Umm, can't you limit Pioneers by... lets see... not making anymore ? 

Just odd you would need a mod for this.

The problem is the I don't want the A.I. to build tons of cities either. I want it to be a two-way street. Forcing both sides to do their best with just a few towns. 

I believe this would lead to there being killing fields, which are always awesome.

the problem, as i say in every thread, is the way population grows and income is generated.

if population growth for your faction as a whole was determined predominantly by the food available per person, and merchants generated 0.05 gildar per person or whatever, then the best way to play the game would be to build small villages to control resources (such as food) but only build the capacity for population to grow (houses) in big cities. that way you keep most of your population in the places where you have the infrastructure to exploit them.

the result of this is that you can use pioneers to grab resources without getting settlement spam. just one or two biggish cities per faction for making the things that people make (gildar from trade adn taxes, troops, materials in workshops), and small villages to control the things that are produced by the world (metal, food, gildar from mining).

this keeps the map unclutterred, micro-management minimal and the whole thing intuitive and believable. best of all it helps the flow of play, because the settlements on people's borders are less important than the cities at their heart, so losing factions remain competetive for longer.

would also suffice, but i think if you get the game mechanics right (like i suggested) you won't need to limit people's settlements like this. they will want to do it themselves.

this way it's organic and the player is empowered instead of restricted. and if you lose your capital early on for some reason, you can redevelop a smaller place to work as a new big city.

Another way to slow down expansion would be to make the wandering enemies aggressively attack your cities, and make them much more abundant and powerful. Then you would have to balance expansion with making sure that everything you take is secure. To balance this, the player would probably have to start off with a couple defensive units to station in their city. A side effect of this is that there would be much more experience gain.

This world is VASTLY under populated and more expansive than most people realize. And yes, for the record where I live I can drive 10 miles and be in the middle of nowhere, no buildings, no restaurants, nothing, but swamp, forest and wetlands for hundreds of miles.

In Civ and this game, cities end up taking everything over and it's unrealistic and it's annoying. It should be an adventure from one city to the next with dangerous creatures about (not everywhere, just enough to be dangerous).

Reading Brad's new Dev Journal post Thursday Musings, population is about to be a resource, that I think will help some.

Indeed, Ssternbe I like the idea of Outpost buildings that would act as mini-settlements (which i imagine would be used to "cap" gold mines and what have you, but they would be really restricted in terms of sprawl.

Right now I'm going the easy route and making a map I feel will cater to keeping a low number of towns. It includes a ridiculous number of quest nodes, few but dense resource areas, lots of mountain passes to discourage settlements, things like that.

Edit: Delmoroth, that is an amazing idea!

I don't see anything wrong with players having a fair number of settlements, but as Sethai suggests there should be few big cities and larger numbers of small towns and outposts.

Maybe you could have a system where every level of an existing city allows you another city at the level below that? So if you have two level two cities, you can also have two level one cities. This doesn't really stop city spam, but it does encourage you to build up cities more and it means you can only have so many high level cities.