With recent patch, the early game slows down a bit and some of the improvements got nerfed as well.

....

The result is even more hardcore pioneer spam. I am playing mostly on hard~expert difficulty, and the importance of getting many cities as possible is far more important. The reasons are follows.

1.) Slower and longer build speed means I need more multiple production cities = need moar cities.

2.) Nerfed improvements, even less important to get high-tier cities = spam more cities instead.

(Those two will be discussed further below)

With other reasons already stated on my previous thread, pioneer spam is now pretty much only viable way to play when game difficulty is normal or harder, unless you are aiming for peaceful ending or master quest.

Now, it is evident that trying to solve this problem in 'patching bandage way' only makes more problems rather than fixing the original problems.

Here are two NEW pronounced problems caused by recent patch :

[1] No, Master Scouts is not overpowered, it is the 'bandage' that made it overpowered.

Tarth and any custom faction using Master Scouts were ok before beta 5 has arrived. I personally almost never used the trait.

Now, with beta 5 has arrived, and I noticed Tarth is now expanding and conquering in such crazy speed, thanks to the fact that monsters do not attack units and cities.

It wasn't this powerful trait. Back then, Master Scouts were really nothing more than speed bonus; It was good speed bonus, but not this gamebreaking.

So how did it become a problem now? Oh yes, Beta 5 introduced moster behaviour that will attack nearby cities far more often and more aggressive. Now suddenly, Master Scouts is one big advantage compared to others.

Oh yes, we can nerf it, but then Tarth becomes mediocre faction other than bows (and bows are not that good weapon in current balance situation.) not to mention it won't fit into Tarth's lore and settings. So we are going to completely rebalance the race faction/race.

Do you see the problem here? Bandage fixing only works when a game is simple enough, but we are talking about 4X game that has so many things depended on among another. We have to directly address the pioneer problem rather than trying to alter other elements to subdue it.

[2] Isolationists are screwed in this game.

There are some AIs that prefer 'isolated' from other players, programmed to build just few cities and focus on internal growth. Guess what, they become so outplayed by other AIs that they are either dead or staying at bottom of the power rating when I finally meet them. The real issue is unless city spam is not solved, those 'isolationists' are nothing more than 'easy' AIs because they are not competitive at all.

[3] Even slower early gameplay. More boring. More Cities, More powerful heroes.

As I explained above, slower progression means... we need more cities to make things faster. Not only it encourages city spams, but it enhances another important issue in this game, 'heroes'.

The heroes, in pretty much any setting, become very powerful, more powerful..... to the point that you finish the game without making a single troop. The matter of the fact is the game ends even before I have researched MAYBE 40% of whole research tree while using powerful heroes to conquer stuffs. That said, from beta 4 to 5, I have not managed to get last tier weapons available on the Weapons Of War on my troops, because the game ends far before it happens.

Why does this happen? While it is true that heroes gain experience very fast, but also it is important to realize people send them alone, with no support troops in early game, making the gap between heroes and normal troops far bigger than it is supposed to.

Why do people send them alone? Because they find themselves they can't afford to use precious time to build troops instead of building endless amounts of buildings needed to be built on cities.

Why can't they afford it? Because everything takes forever to build.

Why does it take forever to build? Because production is hard-tided to tile yield.

Let's postpone about discussing how broken tile yield system is; so, the obvious conclusion is that players need more production values from tile yield, which is no way to increase other than increasing multiple via buildings and researches. The only viable way to actually increase tile yield production value is.... get more tiles which has tile yield, which basically means players need MORE cities; this is another very serious element that encourages city spam.

[4] Can't play this game without cloud road!

This is rather personal opinion, but I found the game becomes really annoying due to monster aggression. When ZoC reaches monsters lair, they start to do 'patrol' and destroy cities, outposts and units.

While it just does not address any of the problems above, I found very highly irritating to deal with provoked monsters. And no, you can't just get rid of slags with crappy level heroes and units. It really slows down the early-to-mid game (and no effect on mid-to-end game at all, since monsters just can't scale well enough even compared to mid-game non hero units.)

So yeah, now air-magic is now nearly must since I have to teleport everywhere to kill monsters everywhere.

There are several ways to fix.

[1] Bring back everything population-based and get rid of tile yield. This is one solid way to solve the problem, without needing annoying monster behavior and more broken mechanics thanks to the changes.

[2] Put unkeep cost like in civ 4. Corruption like in civ 3 can be working well, too. With these, MAYBE taxes can be meaningful again, but tax problems can be solved with first method in much better condition. Also notice, making tax viable again means EVEN slower gameplay, too.

[3] Make pioneer far more expensive. This is more bandage way than other two (like it will be breaking 'wealthy' trait), but it can be worked if pioneer costs like 500 gold. 

Notice both second and third solution do not work at all at the beginning of mid-game due to inevitable economic growth. Really, first one is only way to permanently solve the city spam as long as growth and prestige is hard-tied and prestige is being kept as global resource.

And here are some unrelated requests...

[1] I say again; unit training and building need to be separated like in WoM, I thought about just making things faster, but then in mid to end game, there would be nothing else to build, leading inactive cities. The better solution would be keep the current pacing, and let players make troops without slowing down building progression.

And here is my previous post : https://forums.elementalgame.com/430551/page/3