Instead of making it solemnly harder to found cities in the first place, there is also the option of diminishing gains from additional cities.
Right now, more is always better, giving large empires a growing edge over smaller ones. Every city you add, is just that, a new city that gives you more power, resources, gildar, research.
It is basically exponential growth and by slowing down the pioneer generation cycle, the curve will simply take longer to go into an uncontrollable state.
You and I understand there is an issue with city spamming, the great gross of revenue that stems from simply having a larger empire, yet we both have different means of attacking it. I'm confused that you acknowledge that even if you increase the cost and time required to produce a Pioneer, the "uncontrollable state" of city-spamming will still permeate.
I do agree with the reality that player's and AI will majorly of the time, continue producing Pioneer's and establishing settlements till there is no land to expand upon, but I feel that is an integral aspect of Fallen Enchantress, as much as Civilization, and even off-point RTS's. The anti-city philosophy should be about realistically straining a faction's capacity to build new cities and than maintain them by subsequently ensuring they're profitable investments, not building-as-many-as-you-can's and that's that.
Ways to counter this, of course, include making pioneers more expensive. Besides that though, there is still the way of making big players more threatening to smaller ones, making those in turn unite and go after the biggest one.
I don't have an issue with strongly boosting the cost of making Pioneer's more expensive, but if that's the only idea implemented to improve the problem at hand - more needs to be done then simple unit inflation.
There is already the mechanic of slowed growth for additional cities.
The Faction Prestige is a great mechanic to induce more strategy into the building game, yet me personally I consider it both inadequate and falling short of forcing factions to fall back from expanding so much without due consequence. As far as I'm concerned, I never at all considered Faction Prestige to exist for no reason pertaining to reining in expansion, but as another valuable and rare resource like Influence in surging your empire's growth.
Besides that there are other ways, including higher research costs, gildar upkeep for cities as well as lower morale for new troops (going the way of "why me" if there are so many others in the empire who could do the job of getting killed).
I disagree with higher research costs, doesn't make sense to me as a negative modifier for financially-strapped cities. I suggested implementing what Civ-4 did below, but you disagreed with me right here, whilst proposing it yourself o.0 , lol. I don't think either that new units should be abstractly downgraded due to bloated empires though.
In conclusion:
The only way to control an exponential power gain curve, is at the very least a countereffect of linear growth. Even better though would be several effects including logistical growth, linear effects as well exponential countereffects.
Could you please further elaborate on this statement, because I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest or advertise.
Further thoughts:
Making the price of pioneers grow exponentially (or linear... just growing) with every city and outpost you own, would add to the unexplored wildland effect. Growth would start out fast and slow down over time, leaving more unexplored and dangerous land. In addition, not every city location would be a ripe fruit to be picked, as it would make more sense to move out and grab the best locations first and the worst maybe never, considered the price they may have in the end.
Research costs could go for a logistical curve, leveling after a while so that technological stagnation wouldn't come, but larger empires would still be at a disadvantage.
I sound hypocritical now - but I would only WANT a decreasing pool of "Research Per Turn" done on the global level, as in your stagnating empire wanes in maintaining innovation and empirical research, not reduction of Research by per-city. If we introduce your good concept on the global level, it would both "allow" and "force" factions in an encouraging'y reasonable manner to stretch their resources empire-wide in building up their Research Per Turn to stay within the tech race game.
Thus, factions with globally-taxed Research will be free to either prioritize research Improvements across all their settlements, or focus on their Conclave's specialization in boosting Research capability to respond to their increasing negative upon Research Per Turn. If inflating Research costs were felt on a per-city basis, they'll be too many circumstances where your best, or would-be research centers unable to overcome overwhelming research costs and exist to primarily invest itself as your laboratories.
Like, what would happen if the negative research modifier for expanding empires consumed all the production of research in a particular city, and it reached 0. Would the negative modifier send into negative digits? Or simply leave from the poverty-stricken settlement to the next one nearby like the plague? Plus, Conclave's and their Improvements produce Research Per Turn points on the percentage formula and offer the most opportunities for such, they would be worthless no matter how lenient the degenerative modifier would be on a per-city basis.
As for Gildar upkeep of cities.... not sure about that one. I don't come up with a final conclusion for myself what exactly that would do to the game, given the rather simple economic model of the game. But I tend to say this one would rather hurt the game as a whole.
I'm confused you're against Gildar upkeep when you've speculated upon it as a good idea earlier, but from all my memories of playing Civ-4 I've never found it's complexity to be overwhelming when they introduced City Maintenance. If anything, it was an incredible mechanic for that installment for incrementally regulating a civilizations natural expansion of territory. Hell, Galactic Civilizations II has maintenance as an upkeep variable for maintaining planets, starbases, and ships too. And GalCiv2's approach is a significant departure from Elemental overall because in that series you go "tall" I've heard for the first in my life used for expressing the emphasis of Population in blooming your economy and capacity to manufacture and expand (How GC2 works). EWON is purely a 4X series that increases your economy across-the-board therefore allowing an unchecked, growing potential for bettering your empire.
Like what Derek or Frogboy would just have to do is design a city modifier that's just like the Unrest modifier in-game, that charges rising Gildar per city of yours exponentially as you grow your empire in terms of total settlements, and tile-distance between the core/original city tile if the Capitol, and locations of non-capitol settlements in relevance to self-check it's algorithm. Think about it: what's bad about simply charging factions more for building Pioneer's and the establishing settlements ides suggested earlier in this thread, is that it does absolutely nothing for tackling the arguably controversial issue with city-spam except prolong the various phases of it from early to late game, and in my opinion unnecessarily burden the player far more than the AI when playing sandbox sessions on much much higher difficulties. Such as the early-game rush to churn out Pioneer's left en' right, to mid-game establishing cities still a bit but predominately seeding Outposts over valuable terrain and resources, and the late-game phase of any further expansion efforts involving squandered tiles, Wild Land take overs, and Outposts some more.
That's why I'm strongly for all my ideas and yours, implemented on a comprehensive manner to alter, change, and make FE superior and more meaningful. As of now, there's simply not enough substance or tweaks to current game mechanics required to incentively push for the brainstorming, the strategic depth-inducing apparent to "force" factions into risking en economic-teetering expansion on one end of the spectrum, to more or less a City State-like playstyle that encompasses say the deliberate devotion of several Villages (3-5) to becoming world-class potent cities in their future specialties, or risking an imperial stance of claiming as much good, bad, and resource-only beneficial Villages (6-15).
So to close this post up, I'll list what I suggested earlier, and as Vendetta187 contributed too.
1. City Maintenance: Introducing one of the most important features stated several times already, born from Civ-4 to drastically regulate city-spam. City Maintenance affects every faction in both how many cities you own, and how many tiles they're away from your Capitol or Improvements in non-capitol cities in several applicable circumstances.
For example: to possess from one Village, to three Villages has exponentially increased the Maintenance expenditure by 0.5 Gildar, till you possess 4 Villages, which increases the cost of maintaining all your four cities including the 5th one to 0.8 Gildar per turn. Now from the 6th, to 9th, your possession from 6-to-9 settlements requires 1.1 Gildar each, etc etc. Any settlements you own that are by default 8 tiles away, are subjected to no Distance penalties such as City Maintenance and Unrest (The 3rd suggestion below) till you settle on any tile 9 tiles away from your Capitol's. Every 3-5 tiles you exceed after the 8-block sphere yields an even higher Maintenance and Unrest negatives in meager portions till you hit a "Hardcap" such as 20-30 tiles and it increases incredibly, requiring the advancement of certain technologies in one of the tree's to both reduce Maintenance & Unrest factors empire-wide, and extending the 8-block sphere limit incrementally.
And one more detail, Outposts should NOT be exempt from City Maintenance, but are not subject to rising Maintenance costs no matter how many any faction controls. If Outposts were subject to incremental upkeep the more anyone possessed, it would limit the capability of an Empire-like and City State-like faction from being competitive with one another and thus making it an equal opportunity provider for both of those play styles encourages all participates to engage in the domination of foreign resources
2. Civilization/Military/Magic-oriented Improvements: Modify present game technologies that are simply expanded upon with new modifiers to factor into global resources and cities, and also new Improvements mostly universal between Fallen and Men that nullify other unique Improvements upon production completion in opposing tree's. These very Improvement's as I have detailed in my first post in this thread encourage different play styles, yet across the board would lessen the burdens of CM and DR (Distance-Unrest).
3. Unrest-By-Distance from faction Capitol: The further your cities are from your Capitol and certain Improvements, the more Unrest they're stricken with and has to be dealt with.
4. Global Research Per Turn devaluation: Research Per Turn on factions that are huge, and not advanced enough in their technologies will suffer an abstracted, global reduction in Research points.
5. Moderately increased Pioneer Production & Wages: From Vendetta187 and other sympathizers in this thread, their cost should be inflated a bit, but along with an analysis of whether they should continue being the unit that can only transform into Outposts. My personal opinion is that Pioneer's should still be the only one to both form Village's and Outposts, but
6. Non-Champions can reduce Unrest in general too: It's surprising that EWON has never included this simple and clean improvement when Civilization has had it forever. When we have all manners of troops garrisoned in any of our cities, troops should yield the same Unrest reduction capabilities, which coupled with an implemented Distance-Unrest modifier would amplify the need for defending and holding both enemy and empire settlements to ensure they do not become worthless in their Outputs, and do not rebel and become either neutral settlements or their former empires.
Maybe this does deserve another thread... figured it relevant with the Pioneer issue we're discussing here*
