To preface what I am about to say, I have to say that I think Elemental is going the right direction now; but it still does lack in a few areas namely diversity between races, factions, monsters, etc.

The funnest moment I had playing EWOM was when I was fighting spiders. 3 were normal spiders with nothing special about them except being high leveled, there was then this big nasty spider that had a web skill, and another menacing one that had a poison skill. I had to use strategy to make sure that I protected my webbed units from being devoured by the swarm of mundane spiders, kill the poison spider without taking severe damage, and deal with the big one.

This one battle was head and shoulders more exciting than anything else I have ever done in this game, and all it had in it was two unique skills... two! My units didn't have skills (besides + 20% food increase, or whatever else heroes might have); but merely having the monsters having skills made the game more strategic and changed how I played and fought, it also gave depth to what I was fighting, and was not just merely a numbers game. These spiders were deeper in content than dire bears, wolves, bandits, darklings, and even the other players' hordes of soldiers.

So I would strongly encourage adding more skills or special abilities to the game. Skills that can be used in battle, in towns, out of battle, anywhere.
I am going to list 5 simple skills that I just made up in 10 seconds. No they aren't balanced per say, but I want you to think how 5, not 100, but 5 skills would change the game. Then ask yourself, what could 25-50 skills that took more than 10 seconds to make up do to gameplay, variety, etc.

Skill 1: Pierce (Unit with bow may hit all units in a straight line)
Skill 2: Spin (Unit with axe may hit every unit around it)
Skill 3: Backstab (If unit attacks from behind deal triple damage)
Skill 4: Howl (All enemy units have a 10% chance of losing their next turn)
Skill 5: Observe (Player has a % chance to learn a spell cast against them)

Different factions could have access to different skills (thus making them a lot more different), different races could have acces to different skills (thus making them much more different than appearance) different heroes could have access to Unique skills and so on.

So I like EWOM well enough, but I think this alone would boost it towards the top of my favorite games list, because what I think it is missing the most is variety.