You have to defend them all, that is one downside.  Though if you have enough there might not be anywhere outside of your area of influence for random mobs to spawn lol.

Massive expansion is always best in most 4X games (with variations based on difficulty).

I would suggest just funneling all your caravans to your capital. Then welcome 500% bonus food production.

Cheers,

V

I really wish caravan's would trade other goods.

It's rather senseless that it increases food production. If anything you would think that it would need to be linked in order to receive it's food. Rather then increasing the production of food in the target city...

Anyways, I'm not debating the game's logic anymore, I'm an old man who likes his oldschool 4X games. And I guess times are changing.

:/

@searro go to bed troll!

the biggest dislike of no increasing costs per city means there isn't a soft 'limit' meaning each city is less special.  Why do I care about city (x) if I can make 35 more for no cost increase.  Idk how this would be implemented, maybe 1 city per civilization/empire level and additional cities over that incur increasing penalties? idk.

True, but we also have to take in to consideration the general size of the maps. On large, even 12 fairly spaced cities won't take up more than a quarter of the map if that. While spamming in general should be discouraged, we also don't want to penalize legitimately large empires (whether through conquest, good economics, or both). And, to an extent, barring a really harsh penalty, some spamming will still be possible especially once you hit a critical mass where the cost of a new city can be soaked up by a significantly large empire.

food doesn't limit development, even if you don't multi route to the capital with caravans, get to lvl 5, destroy houses, repeat.

On the enchantment spamming, I think (hope) that the devs are working on a major redesign of the magic system and that some or all enchantments will shift from essence = slots as a limit to mana upkeep. Hopefully, that will keep enchantments reasonably limited in early and mid-game but also enable 'good spamming' in late game, where super-powerful magic was once intended to be intentionally 'unbalancing.'

The problem with food limits is they encourage even more spam of undeveloped level 1 cities (as would any system that limits large cities but allows limitless small ones). Either way it would just exacerbate the current problem, which is covering the map in lots of cheap level 1 cities. Then caravans make it worse; all those level 1 cities can send a caravan to the capital, meaning that they generate more food than they use! Of course this is a problem no matter what caravans generate; if they increased gold instead, you'd have absurd gold generation in the capital, it's bad either way.

The funny thing is, Elemental had a decent solution to city spam in beta: your first city cost 100g to found, the second 200g, the third 300g, etc. (I may be misremembering the exact numbers, but something along those lines). There was also a greater emphasis on powerful resource-generation buildings that required higher level cities to build, rather than the current random map resources that any city can harvest. This meant that at a certain point, it became more worthwhile to invest in developing your current cities instead of founding another increasingly-costly level 1. City spam was still a problem back then, but at least it stopped being so good after a certain point (roughly 5-7 cities). Why they removed the founding cost, taking two steps backwards in progress against level 1 city spam, I'd love to know.

[I'm not mentioning the "destroy houses to recover food" thing since that's an obvious bug and can't be an intended part of the game mechanics - hopefully it gets fixed sooner rather than later.]

Anyone know how to make it so that tab doesn't select caravans that are already trading with towns?  It's so irritating.

As far as I'm aware every enchantment takes "enchantment slot for the caster, so it shouldn't be possible to spam them indefinetly.

Plus, due to low mana regeneration, it takes a lot of time to enchant all cities, if even possible.

.

Now, there is one disadvantage of level 1 cities, and that's that they can only have 2 tile borders.

Civ handled this with city maintenance, which I hate, but at least it prevents city spam.  Kind of a bad oversight... 

REX has been a known exploit for most 4X games for a long time.