I don't want to see customization fully go- but I think it should be limited.  No one ever needed units to have chain helms but leather everything else- one set of armor is fine for troops.

Weapons should be upgradable, and accessories should be purchasable (with crystal+gold), and unit size should be buffable,

Then again, this might be made irrelevant by other changes.

I'm also super-interested in individual heroes having individual trees, that should be awesome.

Well mainly is that your enemies have a different objective than the player.  It's not going to be like MOM or AOW3 or Civ (or FE) in that respect.  I think when we get far enough along to show it off, it'll be obvious that this opens the door to having a very different kind of strategy game than we've traditionally done that lets players have a lot more fun.

I guess the opening questions on the problems with a lot of these fantasy games would be:

1. Why do we always have to wimp out the power of magic in these games?

2. Why do we always have to be "careful" in what we let players craft in these games?

3. Why do we always have to nerf the power of heroes in these kinds of games?

The answer is that we're always having to worry about "exploits".  But what if we designed a game predicated on the player being OP'd? 

I mentioned this earlier but Elemental fans can probably appreciate this: YOU start with the Forge of the Overlord. And there's only one of those.  That led to getting rid of the tech tree. The player starts with the assumption they have all that capability already.

Then ask yourself, what are the funnest parts of FE? If you had to list the 3 key things from the game that you enjoy the most, what would they be? The things you personally enjoy and how might those 3 things be made to be even more fun?

I'm not too attached to unit design. The tech tree is cool, but I would much rather have a more interesting system of obtaining spells... but I'm a magic system nut so I'm extremely biased.

You hit the nail on the head with the next part. In a game that is so focused on magic, there need to be spells that pervade every other system in the game. Whether that be geographic or diplomatic in nature, with this type of game you are justified in making spells of any scale (subtle to spectacular) as long as they touch on different systems in meaningful ways. Having more interaction also affords you with the opportunity of creating more interesting combinations of effects. Also, there is nothing wrong with more subtle spells. As long as the balance of the game allows for it, it makes the theme more interesting and also makes more impressive spells... more impressive. There also need to be more high risk/high payoff options as well.

I've never been crazy about crafting systems. To me they always feel too formulaic. It also feels like just a layer of busywork (instead of getting cool stuff, get a ton of boring stuff, then plug that into this device, then get cool stuff). Usually by the time you get everything you need for said cool item, it's obsolete unless you're farming for the stuff you need. But farming stuff is just a huge fun-killer for me (some people do love it).

The only thing that I feel strongly against is that the sovereign doesn't leave his stronghold. I usually play the entire game with my sovereign, and relegate city defense to the many heroes that I find. Personally the sovereign I created is more interesting to me than the random heroes I come across, simply because I created them. It makes it more fun to develop the character as opposed to other characters. I feel like it would be better to have the choice whether or not to keep the sovereign holed up, but it would be cool to have more severe gameplay differences (consequences, pros/cons) between having them out adventuring or citing in the stronghold. You could add some interesting play style differences that way.

Anyways, this is all just my 2 cents worth... You guys already have my attention, and I can't wait to hear more about it!

Sounds like the game I had hoped the current Elemental games would be.  The current units and factions never felt really much different than one another to me, that was my favorite part of MoM and what made it fun to replay for so long, using different races and different magics.

1. strategic spells - more weather control plz

2. i wish there was a real reason to manually layout my cities - some fun meta-game

3. changing the geography of the map over time - "terraforming" / outposts, roads..

The next Elemental game sounds fun. Overall I found LH to be a good game but not a excellent one.

It's strengths were:

-A solid city building system with excellent city specialization.

-Lots of interesting lore and monsters.

-Solid tactical combat.

-Lots of well differentiated champions and items.

-Lots of stuff to do with champions early game.

It's weaknesses were:

-Basically nothing to do in empire building beyond improvement and unit building. No trade or espionage or even micromanagement.

-Shallow diplomacy and victory conditions. Every victory condition was just a slight variation of conquest.

-No water transportation.

-Somewhat visually empty worlds. I mean seriously you use pre-created map sections , why not spice them up? Throw some ruins, doodads, cool looking rocks, and landmarks into the background. Like in the campaign. Just throwing some rocks into the water would break up the maddeningly always the same coastline.  

-The whole upgrading unit's armor and weapons thing played havoc with the scaling, especially against monsters.

-Designable units were incredibly hard to balance and made all units very similar. This could have been fixed with a lot of balancing, some redesign and a lot of new content but I'm fine with it getting dropped.

-By LH races were somewhat differentiated in how they looked and had a few cool bonuses but they still played the same. Like for the Undead some abilities that changed or added basic mechanics is needed for real differentiation.

Getting rid of custom units will fix a few of the problems but I hope the races in the new game will also have different basic mechanics. Then races will be very unique.

This really makes me think we are getting more of a Player against the World type game with less focus on other teams. That would be very interesting and a much better fit for the Elemental world. I hope you still get to fight other players though.

Another possible take is that factions will have different victory conditions which would be cool but somewhat unlikely.

Good post DsRaider, I concur on pretty much all accounts.

Looking forward to learning more about the new game.

Elemental's customization, while great on paper, worked against it in many ways so I'll be happy to see it gone. Not because customization is always bad or can't be "done right" but simply because I want to see what SD can do with a more tightly designed game. 

I just hope that "designing around OP-ness" doesn't end up being an annoying gimmick.