Have you considered horses?? I mean as a real resource in the world, and not just as mythological creatures only available to heroes in shops?

Well this is a barren world, it is normal that you don't have too much animal life easy for picking...

 I think that horses should be breed, after you discover the tech you shold be able to build horse farms, an improvement that use some citizens , citizens and food per turn (the horses need food after all) and each one shoul give horses to equip 2-3 troops. this should have the following advantages:

 1 - More Buildings to do, now you only construct knowledge/arcane buildings

  2- Will not require to populate the world with many horse sources (it is a barren world after all)

 3 - The food requirement makes sure that is is not good for every civi to have all horse military, as you will be trading quickier troops for bigger cities.

Since this is a Post-Apocalyptic world, we should see a lot of evidence of the former civilizations. Big ruins of statues sticking out of the sand, etc.

*Here it comes, Frogboy: Just like Master of Orion, seeking out the mythical planet to settle, why not have a mythical city (cities) like Atlantis that are hidden out in the wastes but if found (through research and exploration) could provide treasure, research, and a kick-ass place to build a city?

There could be smaller legends to seek out, too. Perhaps you have to hire an archaeologist champion, and as you research the various levels of adventuring/questing, these legends become randomly known to you, or by exploring you find clues (if you're lucky).

With the ability to open up other maps/areas, you could have the adventurers go underground to explore.

Otherwise, as far as spicing up the land: You have three tile sets, right? Wasteland, Kingdom's Gaia, and Empire's Shattered Earth. Give different tiles effects. The wasteland itself should have lots of cool tiles where we might want to build/battle with defense and other bonuses. Through magic research the Kingdom and Empire tiles that can be created through magic could become varies and strategic, each providing their own bonuses: *Kingdom researches "Create Old-Growth Forest," which provides .05 mana per turn for every tile of it.

*Kingdom researches "Create Flood Plain" that provides .05 food for every tile of it cast along a river.

*Empire researches "Drain Life" spell which sucks all life out of a tile of land, providing +5 mana.

*Empire researches "Fissure of Fire," creating a well of magma on a tile that provides .5 metal.

Think of every kind of land on Earth and how it would translate to E:WOM. Shaping the land and exploring the land are two major draws to the game! Both should be full of strategies and variety. Keep it up! It's gonna be a classic.

Hah well said, so many people forget that with beta's....they know some of the stuff is broken, it doesn't matter if you can hand wave the beta at it or not...they want what they currently have tested while they continue to work. 

My ideas on land being to uninteresting and barren:

1. Massively underused quest system.You said yourself that so much more is possible within the engine. Quests are kinda pointless as is... leveling them is pointless as they have the same rewards, and except for 1 or 2 early game ones they don't even involve combat.  Either spend more time and wages on more official quests or make a quest editor so people can start pumping out their own! With a easy to use editor I think you would very quickly see tons of new interesting events and quests pop up almost instantly.

2. Badly done city states. They are just factions that don't build cities.... They can even conquer cities! They shouldn't count towards map faction limits or be an actual team i.e Capitar. They should not be so much a enemy faction as they should be a interesting addition to a map i.e a dungeon. Make them completely defensive, faction-less, and in control of some resources worth trading or fighting for. More actual city states and not just handicapped mini empires....

3. Monster lairs! I think these were in at some point but were removed. Having monsters be pushed back by culture is interesting and fine early game but late game it renders monsters extinct anywhere near your heartlands. Rare monster lairs should spawn that in return push back culture and spawn monsters. The only way to kill them is to attack them and defeat the tough boss monsters within. 

4. Items and effects. Game needs more hero items i.e swords that do fire dmg or boost dex. That way people would actually have a good reason to quest and explore. But idea 1 should be done first.

my comments on some of these:

personality can wait until they are all good at the basics imo. right now there's far too many cities that never build houses and the such like. easy ways to vary them might include different attributes (so mancers have higher con and more hp, wraiths have more int and spell resistance, etc) or research speed bonuses for one particular branch. i think it's far too early for twilight style tech trees.

the global mana is really nice. however, i don't think linear generation with no limit is a good idea. first of all, running any summons or enchants in the long term cripples your stockpiling. every time you cast a spell you put yourself at a mana disadvantage to everyone else for the rest of the game. it encourages peole to save all their mana for a rainy day instead of actually using it. there is more discussion on this elsewhere however.

the economy is better... but i still don't like the food system. we still have a situation where you either have enough food to continue expanding and it doesn't matter (and indeed, having excessive supply has no benefits and it can't be traded) or you don't have enough and you can end up unable to expand or grow (including aquiring more food). it's far too rigid a system; it works a lot better at limiting city spam then before, because cities are no longer able to provide their own food through trade and enchantments. but this just means that you end up running into no-food-paralysis more often. it works at limiting city spam much better, but it's no fun when it does (though this has always been true) in the absence of a food based population growth system, i'd request an option to sacrifice sovereign essense to create fertile land, but we no longer have essence, so....i really don't know.

btw i really miss essense.

i also massively dislike building the same buildings over and over again; i'm getting massive urban sprawl.

agreed on the archers. i also don't see the point of putting longbows and shortbows in the same tech. would be better to have one ranged weapon come earlier; can we get weak short bows as part of basic equipment instead?

i also think it's gone too far in the direction of requiring buildings for units. i can see the principal, and it's noble. however, i'm currently in a situation where i don't have the food to get anywhere but my capital past level 2. and being doomed to watch individual guys crawl round a tactical battle. the game needs more squads and fewer individuals, not the other way around. wouldn't it have been better to have done this by increasing training times and giving us a series of time-reduction buildings at each level?

quests.... i'm still in the position i've always been; they all spawn objectives in or behind enemy territory (or otherwise innacessible) so i never do most of them. it's easy enough to get levels and items through notable locations anyway (would like a way to know which tiles are passable or not without having to walk their first btw).

the monsters... really i am getting the exact opposite experience. currently i am the most powerful faction i know of, but i'm still getting situations where (ten minutes ago) a forest drake appeared in visible space, walked over to my best defended town and walked over the defenders without a scratch, despite them having 3x it's combat rating. this is the second game (of two) where monsters far more powerful than anyone (in the game) could defeat at the time, have conquered my cities. both these games were at EASY difficulty. it's like the game is just randomly selecting where to drop nukes. i don't even think monsters should be attacking cities on easy difficulty; they should be a barrier to expansion rather than a threat to survival. i mean, it wouldn't be so bad if the city simply became a ghost town that i could later retake, but they just instantly destroy EVERYTHING. this has happened in ALL my games sofar in this beta and it's just not fun.

i am also feeling the movement thing, though generally by the late game the mana cost for teleporting is a pittance.

it may not sound it, but generally i really like this patch. great work.

To counter the sprawl.  I'd suggest building multiple of the same building should consume more population , maybe +1 for each additional identical building, so that lab which takes up 3 pop for the first 1 takes up 4 for the 2nd, 5 for the 3rd and so on.

Won't eliminate the problem, but may encourage not spamming.

It would be better if population was done by city, instead of on an empire-wide basis, but then you'd have micromanagement concerns/exploits.

A hard cap on buildings based on city level, not counting huts (to avoid a newbie trap)- is something I've been suggesting for a while now.

Also, the side effect of what I'm suggesting for the pop costs is that it would encouraging levelling up cities to get multipliers and advanced buildings, which would be much more efficient then spamming.   The best way to reduce city spam is to make bigger cities better, and/or smaller cities worse.

each of those cities cost 1 food though.  It would be more effective to build a lvl 3 then a lvl 4 city, then lvl ones.

The hard cap would mostly limit lvl 1 and lvl 2's (I'm thinking limits of 5/20/45/75/125 for building in a city by level would work)

can i also add that, while i like having the option to update my unit cards, it seems to forget the new ones and revert to the old ones eventually (i have yet to pinpoint the trigger for this EDIT: turns out alt-tabbing is one of them) i am also experiencing increasing stability issues the longer the game goes on (not something i had before). this usually happens when i quicksave (but not consistently)

They just didn't write it properly; You get +1 prestige in a city for every 5 points of Charisma *over* 10.

2 Champs with 15 Charisma will provide +2 prestige. Kind of handy... I had a group running around that was basically +15 prestige on demand, teleporting between cities.