The go-to example is Fallout. People, even hundreds of years after the nuclear war, mostly live in small corners of the abandoned metropolises of the past. Or they create tiny settlements in the wilderness. Mostly they get by through scavenging, small scale trade and petty theft. Maybe a little herding or agriculture when they have the tools and training.

I'd like to see Elemental move into a similar vein. For instance, I'd personally ditch the settler mechanic entirely, and have the player instead expand through culture or war right from the start!

Not, that is, by conquering or culturally overwhelming their AI opponents, as currently happens. Rather, they'd be forcing smaller nearby settlements into the orbit of their newly founded home. Settlements with varied art, some of them existing in the sprawling burned out metropolises of yore, and others existing as tiny fishing villages on the coast, or deep within the forest.

More on this later.

My next step would be to remove resource nodes entirely. And workshops, and libraries, and studies. They're stupid, and they all gotta go. This is a wasteland, not Australia. And, no offense, but it takes more than a couple seasons of research to pull off the engineering necessary for a serious mine. Fertile land confuses everyone, magical crystals are goofy looking, studies and whatnot are more boring than The Last Airbender. Plus, they're irrelevant with the settlements.

The last thing I'd pull out would be the random quest system. It sucks. Who the heck wants to play Questy the Whack-a-Moler? Quests, though, quests I could use.

Now, back to those tiny settlements. These guys, wherever they are, are the only source of resources of any kind. Oh, your people will generate some in your one city, bounded by population, but you'll need the settlements if you really want to succeed. The ones hidden in forests will produce materials, the ones on the coast or plains might pop out food, and the ones hidden in the husks of dead cities would produce inventions -- not technologies, not research, more on that later.

You don't get these guys on your side just by expanding a magical wall of "mine-ness". Instead, you've got to bring a champ or a sov to them and hang out, generating influence until they feel comfortable with your side. At which point they give you a quest. Maybe they want you to stomp a band of reavers nearby, maybe they want you to rescue an artifact lost a generation ago, maybe they just want some salted ham. You do the quest and then you can pay diplo capital at any point to acquire them, at which point they shoot out a caravan to your city (have I mentioned you only get one city? you only get one city) and start adding to the resource pool. Oh, and they also up the population cap of your city. Yeah, no more stupid houses.

That's how kingdoms operate.

Empires don't work like that. They want a settlement, they take it by force. That means killing the defenders and enslaving the populace. It also means they don't need a hero around to expand. If an empire stations a hero on a settlement, it'll increase the work rate while also causing the settlement to spawn the occasional slave uprising. No hero, the settlement produces about 3/4th of what it would for a kingdom. Kingdoms can use heroes to cause revolts and capture empire settlements through combat, but other kingdom settlements can only be taken through the use of diplomatic capital.

The empire advantage is that it's quicker to kill than convince. They'll end up bigger, but less efficient, than the kingdoms. 

Oh, another minor thing. You can only have as many soldiers as you have settlements, plus three for every level of your capital.

I mentioned reavers and raiders earlier. See, not every settlement is a happy little community of scavengers or slaves. Some of them are full of people who aren't quite right. And by that I mean they're rape and murder crazed abominations that don't mind eating the flesh of their victims. Scary, huh? Their settlements would be almost impossible to take down until midgame, hidden deep within the empty echoing forests or far up in the loathesome mountains, but in the mean time they'd spawn small bands that would wander the plains and the settlements. If they hit an undefended settlement, it starts to burn. They'll take three turns to reave it, then wander on to the next one. And that settlement won't produce a thing for ten turns or so.  

Kingdoms and empires deal with them differently too. A kingdom exterminates them, and gets a few magical items for doing so. An empire conquers them. Each raider settlement can support a single, very dangerous unit. The more reaver settlements an empire controls, the more dangerous that empire becomes.

And here's the thing. There's not much a kingdom can really _do_ against an empire, militarily speaking. Oh, things will be pretty even throughout most of the game, but by the end the combination of higher troop counts (from occupying more settlements) and the reaver units should put military might firmly on the side of the empires. Or I guess I should say Empire. Just having one plays up the ideological difference between kingdoms and empires. Plus, a monolithic enemy is way scarier.

Kingdoms _can_ fight back though. Mostly through adventuring, careful planning, and the simple fact that all their heroes can use magic, and their mana generation rate is higher. Kingdoms can get funky special units through questing for dragons or griffons, which gives them a special mount for a single hero that adds to their combat capabilities and unlocks a special ability. Plus, there are lots of kingdoms. If they unite, they can probably handle the empire. If they don't, they'll be picked off one by one.

So what's the end result of all these changes? A more coherent system where questing is tied into the game mechanics, city expansion is about gathering the support of settlements and building fewer, more interesting buildings in the city, diplomacy is about controlling an overwhelming force and units and resources are directly related to map control.