What I don't like in city management in Elemental, is that city population, aside from upgrading towns to higher levels, has no significance. Food, money and other resources are being generated by city improvements only, and even time elapsed for buildings and troop recruitment is not influenced by amount of citizens.

I'm a long-time MoM player, and I must say I look at Elemental from Master of Magic perspective. So, what I'm suggesting is: make city population more valuable. How:

• Citizens are the basis for money generation (like taxes), and trader or other city improvements can upgrade the amount of tax gathered.
• Management of workers. Citizens work. They may be used as builders (adjusting time to build new structeres or train new soldiers), farmers (food harvesting, obviously) or workers in other ranges (like mines, quarries, etc.). To cut micro-management (it's not very liked here as I can see) use sliders.
• Soldiers recruited are from the population. That means each and every soldier slows the economy a bit - you must be careful with army maximizing so to not go bankrupt. Also, I think they should cost less, but require upkeep (food, money, or both).

This would be a major change, of course, so it probably won't be implemented, but even so, I still would like to see it as a mod, if it's not too far-fatched even for modding.

What do you guys think?