If you're just looking big obvious things, then how about these ideas:

+ One faction generates mana equal to 50% of the experience of their troops slain in battle

+ One faction can hire both Kingdom/Empire champions

+ One faction is not penalized while moving through rough terrain

+ One faction can produce pioneers of any size less than or equal the total number of citizens available in that city (in other words, these pioneers could take 50 citizens away from one city and start a new city with 50 citizens)

+ One faction can generate resources from resource tiles without building the resource improvement

+ One faction can use diplomacy to force a trade with any opponent who has more than them of something

+ One faction's champions automatically learn whatever spells are cast during combat

+ One faction gets a market to trade any resource for any other resource

+ One faction can trade techs

One thing I always loved in MOM was having unded units raise after a battle if you had gouls (I think it was gouls?!?)  That was alot of fun!

Gah, why Umber so unpopular? 3%?

I blame Kulan, worst Sov in the game and he has stupid hair.

Redo him into something that makes sense. (Not a high Dext, low Int mage/warrior.)

*Updated my urxen post

1) The factions can be differentiated from one another by having different expansion styles.

- spam, spam, spam

- spam until x cities, then go after chosen victory

- one huge city

- a few large cities

- pyramid (slow sustained but snowballing growth) can be narrow (largely vertical) or wide (largely horizontal)

- spam until x cities, grow until size/time y, spam again

etc. (I'm sure you're imagination is MUCH better than mine...)

These should be blended with the factions other traits/units/buildings as to what is most suited.

(Seanw3 has a suggestion above for how to get Gilden to have one or two large cities by building differentiation alone, for example, which tailors with their production abilities.  There is no reason why we couldn't have 3 per faction buildings, I guess?) 

A human player can play any faction any way but for the CPU it should be the most advantageous expansion style given the factions other propensities.

2) Keep in mind that a faction gets bonuses from 3 different areas

- race (=biological)

- faction (=cultural)

- sovereign (=political)

There is no reason why every race should be able to access every cultural or political trait, etc.  Extremely unbalanced mixes can be prohibited.

Having three independent customisable sources of differentiation (as long as none are overpowered) leads to lots of replayability and interesting combinations.

The AI needs to be able to cope with custom mixes.  There could be a checkbox on custom faction creation for expansion style so that the CPU knows how to play the faction if it ever gets to.

Interesting. I thought Elemental didn't wanna go for the classic Good-Evil / Chaotic/Lawful route and stay with Kingdom-Empire none of which are necessarily good or evil. It's a bit of a surprise but I guess at least people are familiar with the good-evil concept from other games.

But, Gilden is lawful good? Seriously? These guys love money and mining. It's been a while since I read Destiny's Embers but if I remember right Gilden's leader went into a forest, got lost, and emerged with a new (shady) wife. He also loves money. Gilden and his leader's characteristics are nothing like lawful good or paladins. I always thought Procipinee as lawful good. At least she "looks" lawful good.

Same goes for some other factions. I love the fact that every faction will get different trais, equipment, etc. but unless you rewrite or rethink the history of Elemental some of these good/evil lawful/chaotic "assignments" don't make sense. I think it would be better to stay with just Kingdom/Empire and a fuzzy concept of semi good/evil.

Building on the stuff I posted earlier in the thread about Mangar abilities, listed below:

Anyway, Magnar are clearly a bunch of slavers and I'd like to see that in the game more. So, what I'm thinking is have a Trait that you can give to troops:

Slave. Trait. This stack of units has been pulled from the local slave pits and forced to fight in the service of Mangar.

• Advantages: The unit cost is free (traits included), so the only costs are for the actual equipment they wield. 
• Disadvantages: When outside a city, another unit in the army must have a Master's Scourge to ensure obedience. At the end of a season, if this condition is not met, the unit disbands. If all units with a Master's Scourge die during tactical combat (or autoresolve), all units in the army with the Slave trait disband immediately.

The Slave trait would interact with the Master's Scourge equipment, below:

Master's Scourge. Melee Weapon. A unit with a Master's Scourge keeps slaves in the army from deserting. The Master's Scourge also allows the unit to use Taskmaster and Slavedriver abilities on units with the Slave trait (see the spoiler, above, for info on those). This item does little damage and is expensive.

The effect this would have on Magnar's armies would be:

The player would need to balance Magnar's army composition between slaves (which can be strong, depending on which traits you give them, and are pretty cheap) and masters. Since the Master's Scourge sits in the weapon slot, it will be visible to the opposing amry, Since it is expensive and does very little damage, the player will have to choose who will wield the weapon wisely.

• Giving it to a sovereign / champion can ensure that the slaves will stay in line (since it'll be hard to kill a lv 9 champion), but it'll seriously reduce the champion's damage output. 
• Giving to regular, trained units will result in a more vulnerable slave master, but will preserve the power of your champions.

It will also change the strategies of Magnar's opponents. The opponents will have to choose between destroying the slaves and taking out the master(s) based on army composition.

• For example, if there are many slaves and one master, it would make the most sense to use magic / ranged attacks to assassinate the master, which will automatically disband all the slaves.

Edit:  Cleaned up formatting.

Another problem with faction differentiation is that it was said most of it would come from the tech tree. But it is hardly the case : most games, everyone fight with about the same techs, as most of the fighting that matters happens between shortbowmen and spearmen. There is very little room for differenciation there either, especially when we even have to go through the most boring of all trees, the civic tree, to research any advenced item in warfare (and we have to go to the semi boring mundane warfare tree to unlock many items of the magic tree).

If the tech tree was reworked and made not boring (and really offer several different ways to play the game), maybe it would be much less of an issue, as  two subsequent playthroughs would not be identical.

They should be

Maybe, but he is contradictionary and really only exists because SD knew that the Assasin Sov he should be would be unplayable due to thier terrible implementation of assasins.

1.He is a cruel warlord(already underpowered trait at 10%), so he gains extra exp from champions but has fewer champions  than normal.

2.He is described as a rounded character who could be either a mage or warrior. Rounded characters are horrible in FE, especially when their specialty is the broken dexterity stat.

3.His schools of magic are water, earth, death, The buff/curse schools. He has low Int though so is in fact a horrible curser and without fire/air he cant just become a evoker abuser like every decent mage in the game.

Im hoping hes a placeholder while they fix the game.

Apparently Frogboy was just using the old D&D meme to get the discussion started. Please do not take it as written in stone. It is obviously made from the perspective of one of the Kingdoms, probably Gilden. They probably would like to see themselves as Lawful Good. Maybe Lawful Greed.  

Not really fitting the Umber image of a cunning, migratory, snake worshipping, savage people.

So far, all Sov have the base stats of their race plus whatever traits they start with. Even if you gave him Int traits he would still be no wraith and i'd like to avoid completly rehauling all Urxen stats. Kulan as a tactician more than a fighter could work and i'd love to see his dexterity actually put to work as a playable Assasin.

Skath are aquatic lizards, not fire lizards and Umberdoths are bone ogre tough.

Kraxis isn't really a "Spider Team" they just have a spider flag to symbolize their craftyness. I'd be down with them getting Spider mounts and monsters though they shouldn't be 1 dimensional "Spider People".

I'd give magnar some bonus fire spells and maybe fire resistance to bring out their fiery nature. But like the kraxis the Magnar are more than just fire people, most additions should reflect their romanesque empire.

Gilden being both the owner of natural resources and greedy being seen as lawful good along with the World of Elemental being a world that has suffered a cataclysm in which only white people have survived is a true Republican fantasy world. 

Except for almost all of the Empires?