But, if you have 32 races, and then say 10 minor races, 20-25 cities is obviously too small. Assuming that you spread out some before going to war, and establish, say, four cities, then at four a piece you have 128 cities, just for the main races. Plus say another five or six for the minor races. Let's just say 135 for ease of computations.

So, if you're a huge sprawling empire by turn 500, and have crushed a few players, you probably have say, 40 cities, pretty easily. I don't know about you guys, but I wouldn't want to create 20 vassal cities and try and stay friendly with them. Unless they were puppets, forced into trade with me of course.

Assuming you win by conquering your foes, you should pretty easily have 80 or more cities, if not closer to the 135 total. Both numbers are of course, well above 20-25.

EDIT: Qouted the wrong person the first time, also, sorry for the double post, I seemed to have gotten excited.

Well, obviously this "issue" is related to the size of the maps also.

So if you share a border with a powerful potential enemy, one possible way to help keep the peace would be for you each to contribute a border city to an independent state which would now seperate you, excellent.

Ok, that makes more sense. I agree with cities being more spread out. But in gigantic maps, there will definantly need to be mroe than 20-25 cities.

You're assuming that by taking the path of the conqueror, capturing every city is optimal/advisable. I think it'd be neat if there were some mechanism or feature in place that made choosing whether to capture or raze a city a meaningful choice. You might be better off just capturing your enemy's two best cities and razing the other two to the ground. Or maybe you'd raze his best cities to the ground and take his less-developed ones! The better cities' people might cause so much trouble for you that you'd rather just raze it the ground.

That alone could cut your number of cities down by half, or even more. Then there's also the matter that "HUGE, glorious, sprawling empire" is entirely relative to the size of the map you're playing on  

Razing a city should have some negative impact in the kind of game I've seen described here. With all the talk of gifting and blood relations, I can't see how razing a city would leave no impression on your allies or enemies. Razing a city is some pretty serious stuff; killing or making homeless an entire city's worth of non-combatants. It's not going to make a favorable impression I think.

@Seedy: I concur, be hard to explain the death of blood relatives as well. That and razing a city is almost always a short term boost, rather than long term.

@pigeonpigeon: You sir, are quite right, I look at the conqueror picture constantly. To me there are few things as great as imperial might, so in games I tend to reflect that. I never try to win by any other means. Sometimes, just to show I can, I do everything up until that final step (i.e. allying with 7 of 8 races, or researching all techs but the final one), then I show that I can take it, but I don't, and then resume with my conquering. Weird, I know.

Don't use that geass  on me!

Were you playing much Europa Universalis when you made this decision?

WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE. I think Frogboy just lied to us. The 64 bit version will have a maximum of 16.8 exobytes of RAM. I would assume additional players will require additional data' at the very least a few bytes to store variable related to each character. So the maximum number of players would probably be something like 2 quadrillion, NOT infinite.

Razing cities (or at least towns and villages) was common practice in ancient and to a lesser extent in medieval times. Sure, it'll leave a bad impression on the allies of whoever's towns you're razing, but they'd have a poor impression of you anyways. And maybe some other goody-two-shoes would get a negative impression of you from it... But razing a town doesn't necessarily mean slaughtering its inhabitants. It just means dispersing them and destroying the town itself.

In games, maybe - but just because it traditionally has been doesn't mean it needs to stay that way. Razing towns could present significant long-term advantages. Also, sometimes short-term advantages are worth more than long-term advantages. If foregoing the short-term advantage means you are unable to continue your offensive, for example, then you might lose more in the long-term by not razing the town than by razing it.

WAIT JUST ONE MINUTE. I think Frogboy just lied to us. The 64 bit version will have a maximum of 16.8 exobytes of RAM. I would assume additional players will require additional data' at the very least a few bytes to store variable related to each character. So the maximum number of players would probably be something like 2 quadrillion, NOT infinite. 

Except for the fact that no hardware that exists today actually has 16.8 exobytes of RAM. And no operating system I'm aware of supports that much ram. (Perhaps some supercomputers and their custom OS's are exceptions). So whether or not Elemental can, in theory, use that much is irrelevant

Remember you can create a vassal with more than one city, so you could create a vassal kingdom with like 5-10 cities. instead of dealing with 10 vassals.

wth is up with no copy and past in firefox?!?!?! java is the devils spawn apparently.

Yes but then you're making them stronger then you have to and they might become a threat later Make 3 vassals with 3-4 cities each and play them against each other instead!