Please learn about the game before posting suggestions. A little research would show there are no elves/orcs/dwarves and that factions do have racial terrain.

Yes, there is racial terrain. Kingdom factions spread land imbued with life while fallen factions spread land imbued with death. I'm sure with modding this could be applied a whole number of ways.

Also, you cant expect someone to read one op to understand what you mean in a completely seperate one.

What you suggesting is easily do-able. It’s basically a racial trait that confers a bonus to a certain land type. So as an example, the more of the preferred land type within your city's radius, the more of a bonus given by this racial trait If there are multiple races in a city (which I hope is possible), simply multiply the bonus by the percentage of the city's population the race composes.

As for your other thread, these forums add in more spaces if you copy and pasted from other programs like word, or if you hit enter twice to separate paragraphs. It makes posts look a lot longer than they are, and your other op looks very long. I'd suggest deleting all those extra spaces. Also bold your subtitles in order to highlight them. It breaks up long posts and allows people to digest it in chunks.

Outlaw - more than just bonuses for the cities... armies should move faster (or fight better, etc.) on prefered terrain if they are made up entirely of a race that gets that bonus. 

I made your suggested fixes to the other post using the in-forum editor. Let me know if its easier to follow now.

Jafo - Sorry about that- I don't know what happened- it appeared as plaintext to me in the editor.

The bonus for cities was just an example. You can easily extend it to indviudal units outside in the city. FFH has something very simialar to what you are suggesting. Races have different sets of bonuses depending on what land tile they are on.

I wouldn't restict these bonuses just to armies as a whole. Simply give it to individual units. If in your army there are certain units composed of a race not recieving the movement bonus, then they just simply fall behind. Let the player decide whether or not to slow down so everyone cathces up, or send out the speedier racial units to attack.

As for your other thread, its still very long and it covers many different topics. I don't even know where to begin replying to it. I think its better to break up each of those subtitles into their own thread (like you did here). You'll get a better discussion, and then once that discussion is finished post another one.

FFH is Fall From Heaven 2, a mod for Civilization 4.

And there are dwarves and the like in Elemental. Just read the civilization descriptions. It even says "In another world, these people might be called dwarves." So while they aren't called Dwarves as such in elemental, for all intents and purposes, they are dwarves. Though I guess it might just be a placeholder description that's ironic, who knows.

But anyway, I agree that it sure would be nice if terrain suited an empire. Perhaps not on a racial scale, but it would be nice that a certain terrain characterized a certain empire. "That swamp kingdom in the East." That'd cause them to have more personality. But since we don't truly know how the game works, it might be just that. The channeler would turn his lands to swamps with magic, and his nation would have people that have the Swamp Survival ability.

Empire based would be OK too, but I like the idea of race-based more only because it would make it so if two different empires had the same race they would use the same terrain. Doesn't really make sense that two goblin empires would like different terrain.