Not having that much time on my hands to read this thread through, here are some suggestions to what I'd like to see in your game:

I would like to see adjecent buildings do more than just boost the production of the special tile.

Maybe have a Steel Refinery next to a mine would make the quality of the items made in the city better (boosting their stats), or other buildings in that flavor.

Maybe even a certain building that could decrease the amount of food needed, in order to build a house in it's city, half the amount.

It would also be nice to have some way of generating more food/building other than gardens, if you don't have the tile available for this.

I must admit, I haven't looked into the enchanting bit again, but I'd like to be able to branch out in what types of enchantments I would like to be able to do in my cities. Say, I want to focus on enchantments that specialize in doing fire damage, then I would have to brance into a fire-element foundry, but also one that specializes in damage, in that school. This could enable you to make enchanting more potent, because you would be sacrificing other types of enchants, to get what you want.

Concerning research and suchlike:

a fully detailed tech tree, with links to an elementalpedia (think civilopedia), in which you can look up all descriptions and stats of every element of the game.

I would like the tooltips for things you can get with the techs (buildings/items/etc.) to show what they do (eg: looking at a market, having the economics tech selected would show you what the building does, and how much income it gives you (in this case) in the tooltip).

For techs, I'd like to see a short flavor text to each (not needed, but would add atmosphere), then below, what said tech enables of units/buildings/upgrades/items/further tech advancements.

I would like to see certain, significant unit improvements to require two separate paths of teching, within the warfare (or maybe warfare-magic/adventuring) to be available. This would create more options for strattegy, and a good sense of anticipation, when you intend to use these opportunities.

the HUD info you get should be detailed, but comprehensible. You should not have to click the city, in order to get the info you need (when you say HUD, I think of it as a mouse over tooltip) So, it should contain all significant info you need about the game element you're hovering over.

Outside of the HUD display, I would like to have the ability to enable certain options to be seen. Especially how much revenue/research/prestige each city makes, the amount of units stationed in the city, and what type of unit they are (offensive/defensive/spellcasters), and the strength of these, based on certain brackets (1-5;5-10;10-15 offense, etc.)

this could be done by making icons above the cities, and a number besides them. When it comes to stationed units, I'd prefer dots, that will collapse into each other, if there are a lot of stationed units. Color coded depending on type (red for offensive, green for utility, blue for magic, yellow for defensive, eg.) I do not know how to indicate the strength of the units in the city, but it may not be needed outside of the HUD.

When it comes to resources, I'd like to see maybe 3 levels of quality of each resource. So, for mining, we have: Iron, Mithril, Elementium? This would, first of all, make better quality items, and maybe be needed in order to create certain items/buildings/whatever you can think of.

Maybe have certain spells use rare resources as components for them (eg: certain earth spells may need you to have mithril or elementium available, in order to cast them).

Or, what about certain resource types needed, before you can make certain types of enchantments on them, or resources that attune better to enchanting, but in it's natural form (without enchantments), they wouldn't be as good as items made of steel.

All of these special resources should, of course, be quite rare. This is in order to not trivialize their potency, but also in order to give players to alter, or improve their strattegy, should they find one of these rare resources. Having rare resources that impact the game in such a way, would also create a very nice logistics and mobility management aspect within the game. (as these resources would only apply to the city they are found in)

Frogboy et al,

Here's my $0.02 -

#1) I like this concept a lot. Like was mentioned previously, auto upgrading of several buildings would be nice to see too. Something like a study, a library and 2 schools to a university. Or 4 houses to a "neighborhood" with extra max housing. I think that there are even some really unique configurations that could be thought-up. As for your specific points:

 1-1) Farm\Gardens - Windmills\wells, silos\granary, ranch\herdsman, market

 1-2) Mine - smelter, prospector, metallurgist, forge

 1-3) Crystal - armory,

 1-4) Shards - wizards tower,

#2) Definitely like better explanation of "why would I want this" from the tech info. Some sort of mechanism that lets us know if this is a building block for better things (other techs?) to what benefit a specific tech allows us to do (e.g. what bonus does the building(s) provide if built). Would be nice to get a pop-up of that type of info when I mouse over the building icon in the tech tree instead of having to consult the hiergamenon. I'm also in the camp of figuring out a better way to get weapon tech instead of the dagger->sword->long sword route since I agree with another poster that it is not necessarily intuitive that you'd want to research the dagger before going after a long sword. Something a little more generic seems like it would work better (e.g. small/light weaponry (daggers), medium arms (single handed swords and axes), two-handed weapons, pole-arms, etc.

#3 & #4 - no opinion presently

#5) Aside from the obvious of variations in colors, building/clothing design and flags, I'll have to give it some more thought.

#6) Just some quick thoughts:

elephants, rhinos, & giant lizards (mounts)

hemp field (better rope for siege weapons bonus...) & primordial forest (stronger or quicker wood/materials production & better siege weapons/production)

river & mine tiles physically adjacent (mining bonus)

ancient ruins (prestige & research bonus) & ancient battlefield (bonus weapon design/damage, prestige bonus), ancient world wonders (prestige & population bonus)

rare ores (building mine or forge/smithy on them allows special/unique weapon construction)  

Regarding the newer items/weapons/damage types, an idea struck me...

Why are units all the same? By that I mean...if my kingdom builds a knight in full plate with a longsword and a shield, it's the exact same as any other kingdom's unit with full plate, longsword and shield. Sure, I can give my knight a different face...but what's the point? He's still the exact same as anyone else. And it seems fairly strange that my units are all so plain - just a guy in armor with a weapon.

What I'd like to see is the power to give special abilities to my units. Alpha Centauri had something like this during unit creation, and it really made each unit different and unique if you wanted it to be. Elemental could implement this as unique training methods.

Examples...

• Offensive/defensive training - increases offense at the cost of defense and vice versa
• Messenger training - increases movement speed over land
• Stealth training - allows individual units to stealth near trees
• Ambush training - when attacking, units will get a free attack doing some small amount of damage to all enemy units.
• Individual weapon training - +1 attack with chosen weapon; gives a free ability with said weapon (daggers double attack, short/longswords have one free attack/turn after a successful defense [riposte attack], greatswords/bastard swords can use a multi/sweep attack, bows gain a range increase, etc.)
• Dance training - unit can, once per combat, strike an enemy and retreat out of retaliation range.

You could also implement stances, which each unit has the ability to learn, furthering specialization.

• Knight's Stance - Increases defense
• Blade's Stance - increases combat speed
• Fencer's Stance - gives a riposte attack
• Archer's Stance - increases range of campaign map archery attack
• Berserker's Stance - increases damage
• Duelist's Stance - allows for dual weapon training (Yes, I know that DUEList is not DUAList)

Initially, these would be just normal techs in the warfare tree, and you could only add one to a unit - a stance or a training, not both. Given more work in the three, you'll be able to add one of each, allowing for further specialization.

Do you want to have units of superior defense? Heavy plate mail, defensive training and Knight's Stance - your unit is now a tank. Or give him plate mail, offensive training, and Duelist's Stance - you have a strong attacker with decent defense. Duelist's training + dagger training introduces a unit that doesn't have strong attacks, but can attack four times. Have archers that fire further than anyone else, or train them in ambushes and Berserker's Stance and start combat with a potentially deadly volley.

Having more abilities would give players a stronger ability to customize their units to their playstyle, not to mention adding distinction to each army, AI and otherwise

Capitar - nobles, right? Then I wouldn't be surprised to see them using dual weapons and fighting with the Dance stance, to keep their hides from danger, or doing longswords and fencing like a number of medieval noblemen.

Ironeers - Known for their mining capabilities. Could have some strong defensive units, or perhaps favor the extremes - units that are very strong with little defense, shielded with units that are very defensive with little strength.

Tarth - Rebels. Stealth training and/or ambush training, with superior archers (Archer's Stance) and swift warriors (Blade's Stance)

Altar - Generalists? Not a lot known here. I'd imagine a few ranks of knights supported by spearmen and archers.

Pariden - Protection of their lands seems to really characterize the Pariden. Knight's Stance used with Dance Training.

-N

#5 Visual Distinctions between Factions.

The Beta 2 series will begin to show how factions are different from one another much better. However, we’d love to hear your thoughts on making different factions more distinct and interesting. Bear in mind, from a RAM point of view, it’s not practical for every faction to have a completely different building design setup (when we’re all 64-bit then we can talk about that)

I admit that I just found Civ4 Fall from Heaven 2 last week. The thing that I find most impressive is exactly that. All the units form all the factions look different from each other. Even all the workers look different from eachother. Does that not suggest that it could be done?

I love how in FFH my ranger looks different from your ranger, my warrior different than your warrior...

Also the cities do look different as well.

Just giving an example of it being done in an older game. A lot of work on the content side though,

There's a high concentration of good ideas and comments in this thread. Personally, I found several of my views and thoughts reflected in MadMagnus' ideas. In particular on:

#1 City Improvements

As pointed out by several people, building and upgrading housing is not the most interesting of passtimes. From my view, as the grand wizardlord I'd really like to be able to spend my time more on the bigger picture (i.e., world-domination through whatever means - magical research, diplomacy, warfare) and not be forced to make decisions every other turn on bread-baking or city-planning. So as MadMagnus suggests, having housing grow automagically is an interesting idea from my point of view. 

On the other hand, there's the whole interesting aspect of strategically having you city grow into a particular shape, and (depending on how sieges and city tactical battles will work) laying out the buildings in a city for defensive purposes. 

A simple solution could be to allow designation of whole swathes of unused areas around the current city as possible housing sites. Then, as the population grows, people will build their houses there. That's essentially a small step in the direction of macro-level city governors.

I'm also quite concerned about distinguishing cities from each other. I'm strongly in favour of having few-but-noteworthy cities rather than many-and-bland. I'm a huge map-fanatic - and thinking back to the maps of the many fantasy-novels I've read, these did not count a huge number of cities. Rather they counted a small number of very special and unique cities (Rivendale, Minas Tirith, King's Landing, Winterfell, Beryl, Juniper, ...) - and a lot of backwater provincial areas... not unlike true Medieval times, I guess. I'd really love for the mechanics and landscapes of Elemental to lead to maps like this. 

For this to happen, I see several issues:

• There needs to be a benefit in building further onto cities that are already noteworthy. The bonus to combinations of building might fit the bill; (though city-size should also be soft-capped somehow, e.g., by introducing something like a negative factor "squalor" that increases with city-size).
• On a related note, I'm all for special one(or two)-per-kingdom buildings.
• It needs to be a considerable investment to found and build up a new city.
• Even further, an idea could be to have a increasing cost to maintaining a large number of cities. I'm not certain that the one-time cost to essence is truly enough make it a viable strategy to go for few cities and a strong ruler?
• As Frogboy suggests, it'd be great, if there were many very rare ressources in the game, a few of which would be in each game. They're locations would serve as natural places to build one of your few cities.
• And last, but least, there needs to be a way of laying claim to land without having to build a new city - forts, military outposts, trading posts, and diplomatic agreements ("It is hereby declared that the land North of the River Red belongs to the Clan of Bears.") spring to mind.

#6 Other world ressources

I seem to recall having seen - in very early screenshots or comments - that the world-generator would generate or place named macrofeatures, such as "The Forest of Incrediblyness", "Bad-Ass-Dragon Mountain", "Valley of Vile Humours", or "Wet River". Is this feature still in? Recalling both Alpha Centauri and FFH2 such grand features serve both to add to the feel and richness of a particular map and - if said features give special bonuses - add to the grand strategy.

There could also be (the option of having?) even larger features, large enough to focus a particular game around. Think an incredibly powerful evil imprisoned-but-might-escape magician such as the Dominator in the Black Company series, or a quest for the control of a little ring that might just rule them all...

(Disclaimer: Long Spammy Post)

1. City Improvements:

I personally am in the camp that I would like the city management to be a more complex part of the game. I've seen several people warning against that; but I beleive the reason they don't want that is that they're used to Civilization and similar games where city management is a chore and all cities are roughly identical; I'd really like to be able to differentiate my cities in what each of them do...and have city management be both strategic and fun.

This to me means more types of buildings. Also, though; it seems that there's far too little space and by the time I've built several things I'm completely out of tiles. I would like to see either more tiles open up or a larger cap on maximum city size because I'd really like to be able to create sprawling cities that specialize in: Industrial Production of Resources, Military Production, Food, or Trade...with specialized buildings to help with each...but each city should still be able to have space for some basics.

Even with a military town or a trading town they likely have a farm or two, and likely a farming town or an industrial town have a garrison.

2. Research:

So far with research I understand/realize a lot of the techs are placeholders. I think though that the game would benefit from an expansion of far more technologies but making sure every one has a tangible benefit; not just lead to another good tech later on. I personally /like/ having a tech for every individual type of armor, weapon, etc. I think that in long Epic games /more/ will be needed to keep them from making it so all civilizations are identical in a few hundred turns.

I like one of the ideas I read about 'sub-categories', and I also think that there should definitely be some hard choices in research and it should be possible for research to better define what a faction is; rather than every faction wanting to research the same things. Different techs should provide bonuses which can work together so a faction can rely on them. Is this a faction which raids, a faction which trades it's minerals for food, a faction of forest hunters?

I also think that technology differentiation, in a similar way, could be used to make distinct the buildings of different factions. Taking certain techs and 'branches' in research making subtle changes to the underlying structure of your buildings so you can tell the difference between the hide and wood huts of forest hunters and the thatched roof cottages of farmers.

Lastly; as for more techs; I personally would like to see say 'padded cloth' before hide, leather before studded leather, scale before chain, chain before plate, etc. I'd like there to be different materials that could be used to create items such as wooden shields and bronze/copper armor and weapons if you don't have access to sources of iron. I'd also like to see more tactical and statistical differentiation between equipment.

4. NON-HUD Information:

I certainly wouldn't mind seeing banners; or seeing large groups of troops show up like armies on the map.

I also have quite a bit of trouble distinguishing 'goodies' when not on the cloth map. They really blend in to the rest of the 3d view for me and I can't tell what is just a bunch of rocks and what is a magic item/cave. I'd like to see those more clearly highlighted.

5. Visual Distinctions between Factions:

I was talking about this earlier in my research suggestions but I'll expand it here; I think that there should be minor cosmetic distinctions in the 'base models' of buildings, not only based on the size of the city (or outpost) they belong to, but also based on certain techs the faction has researched.

Similar to Civilization (but without ages) I think factions who research certain types of strategies, or concentrate their research in different subsistence or production areas should differ. A faction based on bows and hunting and logging should have hide roofs and wood walls. The buildings can otherwise be identical but little things like that really differentiate. A Faction which has focused on metal-smithing and industrial production should have more smokestacks, sooty buildings, and a more sturdy construction. Owning certain resources can also add to this but personally I'd like tech and strategy to be a deeper part of the game; at the moment it seems like everybody researches the same things and has the same overall strategy.

6. Other types of World Resources:

Being the tactician I am, I'd like to see more resources period. I don't know how the coding works but perhaps there are resources that can serve multiple purposes; such as honey being both a food and a trade good. If there's enough food then the most valuable 'food type' is traded for money.

I'd like to see specific types of resources like 'Strongwood' which is like normal wood but gives units who have weapons made of it more damage, or more accuracy. Perhaps a certain especially strong breed of horses which take longer to train as mounts but are much more effective.

Lastly, I'd just like to see more resources. If there was copper or tin in addition to iron and gold then it'd allow certain civs to control certain more useful resources. Other civs would have to use technology or ingenuity to either get access to that resource, or come up with different techs to make up for it.

I'd like to be able to see a civ with tin and copper and gold build a merchant empire with bronze clad troops and then attack the iron holding empire and be able to do okay through having more troops due to superior funding; but with inferior equipment.

Variety is the spice of life; and in a strategy game variety in factions, units, and techs...means more fun and more replay value.

City management:

You should strive to be more MoM-like there.

Remove all that tile thing except for special stuff like orchards/mines/shards/oasis...

It's a real pain right now. On the cloth map, the buildings sprawl was ugly but bearable. In 3D, it's otally ugly and hard to "read"/understand. I suggest to just get rid of it totally. Have a city radius grow like in Civ and let only special, unique/meaningful buildings be built on the map (wonders, shard harvesting buildings). Remove all the houses/markets/gardens from the map and abstract them.

Loving the latest Beta with the sexy graphics.

For cites it would be nifty if when you built walls and fortresses the "defended" area didnt expand as the city did. So if i have my beautiful city all geared up for war and build another slum i would have to build it outside the walls. Then later if i wanted i could rebuild or build another level of walls to cover the undefended ring.

Right now the tech seems to go way to fast for way to little results. Not sure if its just because the other techs are turned off but at 150-200 turns im able to do any tech in one turn and even with a horde of troops i get squashed by some random lone troll or something.

A resource i would like to see it a defensive spot. Say i have my city in this nice little vally, there would be a spot i could sent my pioneer to and build a watch town near the mouth that could be stationed for a small defensive bonus.

City building seems to be the topic of the day here, I thought I'd add my two bits and expand upon some of the other ideas here.   I too am concerned about cities becoming carbon copies, requiring repeated, micro management to be effective.  MOO3 went with the option of leaving the redundancy in, but allocating it to a governor as you saw fit.  We all remember just how well that went over.  It became a game of "write your own AI."

I like the idea of varying the cities based on the resources available.  Special resource tiles could enable entirely different building TREES instead of a single building.    A Horse resource for example could allow first a horse ranch.   Then having a horse ranch could allow research of Wagons, ferring (horse shoeing, not sure of the spelling) with the combination of iron, animal pulled wagons, Horse trainers, barding, etc.   The one resource could offer several different new building options.  The key would be to allow for more options than there is room for in the town, and only allow a limited number of them per resource.  You might have to choose between adding a barding smithy, a plow maker, a breeder for making elite horses,a slaughter house to use them for food, and a wagon builder.  There just aren't enough horses for all of them.  Each building could have empire wide effects, or some of them could have more powerful city only bonuses like the slaughterhouse.   Decisions like this are much more fun than "Where should I place my next house?"

Change house building to an automatic setting. "how large would you like to fund your city's growth?"  then select the size.  make building the houses an automatic thing that just "happens" and allow construction on tiles 1 further out.  You'd still have the same control over the shape of the city growth, and the housing could fill in the gaps dynamically.

AVOID things that players will want to automate!   That includes things like spamming housing & farms.   As it stands the only reason we'd want control of it, is to work our way to resources.   Allowing us to build 1 square further away from a current square, and having the computer fill the voids with dynamic housing until you build something else there later, fixes this.  It also allows you more options for "addon" buildings that you'd want to construct next door to specific tiles.  Allow the optimal build queue for each city to be different.  Anything that shows up identical in each city, needs to be changed.  Perhaps to a setting for the city, like I suggested with housing.  Perhaps someone else has a better idea.

A crystal could offer a huge number of options for additional construction.  A forge that increases the benefit of enchanted units.  A refinery that increases the benefit of  the crystals production by a percentage.  A research facility that increases the benefit of all research producing building in that city, that is mutually exclusive with a facility that does the same thing empire wide with a much smaller percentage.  A generator, that would allow you to build a defensive tower somewhere on the planet (multiple generators could be built, but you're limited by the number of structures the city has room for, and by the number of structures the crystal can power.)  Depending on the crystal, it could power different sorts of towers.   One that damages units for fire, one that slows them for ice, one that  dampens magic for air, one that damages water units for water, one that causes animals to aid your armies in range for green, etc. etc. etc.   You'd have to choose a few of these options per crystal.  If you sacrificed all of your other options to spam towers, you would be losing out on some potentially awesome benefits.

My point to all this, is to have a good reason NOT to build any structure that is under the players option to construct except special resources... By having them be mutually exclusive with other construction options.  Anything that you always will want to build, have it be automatic, or come up with a good reason to not build it sometimes.

Research: echoing the need for a real tech tree just so you understand where you are going. Incl. info on what each tech does (link to encyclopedia info). 

Resources: 

- Crater with meteor stone or metal (better weapons or armor, and usable for some magic spells)

- Crater with stardust (+ 1 essence when first annexed, usable for some  spells)

- Precious stones: diamonds, emeralds etc. (gold income + usable for some spells)

- Mithril / noble silver (self-explanatory)

- Adamantine (super weapons/armor)

- "Elven" wood: super bows and arrows.

- Bones of the Titans: better weapons / armor + usable for some spells

- Pearls (e.g. giving income + usable for some spells)

- Pool of the wise waters: + research points

- Gold fish (i.e. fish with real gold on them!): increased income

- Everlasting ice (doesn't melt so can be found anywhere): for weapons, amor and some spells

- Poison spring (poisonous weapons, some spells) 

Mounts:

- Wolves (a must)

- Dire wolves (even more of a must  )

- Ranyhyn (blessed horses): like horses but faster and stronger and overall much better

- Lizards 

- Camels (needed for desert travel without penalties)

- Nightmares (hell horses, only usable by empires)

- Sea monster: can be used as boat! 

You forgot bears

Combining resources and Collect the whole set!

Have a rarer resource unlock when all other resources have been acquired.  It can be a boon for those diplomatic minded leaders who can negotiate their way into a limited supply of everything.

Hm, I just thought it had already been pretty well covered!