Exactly, you probably can make a cityscape, but it would be easy to overrun or invade by your opponents as you could not support the troops/magic etc. to defend it all.

You mean like portals that elementals/demons sometimes slip out of, destroying the nearest civilization they can find?  Or deep caves, where orcs, goblins, boggarts and other unmentionables?  Or once every X years, when the black moon rises for a month, and the unburied dead rise from the battlefields to slay the living?

All of those are cool ideas.

In MoM there were pretty clear places that made better cities than other thanks to mister cartogapher (or was it surveyer... the guy that told you the max-pop of city locations).  I think if you made an option that was like some sort of great-wilds world map option to create a map full of "wilderness" that was so rough terrained and crazy (its hard to clear cut a forest in this game mode)  that you'd actually end up wasting money if you blanket it with cities.

That would be very cool. And it would be neat to be able to have diplomatic relations with those entities, and each type of entity has its own principles/needs. For example ents might be more likely to be friendly to you or even help you if you don't clearcut your forests (if that's even possible). And maybe if you manage to build a good enough relationship with, for example the ents, they'd agree to take up residence in your forests, making them very dangerous for your/the ents' enemies.

Like you said, though, the player should never be able to take direct control over them; at most you might be able to persuade a small handful of them to join you, like dragons. I guess this all ties into the beast "faction," really. I'm hoping the beasts will act as a sort of group of minor civilizations, in the sense that they are locally very powerful but don't really try to take territory or anything; but if you piss them off, you had better be prepared.

And I would love to specifically see ent-like beings in the game. Living trees always seem like they should be the upper echelon of forest-dwelling creatures to me.

I think the places inhabited by powerful beings like ents or djinns or whatever should be habitable by others. But if you want to establish a city in their territory, you should either need to fight them off or befriend them (and even if you befriend them, settling on their territory should sour the relationship some). And I wouldn't want every forest or desert to be inhabited by these powerful beings, only some. 

In terms of people wanting to play those races... let them. I don't think the beast faction is going to ship as a playable faction, but I'm sure many people will make mods to that effect soon after release. Personally I love the idea of the world's most powerful beings other than channelers acting as minor civilizations content to stay to themselves. But if you rouse them, the consequences are big (whether you make them angry or recruit them for your cause). 

And I really like the idea that most of the most powerful units in the game should only be recruitable through diplomacy or powerful magic binding/summoning spells. It makes them more significant. If you can train the strongest units in your cities, you inevitably get to the point where they make up the bulk of your army. (Take AoW:SM - not long into the game producing the highest level units was not a problem at all). If it's actually a big deal to get ahold of 4 ents, then they can actually be epically powerful, like dragons (but on a smaller scale).

This way dragons aren't the only forces of nature that you need to watch out for. Collectives of less powerful, but still incredibly strong, beings can be just as dangerous. 

That is one thing I liked in MoM, on the higher difficulties the roaming armies from neutral cities, towers, power nodes, etc was a serios nuciance, and sometimes even a threat in the early game. You had to conquer the environment, which made for a much more interesting early game than many similar games have. Expanding on that would be a great idea IMO!

There are neutral cities in the game.  Other problems can occur because of those freaking adventurers who go into dungeons, get killed, but end up causing a demon or a dragon or some other bad thing to be wandering around the world.  You'll never look at a D&D party the same again.

This thread really got me thinking. If I understand right, you could spend a lot of your personal power reinvigorating the land, making a nice territory full of cities, perfectly aligned for max density, and full of farms and roads and no bandits. as one of the posters described. Or you could leave your terrain barren and instead focus on making yourself or a few choice heroes more powerful... I just figured a "rewards for being bad" kind of scenario, where you would focus on your own power, and then assasinate the chaneller of a nearby civ who invested heavily in towns and the like, and then conquer them. This would give you the benefits of a large base, without the personal costs...

Ofcourse there are many aspects and rules that can make or break such a strategy. But it was an interesting idea.

Frogboy, I love the idea of an adventurer accidently releasing a dragon.

In this game, everything that isn't human or fallen is considered to be part of the Beast faction. Including Dragons. Based on information from a bunch of different dev posts I get the impression that they are going for a 'faction' of mostly unintelligent creatures, but 'ruled' over, or managed by, an upper echelon of powerful, scarce but intelligent creatures. Examples of beast creatures that could sensibly made to be intelligent (by which I mean able to interact with players on more than a kill-eachother basis) are Dragons, Ents, etc.

This sounds frecking awesome beasts would add a lot to the game, but shouldnt be limted only to super powerfull beings if you keep chopping away in some wood wolves should become a problem and they either need to be extermanated or tamed also bears could be a problem and varuious beast in places would be cool for resource minning, and cities, and towns and cities should of course cause a lot more of a problem as there this huge encoachments upon nature.

to further develop upon the super beings like ents, dragons, and smaller beast's(referring to beast as a minor faction that could include cobolds, pigmen,and minor fractures of men and maybe small pockets of dwarves and goblims hobbits stuff like that) they should only appear sparsely and have major impacts upon the game allying with ents for example could make venturing into youre forest extremely dangrous but allying with them should be a incrdibly hard prospect and take a very significant amount of time and resources but have a very nice payoff maybe the ents could also teach you some special spells and such and this should apply to every faction maybe dwarves would give you added boon to your mines and some really cool warriors small pockets of men could have very specialty units like maybe a small faction of men living in harsh cold mountains would have various techs for maeking living there a less daunting prospect and give you the abilty to have special training programs to implement apon youre units when you assemble them maybe to use the previously mentioned mountain men the abilty to add in the extra benefit of moving through mountains with the same speed as plains and added combat powers when in said mountains. All these things should only appear very sparesly and defently not be in every wood, mountain, or desert.

Then i think there should be the actual beast and these should be bears, wolfs, boars, tigers, very primitive races, ghost's,and stuff like that that maybe every 3rd or fourt tile would have immediatly but the more you work upon a tile the more problems you will get form the local beast and these would be more like random events than anything maybe wolves raid youre coffers of food one day but the next youre peasant kills a wolf and dosnt require any food and sells the pelt for some added happyness as he gained a little money maybe this would be too hard to implement but i think it could be done.

there as always just my two cents

I must agree. I didn't read any of that

That would probably be unbalanced in favor of the expansionist. Having lots of cities already provides a long term bonus - you will have a stronger economy and higher population allowing you to field a larger army than somebody with only a handful of cities. In order to balance the two options, the person with fewer cities will have a stronger channeler. If settling cities gives a long-term bonus to your channeler's power than expansionism would be by far the better strategy on any but the smaller map sizes. And if the expansionist's territory covers a lot more land than the other's, then they are also likely to control more elemental nodes, giving them more power anyway.

Yeah, I for one would be pretty pissed off if I randomly got the defeat screen because somebody got lucky and assassinated my channeler. I wouldn't mind for it to be possible to assassinate some characters, maybe even heroes, but I think channelers should be exempt. 

I don't like being penalized for taking somebody else's territory. If a channeler falls and leaves behind lots of juicy cities, it would be cool to see its neighbors descend on it like me when I see chocolate. Conquering cities should be less magic-intensive than settling them from scratch, especially because you will already pay a price in combat losses.