Keep Wilderness - No city polluted worlds

I couldn't agree more.

I think this should be a matter of play style. If you take the GC2 map settings as an example, the game could easily support both an open-spaces style (very large maps, few stars and planets) and super-busy maps (abundant everything).

I'd play on wilderness-rich maps, if given a choice.

Settler rushes a must? Really? I usually like to start with a work boat.

Pretty much agreed. It really is a problem because of the eXpand point in the 4X. You always expand without any limiting factors, growing more and more cities, which affects the terrain(not to mention micro-management and overall atmosphere).

What I would like is that cities were much fewer in number(a bit like in the HOMM series, where you can't build more of them) and the wilderness had more of an impact overall. Perhaps instead of full-blown cities you would have small villages that can never grow into cities(thus limiting out of control expansion), and if they were attacked by roaming monsters if too deep in "barbaric lands" it'd also limit their number, effectively making more wilderness.

Or just have a lot of terrain that is poorly suited for a city, perhaps even so much that making a city there would be foolish, because it costs resources instead of gaining them. Then you'd have to actually think if you want to make a city somewhere, perhaps for defensive purposes or to gather some rare resource(if they are included).

Remember, in Elemental, one of your choices is to use your Essense to 're-seed' the land to make it livable for a settlement.

If a player wants to 'colony rush', then they can, but only to the extent of their magical ability and then they'll be too weak to put up a fight. Cities also have to be built upon and around 'Fertile Land' tiles, so players wanting a slower 'Expansion' phase can tweak down the amount of fertile tiles in their world.

It sounds like your personal magic power is the major limiting factor in the game.

You have to balance your spell casting strength vs the power of your heroes vs your city expantion vs (other things you can do with your personal magic power that we don't know yet).

I like the concept a lot!

Sammual

Thanks very much for the info, BoogieBac, that sounds like a hybrid approach from the "limited number of valid settlement sites" approach from Kohan 2 (that's just where I encountered it), but with the nice touch of allowing the player to tradeoff for more sites.

In fact the "magic is used for everything" is excellent. You have to make real choices.

Yep, sounds very good to me.  Magic is the currency of the game.  Spend it expanding, and you don't have much left to defend yourself or do other things.  It seems to have been inspired by Tolkien (not surprising, since a lot of other parts obviously have been too ;)).  Morgoth and Sauron were incredibly powerful, but "invested" much of their personal power and malice into creating their followers and armies of hideous things, and dominating the land.  Each time they did that their own personal power diminished.

I would like a game where sheer size and population don't govern strength, much less another empire's likelyhood to attack you. One of the main reasons for a land rush is fear that somebody else will get those super useful reources, and the more land you have, the stronger you are.

I agree wholeheartedly. Options aka tradeoffs are what it is all about.

With 64-bit support the maps can be so huge that this wouldnt be a major factor IMO.