Great list!

You haven't specified the types of future updates, so I will list the conceptual ideas I've thought of in the past. Even if these were part of DLCs: 

Start Location Option in the Setup
- Have a togglable preffered start with options: Middle, Edge, Corner, Random
- When the map is generated, it places you (within reason) as close to your preferred location without violating other startup restrictions, THEN places the AI players

Faction Organizer
- Be able to design sovereigns and assign one to a faction
- Be able to assign designed units to factions
- Be able to select/deselect units available for use by factions
- Be able to delete your designed units/sovereigns

Expanding Wildlands
- Wildlands have a starting setup (as now), but are nodel (like a cities ZoC). Each lair within a Wildland has a ZoC.
- Lairs spawn wildland creatures of their specific types.
- Every X (perhaps 50) turns and world event happens: Wildlands expand ... increasing the size of ZoC by 1.
- Enveloped cities are strongly agressed against by the creatures of the wildland (even the Wildland lord).
- If a city falls, it becomes a new lair to the wildland with ZoC of Y and will expand along with the other nodes.
- Reconqering your city from the wildland is possible.
- When a Wildland is completely destroyed and fetile territory appears, there should be fewer locations to settle.
- This will made late-game more challenging for those that choose not to defeat wildlands early-mid game.

City Defenders Fixed
- Currently if your city is attacked a second time on the same turn, your city defenders do not fight.
- Currently if you attack an AI city a second time on the same turn, ALL their city defenders fight (even if they've died in the first attack)
- A consistent system to be made to made it fair for player and AI alike.
- Units HP and alive/dead status of city defenders should be tracked across the turn. If a unit is dead...it's dead for the rest of the turn. If a unit is wounded...it stays wounded for the rest of the turn (if nothing else happens)
- At the start of a new turn, the status is reset.

Outpost Upgrades
- Currently there is little drive to build and develop outposts in the game.
- Remove the ability for a Pioneer to settle an outpost
- Add the ability for a Scout/Explorer to settle an outpost (if needed, add a small population cost (5 or 10 .. tops))
- Ouposts should have their OWN upgrade queue
- Outposts should have only a max of 5 levels (starting at level 0), a level depicted by the number of upgrades it has.
- Each subsequent upgrade should take twice the time to build. (lvl1 - 3 turns, lvl2 - 6 turns, lvl3 - 12 turns, lvl4 - 24turns, lvl5 - 24turns)
- Outposts should have a minimum distance of 5 from any city and any other outpost
- Likewise, a city should have a minimum distance of 5 from any outpost (so an outpost can 'guard' fertile land)
- Outposts should have more upgrade options -- see attackdones mod for examples https://forums.elementalgame.com/446432/page/1/
- AI should be able to upgrade their outposts!

Roads Redeveloped (I'm going to simplify my earlier beta idea)
- Roads showed be 'owned' by a faction
- Roads should NEVER enter neutral territory (that means to make a economic treaty, you MUST share a border and IF that border is lost, the treaty IS cancelled)
- Roads that end up in neutral territory should be razed in 10 turns.
- Roads should level up through techs along the techtree. (Path --> Road --> Highway)
     - Path - granting +1 movement
     - Road @ Construction tech - granting +2 movement
     - Highway @ Mobilization with prereq Construction - granting +4 movement
- All your owned roads level up upon reaching a tech
- A Road Builder Unit should be made available at the Construction tech
- Global Spells could exist, with upkeep cost, to boost your road movement even faster (Ride like the Wind & The Golden Road)
     - Ride Like the Wind - Air Spell (lvl2), granting an additional +1 movement for travel along ANY road by your units/heroes
     - The Golden Road - Earth Spell (lvl4), granting x2 movement for travel along ANY road by your units/heroes

Building Cities
- It would be absolutely fantastic if the city terrain retained its basic shape from pre-city.
- Have several new 'city tiles' developed for the different hill orientations that exist
- 1 corner raised, 1 half raised, 2 opposing corners raised, 3 corners raised, all corners raised
- Have these tiles rotatable so that the engine can match it with the nearby hills + mountains
- Have the terrain merge into these tiles instead of going completely flat.
- All Buildings would need to know what level, upper or lower, they are being built on

Razing Cities
- Razing a city should NOT be allowed for X turns after conquering said city where X is the level of the city.
- Razing a city should NEVER salt the earth on or around the tile. (to prevent AI building cities, cast Salt the Earth OR build an outpost (see above))

Capital City
- You should be able to build a Palace to move your capital to a new city.
- Your first city should automatically start with a Palace
- Building a Palace in a new city automatically destroys your other Palace.

Heroes
- New heroes joining your cause should show up at your Capital city (Palace could be the spawning point)....NOT at your sovereign.

Shopping
- The shopping experience needs to be more organized...perhaps into the same catagories as shown how a hero is equipped.
- The prices of items in other factions territory should be impacted by your relationship with them AND rarity of the item (encouraging you to develop the items for your shop yourself)
- Random events could exist where a shop keeper approaches you and offers to sell you a rarer item on occassion

I'll post more here as I recall them...

ps: I will also never say no to more cutscenes throughout the gameplay and more music !!

Pretty much post what you want as long as it's reasonable within the design (i.e. don't ask for combat to be turned into an RTS or something like that, save those ideas for future projects outside of elemental). If it's a list that already exists somewhere on the forum post a link, I will try to include the link. This way we have a check list for the developers to look at to cherry pick what they want to work on. Also, I will try to feature the ideas that don't require too much recoding the entire game. For instance I like the idea of wild lands growing, however, they are created via stamps so I don't think in the current build it is possible without a ton of work from the developers. That level of work is unlikely to see the light of day for a game that is two expansions in. Feel free to post crazy ideas anyways though.

I like Illauna's ideas. GFireflyE's are interesting but generally look to be more work and more controversial.

Heroes: I don't particularly mind either way, but why do you think it's better for new heroes to appear at capital rather than sovereign?

I disagree on Outposts, I build them quite often, and frequently build Stables and High Towers. The Dead more or less require Consulates if you don't get lucky with Death Shards.

Roads Redeveloped: I quite like the idea of road levels. It doesn't sound too hard to implement to me, and would give a significant advantage to higher tech factions, which on higher difficulty levels is probably the AI. Frogboy has commented before that moving AI units around is a problem, giving them big movement boosts might help. Perhaps the technology could be spread out a bit, e.g. military roads are the first upgrade (from Warfare), magic roads are the final upgrade (from Magic), as at the moment I already think there's too much advantage in concentrating on Economics. Do you mean +4 movement or *4 movement, by the way? There's quite a big difference. At the moment road tiles have reduced movement cost, which effectively makes them a movement multiplier. I don't see why roads should be razed in neutral territory, however perhaps the upgrades could only apply in friendly territory. I like the idea of giving Earth a high level road specific movement spell, it would give a bit of depth and variety to their spells. What spell would they lose though?

Razing cities: why do you want to change this? It would significantly weaken Magnar and the Dead. Also if we care about "realism", the time cities were burned was immediately after they were taken.

Automatic palace for capital is interesting, it would significantly strengthen the Dead. In general it would make the start of the game significantly easier (lower unrest, higher growth, larger ZOC). I would expect that to benefit the player more than the AI (other than the Dead). Again, why do you want to make this change (why do you think it would make the game better)?

Honestly, I think the tower of domination should determine the capital location. 

I think we can all agree that the AI needs to be able to use the upgrades, however.  Right now you are essentially cheating if you build upgrades.  If the AI cannot be programmed to use them, then they should be changed so that the AI can use them.  If that means they need to be simplified, then so be it.

A change I made that I've really liked so far is to increase the XP bonus of the Adventurer's Guild to 5xp a turn for stationed champions.  It really allows for you to get some use out of later selected champions that you normally just have sitting around because there isn't anything late game for them to get xp from.

I haven't forgotten about this thread just was busy with finals and some other RL issues.  

And they really need to work on the "roaming" monsters issues.  Monsters that are guarding loot locations inside special wild lands areas should NOT be roaming around.  It's ridiculous when the AI or I can run around looting these unguarded locations early in a game without having to kill anything.  This would cure all the weird stuff as well with Vertrar and other major wild lands bosses.

Also, in the ruins of Imperium Wild Lands area, often when you unlock it by settling a city, some of the walls surrounding the ruins become invisible, yet they still block movement.

I'd add AI balance as well.  In games where Yithril is one of the enemies, they almost always jump out ahead of the other AI factions by a significant margin early.  I haven't explored the reasons for this, but it's worth noting.  Some other things I'd like to see addressed:

1.  The Beastmaster trait and tamed creatures bug is terrible.

2.  The Dead are a mess as far as the AI is concerned and present NO challenge on any level.

3.  The AI still has wonky behavior as far as how it expands and uses units.

4.  Outposts need some work -- the AI cannot use them as implemented and they need to be fixed so the AI can use them.  Simplifying them seems appropriate.

5.  Roaming monsters is at least partially broken.  Monsters should not wander from Wild lands area, nor should monsters wander off of loot nodes in wild lands area.  It makes it far too easy for the AI or players to run around looting the areas without technically clearing the zone.

6.  Crashing of the game in mid-late game.  The game has a tendency to crash sporadically in late game when there are lots of units/cities/etc. 

7.  Roads should be implemented slightly differently.  As in Civilization, enemy armies should not be able to use roads within your area of control freely-they should be treated as using the terrain as is.  Also, after you capture an outpost/city, a road should immediately connect to that outpost/city so that it is part of your network.

8.  Some balance to champions.  As it stands now, I find that in mid-to-late game I have a bunch of fairly useless champions that only serve to reduce city unrest.  This makes the mid-to-late game rather unsatisfying as far as heroes are concerned, especially considering the game is "Legendary Heroes."  If I'm lucky I'll get governor champions which will have more use late game.  I think the main problem is the result of a few issues: 1)  Champions/Heroes take a fairly long time to level up, and in late game there are far fewer mobs to gain experience off of than earlier in the game and you generally get experience at a slower rate when fighting opposing sovereign armies; 2)  Trained troops in the mid-to-late game are generally very strong compared to all but the highest level heroes that are carrying the best magic weapons. 

Possible fixes: 1) Make the later game acquired champions start with higher level or skills; 2) Provide a way for champions to gain experience late game to catch up--I've tried increasing the experience gain to 5 per season and that seems to be helpful (I think you could also make it so an experience benefiting building could be built in every city--minus the fame bonus the current Adventurer's Guild has); 3) Provide a way to research hero-only useable items that are stronger than the current researchable weapons that can be used by troops, but not as strong as the best loot.  Currently all of the researched weapons are not good enough for heroes because an entire squad could be using them.  I'm sure some others might have suggestions as well; 4) Generally increase the power of looted items across the board--I've been increasing the power of hero-only ranged weapons and that has been a help.

Hmm..it doesn't appear to work that way for me.  I'm not using any mods that would appear to affect that.

In Civ you can't even enter your opponent's territory until the parties have an Open Borders agreement.  I basically feel that you should only get the benefit of another sovereign's roads if you have a Non-aggression Pact with them (along with the other suggestions about how roads should be implemented when you take over new cities/outposts or lose them).

That being said, considering the movement bonuses you can acquire with mounts and spells I'd almost suggest that movement should be automatically reduced, much like the outpost improvement, whenever traveling through the land of an opposing sovereign that you are currently at war with. 

This would also work well with my suggestion to simplify Outposts--you wouldn't need the upgrade.  I always thought it was odd that you could get this benefit by upgrading an outpost, but cities couldn't get the same benefit.  The whole outpost implementation is a mess, if you ask me, especially because the AI can't even upgrade them.