Elemental looks promising. Started the campaign but got board with it and tried the sandbox games, much better. Some random ramblings follow.
The constant 'out of memory' crashes and ineffective UI are annoying. The strategic game is its strongest point, while it does not have the depth of Fall From Heaven (FFH) I can see it getting there in time. The tactical game I found disappointing in comparison say with the Age of Wonders series AOW.
The way information is displayed is very bad. Don't they have a professional UI designer? The idea of a UI is to make it easy for the person using it. Civ have got it mostly right (after a couple of decades of development) they should not be too proud to copy the bits of their UI that work.
Strategic Game.
A list of all your cites and status like hitting F1 in civ. When you research something giving a 15% bonus in something and costing 1GP a turn, you want a nice list of cites you can look at to see where to build it. You should be able to navigate from there to the city screen and back.
And while we are on cites, when a city grows you should be able to see the stats on a city. Which resource do you get your +30% in. No one can be expected to remember all there cites. Currently you ether don't bother, keep a paper list or save and reload each time a city grows. Fix this.
When on the city page that looks like a book you should be able to scroll through your cities using an arrow thingy in the BLHC.
A similar list of heroes and heroins. Less important but should be there.
Diplomacy screen. A relationship between leaders like in Civ would be good. You have the information but have to work really hard to get it.
The list of techs researched is there, very good but unfortunately after the first few techs it becomes unusable. When you look at it all you get is the number of techs researched in each discipline. You want something similar to Civ's tech tree screen where you can see at a glance the state of your research.
The maps don't really work. The isometric looks pretty but it is very difficult to tell things apart with everything similar colours. The hover over tool tip does not seem to work properly. If a unit is sitting on something its difficult to find what's underneath without moving him off. Do something about this.
Maybe add an option to put a colour squares around stuff – red, blue and yellow for units, brown for locations green for resources or something similar. And a nice list of everything on a square not just the top thing. Oh and how about have neutral units you can hire looking different from neural units belonging to another civ. (orange and yellow maybe?)
The cloth map is better at distinguishing things, but is larger scale making detailed movement more difficult.
Minor point:
Moving a unit manually should switch off auto explore. (Grrh!)
Tactical game:
I saw another nice post pointing out the flaws here. AOW and Heroes of might and magic HOMM got it right in two different ways. Elemental seems to have the worst of both worlds. Really I think this can only be saved by a complete rewrite along AOW lines.
Magic and combat is unbalanced in favour of zap your dead magic. Not necessarily wrong. However I feel the whole spell system needs an overhaul with respect the relative cost and level of spells.
