You aren't mentioning other ways cities are different from regions, namely they gain peasants faster.
I completely reject this notion. Cities grow in population number faster only, but much, much slower for population ratio. And it's the ratio that determines production. Between a 1500 max pop rural and a 500000 max pop city, which do you think will reach 100% population and production first? The rural. It may be dirt poor, but it'll be able to handle much more infrastructure than the city for an extremely long period of time.
Which is, imho, absurd.
