Just a note: all those cities are far from useless.  Infinite city spam is a very powerful strategy when combined with trade routes.  You can get obscene income from taxes alone if you settle packed cities for +10% cash apiece.

So all cities would be the same level? I'm confused...

You can raze cities .. press x while in the city (after having researched the appropriate tech ofc, which eludes me atm )

While I agree that ICS is bad in general, I don't agree that expansionism is bad. Fact is, a city is -always- beneficial (this game or other games) because ultimately, you will likely get far more out of it than what you put in. Expanding is something you -want- to do even if you're trying to stay small. Limiting empire size doesn't work because all it does is say "Stop expanding here"; you end up building just as far as you can go. And in certain situations, you may -want- to over expand; you're so far in the hole (by whatever mechanic you use)  that the benefit of continuing to spam is actually higher than trying to get yourself out of the hole.

The underlying problem is -not- that city building is bad. The underlying problem is that small empires can't compete. There needs to be benefits and outright advantages to having a small empire. Not incentives, not cool things, but actual gameplay advantages that you give up for the advantages of a larger empire. 

Population growth is -not- an advantage nor is city size, especially not in the current game. There are few benefits from having large cities; yes, you can get gildar and more population to spam stuff with, but there's not much to use it on other than spamming units.... and you're likely to get more benefit out of having more places to build units rather than a few places to build units. That is, if I can build 12 units in 3 turns while you can build a single 12-unit troop in 6, I win most of the time because I can simply outproduce you. I can out heal you (more space to retreat through).

Thanks for the reply. I hear what you are saying, I didn't mean to say that expansionism is actually bad, just not my preference. What is bad in my opinion, is expansionism on top of everything else without penalty. I'm saying there should be sacrifices you have to make from other parts of your empire. As you say, heedless expansion is a path to victory.

I don't like "staying small" per se, but I expand more slowly without leaving myself thin anywhere. You would still be able to expand through warfare, because you would inherit prestige from the cities you take. I watch the AI build all these little outposts and they are too weak to defend them. When I set up a new city I have a sizeable escort ready to defend it. Ultimately you should be able to build your empire as large as you want, and you can focus on expansion to make it happen quicker. All I am saying is it's something you should have to work toward.  It's the same principle behind any other mechanic in any other game.

Plus, there is a sense of ownership that comes with founding a city. When I found a city it has its own personality, and unique characteristics. I like watering them and watching them grow. Also, if I take a nice big city from the enemy, I can adopt it as part of my empire. But when I see dozens of small shanty towns scattered across the map, only one thing comes to mind: Burn them! And there's the administrative nightmare of managing so many little cities. Big cities don't generally need much attention.

I agree with you on this, it should just be available from the get go.  Unless there were some game breaking things you could do in the early game with creating and razing settlements?  I can't think of anything though.

In effect, you're more worried about rate of expansion and not so much the expansion itself. I'm not really sure that's something that can be controlled explicitly since it's something that is affected by many many things. If you're in a corner of a map and manage to box off a big piece of land, it may be very very easy to spam your initial cities there simply because there's no monsters or competition.

And if the AI is expanding without defending, that's at least one cost to that (lack of defenders). 

Currently, there's not many ways to penalize (or at least, increase the difficulty) of aggressive expansion. In Civ, one thing cities are limited by is production - so even if you spam cities, without a strong economy (and early technology depending on surroundings), it takes a lot of time to get the city up to productive status. Not so with Elemental currently; as soon as you drop a city, it's -immediately- profitable if through no other reason than gildar and a unit supply station.

While monsters are some barrier to expansion, they're not reliable as a mechanic and often times one can sneak by them. It also doesn't apply fairly to all parties so, effectively, one faction can get lucky simply because another faction took out the monsters.

Looking at Civ, some of the additional things they do to help control overly aggressive city expansion in the early game is to halt city development while building a settler. Settlers are also expensive resource and time wise. Starting a settler in Civ generally means setting your city back by at least one population point as well as two units or buildings in the early game. The opportunity cost for expansion in Civ is very very high early on. In Elemental, I can start popping pioneers out within 10 turns and it costs me nothing (and generally, only 4 turns); I can even get around the lack of defenders if I happen across a champ early on. I can even potentially spam pioneers in some strategies (spam workshops to get a stockpile of mats which I later destroy to make room for other stuff).

In the current system, that's really the only way I can think off at the moment to help limit the rate of expansion. Really really expensive pioneers to help make the opportunity cost of building them and/or losing them very high.

why do you need prestige as yet another resource to limit cities when there's food doing the same thing?! where does ai get all the food from?

you could argue levelling up city should not increase base pop... or higher level city base using up more food.. to stop the silly thing where you knock down all you houses after getting it to lvl 5 (never done it myself.. don't see the reason to lower my taxes..  just saw someone mentioning it)

come to think of it... whatever happened to the 0 pop outposts that do nothing on their own and just there to harvest resources? (ie.. can't train soldiers/etc without additional buildings)

 <--- the razing cleanup crew.

Except if everyone is doing the exact same strategy of expanding, then there's no one in a position to take advantage of all those undefended towns. All the empires just grab together and then grow together. Of course the player can choose otherwise, pretty much what I have been doing with razing all the small undefended settlements I find, but then I have to fight armies of pioneers coming back to fill in the empty space, lol. it's hard to keep up with. (a more dangerous world would help)

Anyway, it's encouraging to know some things are being worked on in this direction, thanks so much for the reply.

City spam has another negative side effect.  Per Frogboy's comments in other threads, in late-game lots of buildings causes problems.  Fewer cities probably means slightly fewer buildings even if average city-size increases a bit.

Well, the problem is that ICS is actually much better for defense than just a few cities.  Why?  Because if you blanket the map in cities, there's nowhere for neutral mobs to spawn.  So, ultimately, you can just defend your border cities against the AI.