I'm very interested in Elemental and am really looking forward to it.  One thing I did want to suggest was AI diplomacy.  I play mostly multiplayer games and there is something about dealing with a human opponent which makes things inifinitely more interesting.  When I play a game of Civ 4 with my friends, I can chat it up with any number of them and convince them to join me or trade techs/resources using a variety of tactics.  So naturally whenever I play a single-player game, trying to deal with an AI is severaly frustrating.  I could never get the hang of exactly what civ 4 AI's wanted out of me except free stuff every 10 turns, and dealing with their AI always felt more like jonesing the system than dealing with a smart opponent.

Gal Civ II's AI was a lot better in this regard, and the AI seemed somewhat reasonable, but there was still this very noticable barrier.  For instance, I could never get an even trade.  Me being able to exchange a tech for a tech with equal value should not be dependent on my diplomatic skills, it's pretty much the standard by which other trades are judged.  It always frustrated me when a civ was growing leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, and then I try to contact other AI to help each other catching up, but they acted like their biggest priority was milking every last tech out of me just for something mediocre. Clearly their priorities are little out of whack.  Only when they were in severe danger would I see them loosen up at all.  But too little too late. 

I know ideally we'd want the AI's to pass Turing tests, but that is obviously unrealistic. At the same time, I'd like the AI to consider more input from the player rather than just taking into account some diplomacy stat.  I'm assuming there'll be diplomacy between factions within the game, and I guess what I'm asking is that when I sit down at thet able with these AI, I can point to some information in the game (like a biggest army chart, or a most income chart) and say to them, "I don't think you're really considering THIS enough."  And then the AI can get back to me with "You've got a point but I can't..." or "that's not a big deal at all because..." and we can go from there.  Then it might feel like a real discussion between two rational agents rather than a demand/request followed by a yes/no answer.

I of course realize that my threshhold for tolerable AI behavior may be a bit (read: a lot) higher than most people, but I think diplomacy is a source of great fun that rarely fulfills its potential.