Suggested building: 

Trap of wines (Empire)

When built all enemy units attacking city will lose 1-2 hitpoins pr city level

Is the game already harder? It seems you are in trouble way more often than I ever am in this game.

Final suggestion.

Tower of archery. Kingdom

One unit pr city level is shot upon with arrows. Damage is 1-5 times level of city 

Really like this idea.  Something like this could make for a much more interesting AI.

It seems it's not just the AI that doesn't realize that sometimes

There was also that instance where you intended to move a group of units but only moved one, as you had clicked it to look at stats, then inadverdantly split your force.  Could this be solved by incorporating a "split group" button/function, and groups of units can not be moved independently until they are selected and the "split group" button is pushed?

It's a pleasure to see you at work, Elemental is definately worth the wait (though at present AoW:SM is getting a lot of play while I wait for 1.1 )

A request, from a modder's perspective. I don't know if you've seen this before, but it can't hurt to re-post here (it's definitely on-topic).

In 1.09e, the AI does a very poor job at selecting which mount to use for units. As part of the Cavalry "schematic" the AI uses to design new mounted units, the problem is this; the AI only selects "the first mount on the list", regardless of availability or strength. For example, an empire faction will never build warg cavalry because it is always selecting the "horse" mount first - even if it has 100 wargs and 0 horses.

Availability should be easy to code, as for sorting the mount list after strength (again, this is for the internal AI only, so that it does interesting choices) may I suggest looking to the <ShopValue> tag? It is set to 100 for all the current mounts, but I could tweak that on modded mounts.

This is just a personal request to make the AI make better use of modded mounts. Either way, the availability factor is a problem in vanilla 1.09e as well.

As far as early blitzkrieg, I would say to give cities natural defenders along with associated (new) techs. You could still blitzkrieg (potentially) but you'd be required to heavily forestall any economic development.

For instance, for each city level, the city gains 1 defender. This defender is equipped based on a budget (based on city level and buildings) versus resource cost of all available/researched equipment (so that defenders wouldn't just instantly get the best equipment at an undeveloped city). A palace grants +1 defender and +budget.

Other buildings would then influence these things and add additional city-only tactical options. These would require an upkeep. For instance, people have mentioned archery towers - perhaps these are build explicitly and act like a spellcaster in battle, allowing you a special spell (hail of arrows) that you can cast (draining resources instead of mana). These would count as mixed damage of physical and magical damage, which would mean the player also needs to balance resistances (or build more in order to zerg).

I've also noticed that due to seeding, capitals are more or less the only significant target. There's few other targets of opportunity. In part, this is due to the way the resources are seeded - a lot around the starting location and then falling out there. I would say, just give the palace building itself the various bonuses you want all capitals to have and spread the actual world resources out more so that there's more targets of opportunity. As it is, one goes straight after the capital and in doing so, heavily cripples the opponents economy.

i'd argue that the biggest problem with the AI building groups at the moment is that

- the first group tech is such a huge jump in power in comparison to individuals. groups of three are 3x as powerful as individuals. it's an essential early tech.

- the conditions for building groups are too complicated, requiring level 3 towns at least, plus a building  (and another for archers)

a human player prioritises overcoming these hurdles. without prescripted AI i can see how this would be difficult behaviour to encourage.

imho changing the party system itself from 1 > 3 > 9 > 12 to 3 > 6 > 9 > 12 would solve many problems. it would

- reduce the power jump from individuals to parties

- make heroes more unique because there would be no individual troops

- give the game a more epic look and feel

- reduce the number of individual units slowing down tactical combat

- make the base quality of defenders higher, so settlements were always better defended

i would also suggest 4 > 6 > 8 > 11 as an alternative, because i hope one day for the option to have heroes join groups of infantry (because ultimately, no matter how much tactical combat is changed, the problem of sovereign sniping will always remain).

i also believe that it would be better to limit elite units by training time rather than requiring buildings for certain sized groups; ie, have training times increase on an exponential formula and make city level dependent garrison (time reducing) buildings more essential. this way it's never impossible to train good units in a given location, it's just not necesarrily efficient to do so.

as for the the siege thing, i'd prefer a siege mechanic like in the total war games. ie, you can't attack a city instantly, and have to besiege it for a number of turns while you build your engines with which to assault. during this time monsters can be summoned and troops rallied from nearby to come to the relief.

So turns are now called "seasons"?

The 4th video demonstrated both items that makes Tact battles both FUN (getting lucky and winning) and the quite frustrating.

It may be just me, but often, way to often to be coincidence imho, the RNG will provide great HIT values on a enemy target until you reach that moment where the Final Blow would finish it.(Overkill not withstanding)

BUT, instead of a BLOCK, it will leave the enemy with 1HP and and as such an undeserved final retaliatory strike or it happens on your last attack of that round.

If my attacks against any opponent averages 10-15HP, based on their defense rating of course, why then, when it comes time to finally get the KILL, does said "average" seem to plummet to the exact # for that 1 hit, to leaves the enemy at 1HP?

(2:05 to 2:20) The 12HP enemy takes a hit for -1(11/12) then -6(5/12) then -3(2/12) then -1(1/12) then -4(Kill)

or .8% - 42% - 42% - 50% - 33%(Kill)

P.S. I have also noticed, and the video again shows it, the initial attack, after using all but your last AP's tend to result in low avg. attack results. Why does standing still matter???

One limitation you didn't mention was that when you invaded a colony, you had to actually subdue the population, not just walk in with one ship armed with a pea-shooter and take over.  IIRC, a proportion of the population (dictated by .... morale? tech?) was conscripted as soldiers, then your soldiers and theirs fought it out based on your respective tech levels.  Capturing a well-developed colony required committing a substantial number of citizens to the fight.

It seems to me like there's a really obvious way to implement something like this in Elemental: when a city is being attacked, conscript some percentage of the population and hand them weapons and armor.  (what they get is presumably based on tech level, buildings in the city, ... ?)  They'd show up in the tactical battle as part of the defending army (but killing them would reduce the city's population, just like in GalCiv).

Well, I know it's a little off topic, but could we make some set of equipment when we need to purchase it? I dont know for you but when I go to equip my champion and NPC, I don't want to "loose" some time to think: hum, what does he have? What should I buy for him? Could we create some set and buy the set instead?