growing them to be big enough to benefit from the more efficient building is expensive... they also are not at all easy to hold! Troops are expensive and slow to create. They also die quickly.

What is true is that grabbing resources is pretty easy by building small cities just to benefit from them. That might be a problem, but essence cost seems a good solution. Make it 2 essense to build a new city, or some such.

Worring about "city spam" just wasn't reflected in my test games... it just didn't happen, and if I did against serious competition, I'd lost many of the quickly.

I didn't find there to be much micro-management with farms and houses. It took me 3 games to master it, and then I hardly needed to think about it.

On another topic, I'm still very worried about turns where one player has 4 big tactical combats and another player has no tactical combats. If waiting for 30 minutes happens too often, that's going to be a problem. I'm wondering if a timer could be implemented... like a chess clock. If time run out, either the grid stays locked in combat, or it is an auto-defeat.

Between that and making sure these combats tend to be fairly speedy, it could be a winner. When I look at the current combat log, some fairly simple battles look like they'd could take a LONG time. This is largely because of the strange variation in damage: I've seen many cases where a 12 attack weapon did as little as 1 point of damage to a creature in a round. When creatures can have well over 100 HPs, this taken to a tactical mode, would make for very long battles.

I've already shelved several promising games due to this issues, so please forgive my harping on it in hopes that it might be dealt with somehow as early as possible in the development cycle.

I notice the desertion effect also, but have been busy so I havent reexamined it.  The first unit that deserted me was a frigate, lol.  Like you I started taking some cities at the approximate time of desertions.

In regards to beta 2-a, cant wait to check it out!

Could Ale, mulled wine, mead or the like be added to the store?  After desertions or your companies getting crushed by a large geko it feels good to go throw a couple back while the thoughts are refocusing

This doesn't means that we won't be able to build as many cities as possible. [..and it should work like that. Any rules which would "limit" the player to create let's say 15 cities...well that would be a huge mistake from the dev's side.] Maybe most of those will be towns or smaller cities, but you got the picture.

Out of interest has there been any word on when 2A will be with us? Tonight? Tomorrow? Friday? Just wondering, looking forward to having a custom soverign again and seeing how the cities grow with the housing and food changes.

Yes, because it's already been stated by the devs that it's possible to roll up a world with no fertile land at all, or it being very rare. You can watch the AI developer diaries if you want. There's no guarantee you'll spawn anywhere near food resources. Period.

I mean, hate gardens if you want to. I don't doubt that there needs to be some kind of adjustment. But barring them altogether is not fair. As they are right now, they're a fairly inefficient use of space and aren't upgradeable unlike regular ol' farms. Once a better upkeep system is in place there will be less reasons to spawn countless cities and gardens.

Will currently I can make as many cities as I have essence for so you could have a lot, but because they can take up a lot of room on a map and because it sounds like after 2A iit may be harder to make big cities without a lot of land it may take longer and more effort to build a lot and there just won't be room for the same number of cities there would be in the same size CIV map. Cities being built on lots of map tiles makes a big difference.

I imagine there will be sliders or options for random world generation as in GCII, so you will be able to choose how common fertile land or, other resources are.

I also epect that when placing players on the map at the start of a game there will be some checks to ensure the start positions are not too unfair.

Well currently a mix of adventure, killing and recruiting provide the additional Essence, via Leveling, required to make a bunch of cities. I have found that after 3-4, my ability to take other cities way out weighs my need to build, and grow, new ones.

Nick is correct on the "place on" already fertile idea. We will however have to wait and see how the new spread mechanic is set up as I am not currently seeing much change in .802 vs 1Z.

Anyone seeing different?

I want to second the whole idea of "one peasant shouldn't be able to capture a city." The population of a city should be converted to X peasants, where X = (city pop) * (approval or happiness rating percentage) / 100. Then multiply X by some tweaking factor for balancing purposes. But the idea remains, your guys should fight if they can! 

I agree.  Just dont think a level 1 adventurer of a single swordsman should be able to take it.  Also I do feel armies are very weak at present.  This will need to change for them to be a viable alternative to leveling up adventurers or specializing in magic.  I suspect it will as more items/weapons are added and weapon values are tweaked.

To some degree it would be nice to see some population die when you attack, but also have a morale system where if the odds are overwhelming an undefended town gives up.  So if you bring some sad army to attck you are gonna kill pop.  If you bring sufficient army you can just take the city.

I don't know if it will be in the game at some point but the ability to attack certain structures in a town and retreat might be add to the game.  As well as the ability to set siege to the town vs attacking it.

Each unit in the game should have thier own movement rates like in AOW:SM and if they do these should be able to be adjusted in the editor plus there should be skills/abilities and Spells that shoould affect this.