So there's no question that cities distorts the game WAY more than the other two expansions.
I've been playing games with all three expansions recently, and I barely even notice the presence of echoes and figures cards.
There's just no time for them. I need to spam cities! Splays! Endorsements! Faster, faster!
Achievements? Sure, grab them if they're available. But if you dominate icons they'll just come rolling in anyway.
You might say that icons deserve this moment. After all they used to be a noob trap. In the base game, most of the games where I'm being icon-dominated are the games that I win, because I'm spending energy scoring and achieving while my opponent is busy making his board pretty.
So maybe this isn't a bad thing. But I REALLY think endorsements need to be toned down and redesigned. Their spamminess just gets tiresome. They encourage using the same dogma over and over instead of diversifying your tactics.
How about this: When I endorse a dogma, I use it ONCE, as a FREE action, and then cannot use it again that turn. For example, I can endorse Fermenting, which activates it ONCE, and then take two more actions, neither of which are endorsements or Fermenting-activation. (Similarily, if the first thing I do in a turn is make a basic Fermenting action, I can't then endorse Fermenting). Conceptually, your city has taken over the production of that dogma, giving you, the emperor, freedom to turn to other matters. They'd sort of be the "planeswalker" cards of this game. In fact, it would be cool if you could have two different cities each endorsing two different dogmas, and then still having two actions left.. although they'd probably just be drawing or melding, since you've already "locked out" four of your five stacks.
So cities give you just as much efficiency but force you to use more than one dogma. You can't just have 4 cities plus Industrialization.
Or as a radically different idea, endorsement could be: "Tuck or meld a card from your hand whose featured icon matches an icon of the city. Execute the dogma of that card." Anything to stop the double-spam.
Also, I like the idea some other fellow had about changing the icon achievements to "have 10 more than your opponent" rather than "have at least 10 plus double". That'll make it a little harder to reach that threshold.