I've been playing this game like crazy the last few days/weeks. It's that much fun.

I'd like to put forth some ideas, though.

1. Population - Maybe the population number for cities should be more dynamic... Like, instead of using migrants or colonists to solely increase your effective population, it should naturally grow on it's own, though gradually. Bigger cities should logically grow faster than smaller cities. But say, another city has reached it's maximum population, you could branch off a unit of effective population to create colonists/migrants to send to a smaller city to bulk up it's smaller population/reproductive rate.

Each population number should also represent a full bar of recruits, so if you lose the entire army from one city, instead of just losing the temporary recruits number, you could lose a unit of effective population as well.

Maybe you could also have a button to convert a unit of effective population into recruits? I dunno what this would do for balance reasons, though.

2. Enslavement and Razing - In complementing this new idea of dynamic population, you should also have new decisions for dealing with conquered cities. Either for personal or strategic reasons, you could force some or all of a conquered city's population into slaves. Or you could simply turn their entire population into migrants, and send them to other cities.

Another decision for conquered cities, again, either for personal or strategic reasons, should be the ability to "raze" a city. Where you loot the city of it's population and food, leaving behind an unpopulated ruin. Now of course, the enlightened conqueror might not think this wise, but say there's an enemy you just can't fully deal with at the moment, so you raze a city or two to raise intimidation, and focus their efforts on rebuilding that city instead. Both Philip and Alexander did this a couple times.

3. Culture - This is kind of covered by the "native population" element of the city, but I'm thinking the culture of a city should actually be listed on the city screen... Something like " Culture: Macedonian ", and then tying unit trees to that instead. So now, you can actually alter the population/culture of cities around the map. So if you wipe out the population of a Pherean or Chalcidian city, you could replace it with migrants from one of your Macedonian culture cities to give that city a Macedonian culture. Or vice versa.

That's all I can remember for now. This is a wonderful game, and I would like to thank the makers so very much for it. I guess I should get back to playing it now.

Thanks again.

massive fan of the razing/enslaving thingy. maybe add dispersion to it? ruin a city and force out the population to the farms/mines/shrines around it, and make it like an option to allow them to resettle again when you deem it proper.

this could be taken as a peace treaty more or less, so when you appear weak they will disregard you and rebuild anyway.

also a big fan of the colonizing, make 'settlers' a unit more or less like workers but with as only option to repopulate a city that has been razed to become 'spear won land' which lasts as long as you keep the city garrisoned, when the city does revolt it will massacre the 'immigrants' have like a % of chalcidicans, athenians, corinthians, macedonians of which you could recruit if you are the correspondent faction.

for instance an illyrian border city has 50/50 population with 20% macedonian vs 80% illyrian, then only 10 of them would be able to join in on a macedonian unit and 40 would only be able to join an illyrian merc/ally one.

by incorporating the city as 'spear won land' (done after minimum 50% is macedonian and a general is present) the entire pool will be available for only macedonian units. Off course only a certain amount of cities will be available for this course of action. cities like athens or sparta are just too big for this.

the limitation for this would be that a settler takes X amount of the pool to another city, and a city can not be reduced to below 30/30 so only certain cities will be able at all to build these settlers.

@uberwuss I really like the idea of dispersion/refugees. I'd also thought something along the lines of, not only of them running into the hills but also seeking refuge in the other cities of their faction, not as residents of that city but as a separate unit, straining the city's/faction's food supply.

The colonization/massacre/spear-won land idea is brilliant. It would add quite a lot to the strategic considerations of the player.

@Rob Thank you for replying. I'm really glad to hear you've considered these ideas before, and I really do hope to see what you guys have in store for us in the future. Thanks again.