I'm not seeing what's wrong with Elemental only having two races (and six civs/factions per race).
This has already been discussed deeply on the forum, but I'll provide you a quick summary. The difference is because unique races will have NATURAL traits, attacks, abilities, resistances(even 100% immunities), etc., etc., where as with all humans the variation is very limited. So try and imagine the list of difference between a race of only humans as compared with a race of humans, undead, dwarves, and lizardmen.
Nor what's wrong with initial training being a part of a unit's stats. That seems like an evolution of unit design as seen in some 4x games.
This has also already been discussed, but here's another summary. Currently according to the developer journal an untrained soldier has one hitpoint where a trained soldier has five hitpoints... that's a 500% increase. Now while training should provide a small increase in hitpoints it should not be so extreme because an untrained paralyzed soldier would die almost exactly as easily as a trained paralyzed soldier. Another example would be if both soldiers were struck with lightning damage... there's no reason why the same lightning damage would easily kill one group of soldiers and the same damage only scratch another group of trained soldiers.
Also not sure why land-only (although I'd be surprised if there were no room for navies) is a bad thing. I don't think that a game requires multiple races or environments to have real depth of play.
For one it's another fantasy variable being removed from the game. Heck the game could still have real depth of play... even by removing all magic spells, but this is another example of a fantasy variable being removed from the game. It's like removing two or three colors from a rainbow... the overall result can still be impressive, but it's just not as colorful. The second is multiple realms allows greater strategic options since some realms such as underwater, clouds, underground, etc., may provide benefits/disadvantages for each type of unit or for each type of spell. For example a fire elemental can travel anywhere on a land_only game yet if the game included an underwater realm this summoned creature would be unable to enter the underwater realm. The list is huge.
