I would like to preface this post by saying that in single player games I sometimes enjoy playing with more of an RP goal in mind than a min-maxing play to win style. I'm perfectly content to turn the difficulty down so that I can prolong the game and not play to my maximum potential while I daydream about my empire. Elemental does an excellent job of setting up a backstory that allows this, but it could do better inside the game itself.
First I will look at how one major balance issue is affecting this in the early game. Mage-like sovereigns have essentially no unique method of defending themselves and their fledgling nation. Rather than being mighty beings able to call upon the elemental magic of the world to defend themselves, they are basically weak little men with sticks. In fact the first offensive spell in the game, arcane weapon, doesn't even focus towards their skills, but instead enhances the weapon of it's target, something that is both more effective in the hands of a non magical sovereign, and just as easy to obtain. Because of this it is neccessary for a mage to recruit allies early on to do the defending for them. This very strongly goes against the image of what a sovereign should be in elemental; A protector of the weak in a time of great strife.
Secondly, at the present moment, the qualities of your sovereign often have very little effect on the development of your game or your nation. Right now certain things have an effect on the early game, such as the talents that allow immediate arcane/tech research, how much strength you have, how much charisma you have, etc. Right now, a simple way to win the game is to make a sovereign with the meditative trait, the combat spellbook, a good weapon and 15 strength. You wander around fighting monsters and collecting treasure for a little while, train a few troops to defend your capital, and research arcane weapon. Once research is finished you cast it on yourself and you can go on the warpath conquering enemy nations with impunity because you are essentially the fist of god. Because of the large size of your empire you have access to many shards, and if you managed to recruit any of the tech/arcane research champions along the way and pumped them full of intellect along the way you can easily imbue them and you now match or exceed in almost every way the magical might of a more magical oriented sovereign. This is doubly true since a large portion of the spells in the game are not affected by intellect at all, or only mildly so in comparison to the effect of shard ownership. This scenario highlights several problems as I see it. First, the early game blitz, this has already been highlighted by the community and I strongly suspect the developers are working on it on some level, so I'll ignore it. Secondly the relative weakness of mages in the early game, which I already touched upon. And lastly and imho the most important, the magical power of your sovereign is not based at all upon his or her magical abilities, but upon the might and breadth of your empire. By all means a large empire should be able to assist your sovereign in increasing his magical prowess, but it shouldn't be the only factor. And while we are on the subject, it is also true that the martial prowess of your sovereign also has no effect on the ability of your fledgling nation to increase its martial power. It would add an interesting and realistic element to the game if all the attributes of your sovereign had a broader effect on the attributes of your empire, similiar to how a high charisma makes it cheaper to recruit champions. By all means it should be fully possible with an investment of resources to overcome the weaknesses of a sovereign, but it should require that investment and not occur because you choose all the stats that actually have immediate and reaching effects.
Some examples of implementation of what I am saying to better highlight the design. These are FAR from the only ways to implement it.
-Strength: Affects the starting strength of your units, effects are doubled for units trained while the sovereign is stationed in the city. Local effects could be extended to champions.
-Dexterity: Same as strength
-Intellect: Added mana regeneration, broader intellect scaling on spells even if the effect is not enormous
-Constitution: Health bonus for your troops
-Charisma: Already has broad effects on the development of your empire, a very well designed sovereign stat imho.
And these are some examples of how a system could be implemented to overcome the weaknesses of an empire caused by low sovereign stats.
-Members of your dynasty contribute to global effects, and champions contribute to local effects.
-Parallel effects: Ex. A mage sovereign has the capacity to cast lots of very good weapon enchantments, stone skins spells etc. A martial sovereign can't cast as many enchantments, and they are of a lower quality, but his troops are of a higher base quality, so overall it averages out to the around the same thing. While mechanically this is close to meaningless, it feels different, and this is important to many players.
-Keep the bonuses low enough that the scaling will eventually be exceeded by research.
Thank you for taking the time to read the post and if you didn't the TLDR version. Mages suck early game. Sovereigns don't feel very unique and the power of your empire is largely only based on their martial prowess at this point in time.
