Not really, Necro can built one city but even they end up spread out and claiming a lot of territory but it will remain mostly empty only contributing foundations.

Everyone else really cant go tall, the game economy is very expansion focused, limited territories per city, cost scaling within cities for how built up they are, cheap cost of expanding, they all push you to go wide with no real benefits for avoiding them.

Yes, you can attach territories to one city and plant camps otherwise. But it's a sub-optimal way to play unless you're using the Necrophage.

EL1 had some hefty costs to expand so I remember yea? Eventually I mean

It's a similar cost in EL2, go beyond the city cap and you start taking a massive Approval hit.
And unlike EL1, you plant camps and evolve them into cities using Influence. Each additional Camp and City scales the cost, so it becomes more expensive to grab more territory.

But other then for necro the scaling cost isn't all that high in comparison to influence income if you properly build it up

It's not a good sign of game health if you can build tall in these games. It's almost always, unavoidably, either way too strong or way too weak.

Too much of the interaction with other factions (and gameplay) is ultimately driven by competition for territory, and it's really hard to balance "tall" having more strength than it should for the territory it has (by definition) against having a much smaller border and less it needs to defend (by definition).

You basically need to have completely different win conditions at that point, as well as different fail states -- at which point are you even playing the game with the other players?

Paradox titles have struggled with this idea for A LONG TIME and they've never quite got it right, and I'm pretty convinced because it's a snipe hunt. Tall playstyles are fundamentally unstable when it comes to balance.

I mean paradox games are also never really meant to be fully balanced experiences. More a story facilitator then proper balanced game

引用自 bork9128：

I mean paradox games are also never really meant to be fully balanced experiences. More a story facilitator then proper balanced game

...yes, which is actually a further mark against it, because even in the relatively forgiving backdrop of a narrative generator, tall still breaks gameplay and incentives too hard.