Empire management needs to be deeper

1. You can already build roads manually. I guess you want more? Might be nice, but it's not that big of a change.

2. Why? Offsetting the benefit of a building (whatever it is) with a maintenance cost always feels artificial to me. It is certainly not deeper.

But I agree with your general statement. Unfortunately, I don't really know how to make the strategy part deeper.

Maybe buildings that allow unique units, like in MoM?

I see your point about the buildings.

Maintenance was in at least some of the builds.  In the beginning game it can be a very very steep curve to get your town going if you are choked for cash.  Which inhibits having fun in the beginning of the game in my opinion.  I am not sure if it should make a comeback or not. 

I am sort of mixed on whether this adds to the game or not.  It's certainly more realistic, but I'm not sure if actually adds a layer of strategic planning or a layer of tedium.

Also, you can't build every building in every kind of town, there are sets of specific buildings for each type.

They've attempted to address this with the choosing of city types. You don't have access to every building.

Perhaps what needs to happen is that more buildings need to be split across the three building types?

My wood/stone kinda addressed this as well with wood being needed for early game buildings and stone being needed for later game buildings. If such an appraoch were taken, then if balanced properly, the player (and AI) would have to choose carefully where he spends these resources since he can run out.

I think part of the shallowness for me is the percentage and late game buildings.

Because the numbers in LH are very low, percentage buildings don't really do all that much. The sage for example usually gives me roughly the same +1 as the study. The well is actually usually much worse than a garden, etc.

Also many late game buildings take a very long time to build for not a whole lot of benefit. The tax office for example gives the ability to get 20% more wealth when producing wealth. That is....pretty underwhelming.

A city with all buildings should be expensive.  But right now, I'm pretty much in agreement.  I just build nearly everything everywhere, because there is no downside to doing so.

The three city types are fairly well balanced against each other, with a focus (and building access) on unit production, mana/research, and economy.

Rather than going full-tilt with the maintenance costs, perhaps the requirements (besides production cost) should be made more difficult?  Such as what GFireflyeE suggested.  Such as rare resources that allow you to build the more advanced buildings.

In order to build the Alchemy Lab, perhaps you need to have a shard of Elementium or a Pure Mana Crystal. 

Something like that.  Perhaps loyalty as a resource.  Or steel, which has to be manufactured from iron?

We USED to have more stuff to keep track of in Elemental, both resource wise and city building wise.  But APPARENTLY it was felt this didn't add anything to the game, so it was simplified.

Also, we used to have more options in city building, not the 'one of each type of structure' thing you see now.  Also, housing population was something we used to have to pay attention to, by having to build houses and such for people to live in.

These days, I pretty much max out my cities as soon as practical, structure wise.  The only decision really is which of the three city types it is.  Even some the city leveling choices are kind of a letdown.  I found the 'old way' more immersive, even if it wasn't quite optimized yet (Elemental as a game was younger back then).

To contrast this, in Civ, and especially in Alpha Centauri, you had the need to adjust squares to maximize production, terraform them, and sometimes shift their focus (maybe convert them back to forest/fungus, etc.).  Each square by itself had a small effect, but such modifications would accumulate, hence increasing your total production, etc.

By contrast, city building in Elemental simply seems to be a backdrop to armies beating up on each other.  IF that is the intent, essentially just a way to produce the armies so you can beat up on each other, well then we should have more immersive combat at least.  But if the city building element is supposed to entertain us and give us dilemmas to solve other than maximizing food production, which even then is pretty much 'do it when you can' not 'should you', it needs more.

One aspect in Elemental that I think gets lost/overlooked in the Elemental model is population management.  Sure, Pioneers draw down a player's population.  But essentially this just means 'grow your cities as fast as possible'.  I would suggest that city building should be the other way around, i.e. build new cities when your population requires more living space, not build cities and they will come.

Sure, prestige will increase the rate that people show up at your door, but I think that there should be a finite amount of people available each turn, that is split between your existing cities, favoring the larger cities that still have room.  Also, if your empire/kingdom doesn't 'feel' like a safe place to live, well less people might show up - they feel safer out in the wilds then with a target painted on their back so to speak.

Unrest sorta does this, but again it's 'they are there, you just need to attract them', not 'you have x people arriving at your doorstep, where should they live?'.  And sure, baby making will increase your population as well, but overall I think the 'build new city' decision needs to be more driven by 'how can I staff the new city, and will I draw down too much population for my other cities to be effective?', not 'I have more cities so my citizens are more scared now'... This model would help immensely with pioneer spam, among other things...

Play slower speeds, higher difficulty, you will have to pick carefully how to get your cities up properly then. Food vs Hammers vs research vs gildar vs troops can be a hard choice when you are forced to make troops. But I agree somewhat, the main choice is the type of city and you need to pick them carefully, try to go an all conclave game and see how many troops you can afford ;) 

#1 I hate the road system, so I agree with you there But it's a necessary evil atm. Dunno how to fix it except make it manual which will be a huge pain. (maybe remove roads to outposts and between civilizations except VERY far into the tech tree)

#2 Armies already costs tons of gildar when you push research (which you need to do at higher levels), so adding building maintenance on top of it? No. It works fine atm, and a lvl5 town with tons of materials and that 5 gildar pr material is a city you should aim for very soon. 

Comparing it to Civ5 is silly, at least compare it to Civ4 if you want some proper eco management (Civ5 is all about culture vs cities, not eco vs cities)

When you have a fairly mature city, each turn that you decide to build something instead of producing wealth, research, or growth, it is costing you something besides build time.

Sure you can add more micromanagement to city building and some people will appreciate it. For example, Firefly has an interesting idea about wood and stone. However, adding this type of complexity isn't necessarily going to make a better game for the most people.

I think FE:LH has been a hit because it strikes a good balance between playability and complexity. I enjoy city building in this game, which is saying a lot. There are many games--some otherwise very good games--in this genre that I don't like city building at all.

Wow to me this game seems too complicated already.  I think they've added enough features. 

Also command heroes can build roads manually.

Civ IV dropped building maintenance and I feel overall that Civ IV has the best economic model of all the Civ games (including Civ V) so building maintenance is hardly necessary for a good strategy game.

Basically building maintenance isn't much fun. I much prefer a model where the limit on your buildings is how quickly you can build them, which then creates good tension with how quickly you can build armies too (given the single queue).

Well said, Mistwraithe.

Pretty much what everyone else said. I don't think adding more complexity would add fun. And if you really want to, there are plenty of opportunities for micromanagement. Is it better to build the +25% research buildling, the -10% unrest building, or the +1 mana buiilding? When should you rush? In a fortress, should you train troops (big army now), build a production increasing building (bigger army later), or build a building which upgrades troops (better army later)? One of my micro managing activities at the moment is designing a unit which can be trained in as close to an exact number of turns as possible. So if I have 50 production, I want to train a unit which costs 350 production, not 351. (I assume rushing the last turn or two could mitigate this if you have a unit costing 351.)

I agree that in mature cities you will probably build pretty much everything, however the order in which you build is important if you want to get the best results for your playing style.

I'm not a huge fan of the buildings which increase research/ gildar/ growth if you're already producing them, as I usually prefer to build a new building. However a mature town or conclave producing gold/ research can be an impressive contributor to your output.

Has anyone bothered cutting down forests, by the way? What is the point?