(based on the discussion at https://forums.elementalgame.com/396888)

Building Variety:

As it currently stands, there is not a lot of variety in cities other than resources and a few with with unique structures. The simplest solution is to add more buildings, both unique and common. In fact, a city should not be able to get all the normal buildings within the normal tile limit. One idea I would like to see would be buildings that are prerequesites for some types of equipment (e.g. a sword smith is needed to get bladed weapons).

City Types:

Beyond just increasing buildings, there should be specialized towns (not refering to the current mechanic) that are more limited in building options but can get relavent buildings at lower levels (e.g. a military base that get unit production, fortification, and equipment prerequesites at at lower levels than other towns), go up fewer levels, and might have specail rules (e.g. a military base would not collect resources, it would just be to place in an area of military importance).

Housing, food, prestige, and population:

Housing as it is right now is has little meaning that I can see because usually once it levels up it can support about as much population as it took to level up even if you remove the housing. Save the trouble of placing all those houses and remembering to place them, and just have the town automatically and internally build housing when nothing is being constructed and not take up tiles (in other words the "city" is being expanded, rather than a new structure being built), causing the population cap to rise*. On a similar note, food consumtion should be changed to be population based*. Prestige can stay, but it might be worth considering accounting for birth for population growth*.

* Please discuss, this is just my view; however the current way seems like something that could be replaced with something that makes cities less of a bother to build up. And if they are less of a bother, the game will be more fun.

Its late, so that is all for now. I will post about the economy for cities (see link at the top for ideas) and ideas for making city spamming less of a dominat strategy tomorrow (presenting ideas from various threads here for easy reading) other than making cities that do not have resource producing tiles nearby worthless.