I've been eagerly following this game ever since I read the Feb 2009 issue in Game Informer magazine (due to the negative reviews, I'm holding out for the demo before buying it). The magazine article spoke of the sovereign as a figure with power equivalent to Sauron in Lord of the Rings "before he lost the one ring".  Sauron chose to focus his magic on building armies and items (i.e., the rings).  But, the article mentioned that a player could just as easily choose to focus on building up their own character.  This suggested that it would be possible to win the game without building a single city.  This sounded like a great idea to me.

However, based on what I've read, "one essence" is the only cost to building a civilization.  This seems too low a cost -- especially late game when the civilization builder is likely to have all kinds of technologies and army stacks that could easily crush any player who chose to keep that essence.

I know this is a difficult thing to balance, and it probably makes sense to error on the side favoring the player who does build a city.  But, I do think it would be cool if there were a scaling penalty to building cities that was sufficiently limiting as to allow a skilled player without cities to win a lengthy game against skilled opponents who do build cities and armies.  To have any chance in late game, keeping that essence would need to offer some scaling advantage (i.e., permitted the player to gain XP faster, access higher level quests and loot, or gain scaling spell and summoned creature bonuses).

I know there are a ton of more urgent balancing issues to work on.  Just something to think about for the more distant future.