I have a complicated and challenging suggestion that just might make the game a lot more interesting.

First of all, keep the snaking cities, that is absolutely fine, however...

1. Divide the city into each individual tile, so that units will HAVE to travel at the same pace (with road bonus) through the city. This also would allow careful planning of the City to benefit from resources better.

2. Now with the multiple tiles set, it adds a new dimension to sieges. Divide the garrison in accordance to the tiles too. AKA, in terms of defence, think of one city as several cities depending on its size. This not only make sense in a real world perspective, but it also adds a new level of depth, as the enemy, or you could capture portions of the city, and benefit from buildings placed in that tile. You could even have a very interesting scenario similar to post war Germany, where two competiting factions struggle over one city.

2.5 As a side note, another addition could be implemented, is that during Sieges, if the city has city walls, perhaps these could act as destructable environment with towers depending on the grade of walls that act as a stationary unit. The stone walls and towers could only be attacked by siege weapons, which the current Siege Workshop is lacking. This could also be affected by magic, as you may be able to use spells to knock down city defences, for a few turns for your attack.

Further, if the city is split into multiple tiles, a very neat tactical map could be generated by adding buildings as obstacles instead of trees. Not only would this look cool, it would also bring an interesting tactical twist as the defender could dig in inside an alley where the enemy will be funneled in, limiting their effectiveness.

3. With the split tile system in place, another interesting facet could be introduced. And that is loyalty. Much like cold war Germany, the two halves of the city will be competing for prowess, and happiness. (take the loyalty system from GalCiv2). When the half of the city becomes too unhappy with the occupiers, be it due to oppresiveness, or how terrible the taxes are, there could be a chance of a rebellion, where the garrisoned troops will need to be put down, and thusly losing the corresponding population from within the city.

This system would preferably stay WITHIN the City itself(doesn't affect non-split cities), as I find it very annoying in both Civ, and GalCiv to have random cities revolting.

4. Further, this would allow a meaningful choice upon capturing a city for Enslave, Loot, no Change, Purge. This would also allow espionage missions(can be built into the Magic system) to win the favor of the opposing section of the city, start riots, etc.

----------------------------Implementation--------------------------------------

The simplest way to implement this system imo, is to simply make a script that split upon creation of an infrastructure outside of the original tile, to create a new "City", whose name goes something like X city Y Wing/Sector. having the ability to rename these could also be fun.

------------------------------Advantages---------------------

1. Realistically scale up the difficulty to defend your city as it grows bigger. (Bigger cities in real life requires more guards, defenders, etc)

2. Solve the movement/reward issues.

3. Adds more depth to Sieges, and more options

4. Adds more interesting outcomes to wars with shared cities.

I stayed away from this topic for a few weeks because I was rather emotional about the change being suggested and seemingly being implemented, and I didn't want to act angrily.  I figured I could program my own game the way I want it to be if they changed the parts of the game I enjoyed, rather than just complain about it.  However, I decided to write up the way I would have designed the cities and their resources using the current setup.  I posted it in the other thread, but I figured that I would post it here too since this is where I was meaning to post my idea in the first place.

What I would love is for you to only be able to build work enhancing buildings on squares with Material so if you built a +10 work for each material building on a 2 material square, you would get 20 work instead of just multiplying it by the city base number.  This way the land you choose to build the improvement makes a difference, and you don't just build every improvement on a random square since it doesn't matter. I would like the same rules for food, only with grain instead of material.  I would like to link a resource to research too, but I don't know what to link it to.  Perhaps make it use one of both material and grain?  But it should have a linked resource to allow research specialization at the expense of food or work.

You would maintain the 4 buildings per square (perhaps more if you want to compress the cities more), which would in itself make the player want to consolidate their buildings to use the resources they have the most efficiently.  They could still snake out to try to gain access to a new resource, but that would be tempered by their want for having effective building placement.

This difference would also mean that you could build multiple workshops and the like, instead of the old 1 per city.  I hated that 1 per city rule anyway for things like bakeries and workshops, since it doesn’t allow you to make any decisions on what you want to do with your city.  Since you can build everything in every city, city building is rather boring.    Also, this change would require the ability to destroy buidings to replace them with more effective buildings, which I know I did often in the original game.

Non-resource needing buildings would still be one building per city, and could be built in non-resource squares.  These could be snaked out, however you are greatly limited in the number of these buildings that are available.

Here is how I propose to fix the issue:

Remove "teleportation" effect from cities.  Instead, treat city tiles like roads with regards to unit movement points.

Make it so that buildings no longer modify ZoC, and make it so that improvements cannot be built outside the ZoC.

I think that would pretty much solve the issues some people have with building cities on the strategic map.  Of course cities could still be used to block chock points, but that can be done more easily with outposts and "raise land" type spells. 

I would hate to see cities reduced to 1 tile representations on the strategic map, I love seeing all the different sized cities when I pan across the map, its very unique and is something that sets the game apart, visually from the rest of the genre.

I realize that that all those city improvements are taxing on the games memory resources, would it be possible to make it so that improvements in cities in the distance are drawn with 2d images as opposed to 3d models, then as you pan closer, the 2d images would change to 3d.  (Like in Guildwars for example).

Or maybe just have cities in the distance be rendered with less detailed textures and/or lower polys.