The creature models issue would require a lot of work, but I don't think there will be any other real problems there.  I personally don't mind giving up traditional turn based combat at all, although I may be in the minority here.  The other planes issues might be a big deal, we really don't know the limits of modding yet.  It might be quite easy, it might be nearly impossible.  I'm hoping it's not a big deal as I suspect that it would be desired by a lot of mods.  Hopefully one of the Devs can enlighten us on that.

There are a few other things that would have to be decided as well.  Do you stick with a city just being a single square on the main map and all buildings are within that city or do you go for Elemental style city sprawl?  Do you remove all non-magic research or include it?  I'd definitely want to include the old MoM Books and Perks to choose at start, how difficult will that be (my hunch is that won't be too bad)?  Can Elemental support Magic Spirits / Life Spirits claiming mana nodes outside of city limits?  Does Elemental support the building of other races units when you capture their cities?

..in a game like this? Definitely not.

I still have the disk... altough the demo inside was deleted long time ago. I don't remember if there was a turn limit, just that I played that demo a lot.

I'm gonna copy here what I wrote in the forum of that other game that Raven X mentioned a while ago. Take it as ideas, take it as wishful thinking, take it as daydreaming of a devotee...take it as you wish.

So...here goes:

what I would really like to see would be an open ended game like Master of Magic, with grand maps and possible random generation of them. The tactical battles should be realized in pausable real time like the total war series but that is not a deal breaker for me. 

It would be a really successful game if it would happen to have a lot of spells with large diversity (please not another blue fireball, red fireball to get to the 100 mark ).  The quest idea could also really work out well with many random quests as well as different heroes  that would get different random starter statistics and spells and get XP and level up. Some kind of direction of magic research like the different philosophies of standard fantasy literature would be awesome (Life, death, good, evil etc). Think about multiple research directions like spiritual alignment life/death-light/dark, morality good/evil-law/chaos, elemental alignment fire/water-earth/wind etc. with each direction securing the availability of some spells while excluding others. Oh and please oh please do include random spell research. There in nothing more satisfying than realizing that even on the 3rd time around there is original content that you just now explored. The possibilities are really endless. 

I really hope that you Brad (or if you don't the makers of that other game) make a worthy spiritual successor of MOM. 

And please do include the klackons once again

Re planes.  Planes were in those early games because of the memory limit.  We don't have that memory limit. 640k is long gone.

Bigger maps.

Re planes.  Planes were in those early games because of the memory limit.  We don't have that memory limit. 640k is long gone.   Bigger maps.

I don't mind losing planar travel, but MoM always left me frazzled by the end game of larger maps because of all the cities. Though to be honest it wasn't the cities as much as all the enemy units pointlessly running around the map in insignificant numbers. Was this a problem with the AI in your opinion, Brad? And can we hope to not be as overwhelmed on the even larger maps of Elemental?

I like the flavor of "In this plane the roads are automatically enchanted, there are special minerals and only here you can find some of the races.". Plus all the plane shifting thing. Just saying.

Ouch, I face palmed when you attacked 2 gnoll spearmen with a highman swordsmen and spearman (the two best starting units in the game against the two weakest starting units in the game )

Yep, Master of Magic still prevails as one of the best games of its kind to this very day.  That would be why I still play it for at least 20 hours every 2-3 months.  As a matter of fact, I was playing Master of Magic when my bro called me and told me that Elemental was in the works.  Unfortunately, though, certain strategies always dominate the game, especially if you are playing on the hardest difficulty level. 

If you aren't a game-loader, life tends to dominate (otherwise be prepared to never have any game-long heroes.)  A win button strategy, for instance, is to start with full life spellbooks, pick stream of life as your best spell, and then cast it on every city.  Then proceed to max out your taxes (stream of life negates unrest), set your mana distribution to straight skill, and then hit the win button.  Use alchemy as your souce of free mana.  You'll have paladins roaming the country side before your opponents even have halberds.

Most of these glaringly superior player strategies can be "house ruled" though to keep things fresh.  The biggest glaring flaw of the game that you can't fix, though, is the AI and its diplomacy (aka, they always declare war on the player no matter how generous you are with them and at completely random moments.)  So naturally, when I knew Frogboy was going to be responsible for the AI of a Master of Magic spiritual successor, I was pretty darn stoked.  

I don't think the base game necessarily needs them but underground areas, planes, etc would be very nice.  Hopefully you make it possible for modders though.  Larger maps are not necessarily the same thing as there were differences in how the planes acted and underground restricts mobility and could have the possibilty of digging tunnels.  Also opens up new pathways to attack your opponent or hide your strength.  It just adds a lot of interesting possibilities.

I saw a chance he had to win. he would have to evenly distribute the damage between the units. he attacked with his hurt swordsman when he should have finished them off with the spearmen. then (possibly) sacrificed his swordsman to hurt the last gnoll enough so his spearmen could kill it. this all being irrelevant if he had healing from life magic

It's good we all like the same things...last I heard Steve Barcia was working for a console company, which makes me sad.

Anyone remember a game SimTex was trying to do called MechLords? I think that would have been awesome as well, but the FASA gang hit them with some kind of suit saying things resembled BattleTech too closely, which was pretty funny since they stole so much of their IP from the Japanese. Too bad they didn't have a little more tolerance or foresight because if MechLords had some out, maybe they would have gone back to make MoM2 and SimTex would be around today (probably as part of EA) but anyway...enough what ifs...Elemental should be a fine game in the MoM tradition and I'm glad to see Brad's heart is in the right place

Are bigger maps then better? I love AoW:SM, it wouldn't be as good if the maps will be 3 times as big as now but without Underground and Shadowrealm.

You need so much time to cross and conquer a huge map. In a smaller map with 3 layers is it more compact and has alot more stratetic depth.

At my actuall AoW:SM game, do I have an access to the underground in my back garden and the Gobos are spaming Bombers out of it. Thats real pain in my ass, but also really fun to try to shot them down befor they reach my skeleton archer.    (This game now runs with dwiggs 5.oo, so many great mods are availabel   )

LOL Brad Gnoll untis are just awseome melee str. You are lucky u had the stoneskin otherwise they would have totally dominated you. The drawback to gnolls is they have very small "tech" tree, so not a lot of advance untis/buildings Its harder to keep their population happy as a result, and u get less gold cause you cant raise taxes as much.  But they are awesome rush race.

Also to note in reference tot he planes, its a fun aspect of the game. It's not unique to MoM. I know of Civ2 Test of Time that has this, also Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, just to name few.  I think some Heroes of Might and Magic games have an underworld as well.  These things give u shortcuts and alternative routes of attack.  And they are hell of a lot of fun.