Balance: Expanding

I am very new to both turn based 4x games, and FE in general, so this might just be a newbies perspective, but I want to talk about expanding. I have played Civ V and one feature I liked about that game is that I do not have to expand, that I could have a powerful empire with four cities. Taking that strategy in FE though, has led to me getting destroyed by the AI. My current game I have adopted a mass expansion, basically having one city only making pioneers, and this time the AI is cowed, even though I have less military than my previous games.

In general it seems to me that there is no penalty for making pioneers and just cranking out cities. At least I haven't found one, with this current playthrough being my best yet, simply due to me having so many cities. I am correct in thinking that mass expansion is the best way to play? It seems to me that whatever win you are going for, mass expansion is the way to go, which makes your early game at least be fairly similar.

I am not entirely sure what the solution could be, or even if this is considered a problem. Perhaps making all the buildings you can make(which seems a ton more than Civ) build faster, or allow instant purchase on units, rather than just rushing.

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There are two types of penalty that exist for cranking out cities:

First, if your cities are not connected to your capital in some fashion, you receive major unrest penalties.

Second, your prestiege is an empire based value. Therefore, the more cities you have, the slower they all grow.

Third, there generally aren't many locations to settle in the first place....that in itself limits how much you can do.

In any case, it's been considered for quite some time and the above is what SD came up with.

I am still holdings to changing the Scout to be able to build outposts, thus having the pioneer not be able to build outposts; so that there is more control as to just how much that pioneer should cost.

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There are different ways to win, but mass expansion is one of the most effective. Unfortunately, they tried (and failed) to make small civilizations (fewer but bigger cities) equal to large civilizations (lots of smaller cities) using the Prestige mechanic. City growth is Prestige is divided by the number of cities you have (plus other modifiers). The problem is that you run into the growth caps too quickly if you have fewer cities. You would have to spend all of your build queue time and research tree invested in city growth buildings (i.e. garden, granary, etc.) to the detriment of building anything else. Fail!

If you want to try and win with a smaller civilization then you'll have to try using one of the other strategies like the Altar infinite quest loop.

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