Amen to that, Kohan is a king amongst serfs!

A few thoughts about the current discussion though:

- High building maintenance costs are NOT fun. It is no fun at all to research a tech which gives a new building and then realise that it doesn't make sense to build it in any of your cities.

- Being able to build all buildings in all cities is equally no fun.

- Therefore buildings need to have a rarity of some sort but not a type of rarity which makes them not worth building (which high maintenance can do).

The obvious way to ensure rarity is to make building time and cost sufficient to make you think twice before just queuing up all buildings. However this requires that there is some other demand on your cities build queues, presumably the need to build military units. The whole thing needs to be tautly balanced so that queuing buildings instead of military makes one worry a bit about your current survival but at the same time the buildings need to add enough to your future wealth that you are willing to take the gamble that you can hold off your enemies long enough to benefit from the building and eventually build a stronger military.

Interestingly this is one of the reasons Kohan 1 (KIS and KAG) is such a brilliant game. There is a clear and big tradeoff between spending your valuable gold and free slots on building income producing buildings or resource producing buildings (and the military which feed off those resources). This trade off is supported by the balance between defence (which benefits from city militia and re-supply) and offence (which can choose where to strike and guarantee a short term military advantage over an enemy who is focusing on economy), plus key mechanics such as the time to heal up new/damaged units, fog of war, neutral cities/lairs, etc. This full combination of features is necessary to make Kohan grea.

FE is a different game with different mechanics but somehow it needs the same taut balance between current military strength and future economic growth. Whether FE can pull it off remains to be seen.

Please, please, do not let Civ roads make it into this game. They end up looking like a disgusting brown mess of spaghetti...

I agree to a point, or with changes to the current system.

The thing we'd be missing in a one-city game are the additional production queues multiple cities offer.  My suggestion for this would be that additional production queues could be opened up through research and/or building choices.

I think, though, that having, on average, and depending on map size, 3 - 5 cities to manage in a single game wouldn't be terrible.  I often find city management in games like Civ, starting in the mid-game, to be uninteresting and repetitive.

The specialized outpost idea is a good one and very much worth considering.  In fact how these are handled could really set FE apart from other games in the genre.

My 2c on city building:

I agree with much of the OP and first posters said. City building is incredibly boring right now, and it need not be.

I think the key to fixing this are the following ideas:

1. Relating the city to the terrain

At the moment, cities are too generic, and the initial placement seems to matter very little. The key factor is closeness to the 'special' resources, iron, horses, shards, etc, but it seems to matter quite little whether you are close to rivers, mountains, forest, hills, etc. 

More buildings like the watermill, etc are probably the key here. But buildings should relate specifically to where they are on the map. For example, the lumber mill could provide +3 Production per wood square that it is next to. This means that it could provide up to +21 if surrounded on 7 sides by forests. This makes the actual POSITION relative to terrain quite an important decision, and the decision about where to build in the first place a bit more interesting. Combined with a range of buildings that have such interactions possible (fishing village near water tiles, water mill near river, blacksmith within x tiles of iron mine or hills, Windmill on a hill, garden near x clear plains tiles, bakery next to the granary bonus, etc. 

These kind of bonuses would link the placement of a city to a much more complex set of decisions about terrain, and make the decisions about where to build things a lot more interesting.

Combine with idea #2...

2. Having slots, or some internal structure of the city that matters in the game

It has been suggested in the thread that having a limited number of slots might be better, since it forces CHOICE. Indeed, there is something in that. However, to turn this into a 'soft limit', the other way of handling it is to have some privileged positions, and then adding costs to add more buildings. For example, imagine that you have a central 'town' square, and that each of the 4 cardinal directions building spots are 'free' to build on, but that after that, the cost of building went up by an amount (say, 1 Gildar per turn) per squares distant from the center. This simulates the need for people to communicate (talk and travel) in a town, and will tend to drive roughly square / circular shapes. You can still do a long snaky town if you want, but it will cost more, and would only be done for a good reason. It also means that you will have increasingly hard choices about which buildings to build close to the town center, and whether to build more after a point, since the costs will escalate. 

If you combine #1 and #2, you get some quite difficult choices to make, and it will require some real thinking to decide how to develop a town / towns.

The other idea suggested here that I like is the one to link the production of heroes to the buildings in a city.

Cheers

Interesting ideas in here. For me the current cities are not that bad because mostly all mechanics are in and they only need adjusting.

1. Levelling up is cool: Just make the level up buildings preconditions to other buildings in the tree, so that a path is decided.

2. Unrest: As it it it's the difference between good and excellent, make it a difference between bad and good. Include your race, factions and diplomatic actions into the unrest calculation (Fallen don't like kingdom, kingdom don't like war, No one likes loosing units etc...)

3. The buildings that produce something if the build queue is empty should depend on the city production (like trade goods in MOM)...

4. Include some more buildings that actually only make sense in some circumstances: a war school that only works good if you have a champion stationed with some training traits, terrain dependent buildings and so on

Adjust the gildars so you'll need some cities to produce money and only some may build troops.

I think part of the problem is a lack of Civ IV/FFH-style events.  Makes things a little too deterministic.  Sometimes FFH events changed how you'd do something.

Also, it might be possible the slow tech speed is part of the problem here as well in terms of feel.

I'm not really sure why people think Civ 4/FFH was so great for city building... I ended up making the same cookie cutter cities and taking the same wonders each game I played.