[2023] Single Shard

While I understand the idea behind, we're not really fans of restricting server creation. Many of nowadays successful servers have once started as small public servers or servers made just for your own play with friends (including White-Tiger). Given we love and want people to come up with new ideas for server concepts, this would just deter from exactly that. Hosting a server already is linked with a fee of some kind, if you're not hosting out of your basement.

Update 10 with its changes to make civics a core part necessary for normal gameplay nontheless helps your goal, given smaller servers will likely want to disable the new system and as such not use the new features or be incentivized to merge with others independently on one server, as some people have been making plans already planning - might be worth looking into that to consolidate servers.

It should always be up to whoever wants to open a server on if they can do that, though. Financial gatekeeping doesn't seem like a working solution, fulfilling our vision and is very likely extremely unpopular on top, as several others have noted here.