I do agree, it's too easy to capture early-game Independent Peoples.  It's harder than it used to be, but I still feel cheap every time I stumble upon a defenseless, newly hatched IP city that I can conquer with a Scout.  I agree with any/all of your changes:  Newly founded IP cities should always be defended as a precondition of existing; either a redoubt shouldn't evolve unless it has population and preferably real units defending it, or those units spawn immediately when the redoubt becomes a city.

RedSirus wrote:

I do agree, it's too easy to capture early-game Independent Peoples.  It's harder than it used to be, but I still feel cheap every time I stumble upon a defenseless, newly hatched IP city that I can conquer with a Scout.  I agree with any/all of your changes:  Newly founded IP cities should always be defended as a precondition of existing; either a redoubt shouldn't evolve unless it has population and preferably real units defending it, or those units spawn immediately when the redoubt becomes a city.

If they'll wait for pop to amass a certain level, many may never evolve. Otherwise, - totally agree. 

I think that it would already help to just have the 1) in game, make the army that settled the territory sit on that outpost like their lives depend on it (cause they do).

As for the wide vs. tall, maybe just like we're penalized for having too many cities we could have a %FIMS(I) bonus for every city below the limit as well? Or a flat boost to pop output depending on how many spare Administrators you have?

Seeing this comes back to be the topic of a new thread, I'll share once more another thread of mine, as it comes close to DNLH's proposition: it's here.

One of the most annoying things about Civ is the city spam - especially when an AI places a city 3 tiles from your city.

So Humankind was a big relief to have fewer cities. But as you said, they still go too much on the MORE CITIES = BETTER. So in addition to fixing the exploit that we all know about, there should be more steps taken to make fewer cities more valuable. Concrete ideas have been shared across this forum by players, but I'd really like to hear the devs take on this. Is this the intended play? Do they see it as a problem? What ideas do they have to make various playstyles more viable?

I agree with the fact that having more cities is always more profitable, this should not be the case though.

I don't mind having more cities, equals more "profit" but also having a big capital of three or four territories should have some positive trade offs, instead of just increasing the cost of districts and pop exponentially.

As we well know creating a new city will grant the player also a substantial amount of influence per turn, while attaching a territory to your city or capital doesn't really bring you nothing outside of the yields of where we placed the administrative center and just more territory to build.

A big capital city has usually always been renowned for it's cultural and traditional influence over the territories and other  cities bordering them. 

I wonder if deciding to expand our city size should double the cultural and faith pressure further away, indicating how strongly and a wide populated city can affect it's surroundings.

If we are going to get an increase in district building production than we should get a positive trade off on another side, maybe because the city expands and starts covering a larger area, creating military units gets cheaper. Every territory attached to the city grants a 10 % discount production towards units.

Something definitely needs to be done, to give the players the possibility of creating a citystate with benefits and not only drawbacks, maybe discount on cultural wonders?

If the would also change the leadership civic to a +50 stability on capital and +1 production on Makers quarters in Capita city if we decide to go the opposite way of liberty.

There's no playing tall vs wide in this game. Only wide.
There's playing wide by having the minimum of 1 over your city cap and expanding those to cover as much territory as possible,
and there's playing wide by having even more (but smaller) cities than that.
Then, well, there's playing just plain wrong. Wilfully hindering yourself.
If you wanted that added artificial challenge of self-hindrance, go for it, power to you. If you don't, it's just playing wrong.

Playing tall isn't simply having less cities, it's having less territory alltogether. Neglecting to expand at all.
Like playing as cultists in Endless Legend.

As for independent cities, I agree that it's alltogether too easy to conquer them. And maybe they die off on their own too fast.
My main concern with that being that the friendly, influence way of taking them is too devalued.
I would like conquering independents and assimilating them to be equally difficult, or at least have a lot less of a difficulty gap.
That said don't forget independed cities come with no infrastructre. So as soon as you have the sciences for spawning cities with prebuilt upgrades it's imediatly about 9999 times better to do that and never take an independent again.
Heck it already almost feels impossible to keep your orginal city caught up with infrastructure once you get those techs.

What about +2/+4 Influence on Commons Quarter/Garrison on the freedom/authority, giving on all Cities a Stability penalty that scales with number of cities, penalising territories under the Religion/sphere of influence of an empire with wich you don't have a good relationship?

I actually think that in fidelity with the notion of authority vs liberty - maybe you retain Liberty's bonus (increased influence production) while having the alternative be the increase in city cap.  The increase in influence reflective of the freedom to choose how that influence is used, and the freedom of institutions to think differently and have an impact on civic choices, the spread of ideas throughout new territories, and the impact on other countries.  The increase in city cap would reflect the increase of administrative capacity, at the expense of freedom - i.e. your society has more systems in place to manage cities, but those systems may be pretty bureaucratic and rigid.  

Having more influence from liberty means you can choose how to expand, whereas having the city cap might mean you expand but it is less flexible in how that expansion is put into effect.  

tryptakid wrote:

I actually think that in fidelity with the notion of authority vs liberty - maybe you retain Liberty's bonus (increased influence production) while having the alternative be the increase in city cap.  The increase in influence reflective of the freedom to choose how that influence is used, and the freedom of institutions to think differently and have an impact on civic choices, the spread of ideas throughout new territories, and the impact on other countries.  The increase in city cap would reflect the increase of administrative capacity, at the expense of freedom - i.e. your society has more systems in place to manage cities, but those systems may be pretty bureaucratic and rigid.  

Having more influence from liberty means you can choose how to expand, whereas having the city cap might mean you expand but it is less flexible in how that expansion is put into effect.  

I liked that idea at first when we discussed it in the other thread, but it turns out that there's a problem with placing "bonus influence from EQs" on one side of the axis (Liberty) and placing "increased city cap" on the other side of the axis (potentially Authority).   The problem is that because the penalty for going over your city cap is a cost in influence, increasing your city cap equals a net gain on influence.  That means the two sides of the axis are "more influence", just calculated differently.

I agree with @RedSirus and would like to emphasize that the autority part would even grant more influence.

1. Most players stay at +1 or +2 above the city cap.
2. A +2 bonus would remove a 360 to 700 malus
3. 
4. To get the same from EQ (at +4 per EQ), you'd need 90 to ~175 of them
   1. It means popping 6 EQs on 15 to ~29 territories
   2. It is impossible to do during the first eras (not enough territories even on a huge map to pop enough EQ on the map)
5. While the bonus from the city cap kicks directly
6. If bonus on influence production (like the +10% from the Franks) gives the Liberty bonus a bit of a boost
7. It doesn't even takes into account the influence generated by two more cities.
8. Nor doesn't it takes into account the players that do stay at +3 or more...

I'm pretty sure, the good move would be to boost players that do have less cities that the max.
If something would be done about axis, I'd rather have a new axis, as proposed @Sir_Bertrand here, and have it +1/+2 against +10%/+20% FIMS.
That said »Authority« would remain crap.

Having Authority be relevant only with a DLC and in some very peculiar situations means it would still be crap.