dunno much about elemental, but Civilization IV was another great addition to the series and an awesome turn based strategy game.  It was released in 05 and the new one is coming out in fall this year, but if you haven't tried the series, I'd highly recommend it

Fantasy Wars, or the newer version Elven Legacy (And it's.... 3 sequels?) can be had on the cheap and are great games. Have a look at older posts as there was someone asking near the same question earlier in the week.

An original classic from the old days. Had this on my 1st computer long long ago. And no I didn't have to peddle to make it go.

P.T.O. Pacific Theatre of Operations

P.T.O is another military sim from KOEI. In this game you can choose to be either Japan or the Allies. By managing your fleets and ordering new warships you can control many different sides of the conflict. (ship development, Base defense, Fleet arrangement, Direct battle control, Economic decisions) There are many different options of play in PTO, you can choose to play from one of many different famous battles or you can play the campaign. You can control one side or both. There are also limited controls on victory conditions.

It's not that it is difficult, I think, as I've only failed a few times, but instead that it seems almost impossible to do it perfectly. I really like the gold/silver/bronze system and the rewards, but like you found, getting that gold can be near impossible on many maps. But I keep at it

Also: Battle for Wesnoth: Great game, great polish, frequent updates, great single and multiplayer, and it's free. There is no reason you shouldn't already be playing it.

Dominions 3: Very deep, with limitless replayability... Short on the graphics side, if that matters to you, otherwise worth the steep price.

I also enjoy the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, with 11 being the most recent. Polished, deceptively difficult, and a lot of replayability.

Also have a look at  the grand strategy titles produced by Paradox. They are very solid games, but they opt for a variable time/pause-anytime system rather than turn-based.

Dom3 only if you want slow MP (like a turn every 24-48h, beleive me, that's the right pace for it anyway).  Otherwise you will burn out on the SP about a week after you get comforable with the game mechanics.

I'll throw out Sword of the Stars (witih all of it's addons and updates) as a very fun space based 4x.  Simplified strategic map (compared to something like CivIV or GalCiv) but the tech tree, the races, and the ship designs are really what makes it shine.

You do have to be willing to do real time tactical combat (pausible and all that jazz...) though, but seems that's essentially what Elemental is going for anyway.

Civ IV is a great game and obtained at a bargain price w/ all the expansions included now.

Kings bounty doesn't really require much thinking, although the graphics look beautiful. It's purely single player so it's only gonna last around 2 weeks.(also this is a Rpg)

 Civ 4 is great. It's a must play for any turn based strategy gamer.

I did not enjoy GalaCiv.

Battle for wesnoth is awesome. especially because its free. And if you have friends to play with, playing a quick 1v1, FFA, 2v2~~~~ can give you hours of fun. Each Unit also has levels and when they level up. It becomes

 Elven legacy I say it is too expensive if you want to play with all the expansions too. It's also pretty hard, so you have to really try to learn it if you want to play this game.

Sword of the stars is fine.... if you're ok with the art.

Hearts of Iron, and making history,, they look interesting. Anyone played them?

Blasphemy!!! In the battles every move counts and one mistake can cost you the battle. There are so many skills, magical formulas, dragon skills, unit specialties to consider that this actually is very deep I would say. Army composition is an art in this game.

I really should knock some sense into you if I wasnt already planning how to straighten up Mr Raven X for complaining about CIV IV.

Awesome is subjective, I think. I have some issues with King Arthur. I like the fantasy and minor RPG elements melded with largely Total War game-play. However, I'm not a big fan of just how exceedingly scripted the game is. Sure, you can go against the scripting, but that generally gets you killed in short order.

Additionally, the combat aspect of the game leaves something to be desired. Placing your troops into formations isn't as intuitive as it could be, as we can see from any TW game. And troop combat is... strange? In combat your individual units don't even try to hold formation, or follow any sort of physical reality. Instead they implode, converging into a circular melee far too small to have fit even a tenth of those troops, packed shoulder to shoulder. It almost looks like the game dictates that combat must take place within a specific radius.

It's like having your group of spearmen the shape of a classroom ruler engage the enemy heavy infantry unit, roughly the shape of a tennis shoe. The moment the touch, the suddenly shrink down and are all fighting within the confines of a nickle.

What this means is that I can place my men in a simple formation--say infantry up front, and archers behind--but have that work completely negated by a single enemy troop. If an enemy unit attacks one of my front line, they implode, as stated above and suddenly open wide my front line. So much for that shield wall!

The game devs, it seems, tried to work around this by implementing special locations within the battle maps that you can capture for various bonuses and special abilities. Rushing around so makes holding formations nearly impossible anyway. It bothers me that the game comes close to punishing one for organizing one's troops.

HOWEVER: I don't hate the game. It is not awesome. But it is good. I enjoy it more than the Empire TW games, but less than Medieval or Rome or Shogun TW. And I hear there is an expansion coming out, so I can hope for a more refined combat experience.

ok, I might be a bit off the time frame you asked for (ok, way off) but for me Age of Wonders 2 was always one of the best turn-based games. It's 2D art was never state of the art but its kind of timeless - drawn art in games seems to endure much longer than 3d which looks outdated after a year.

in my eyes this game still waits for a worthy successor (I hope elemental could be that) and apparently I'm not the only one as there's still an active community making maps etc

one of the best features was the multiplayer auto-save.. I once had a game with my brothers taking 17+ hours (gigantic map, and we just didn't hurry). without saving this would've never worked (especially because we've fried the electrics once with an overload *g*) without a solid auto save system. its possible to re-open a multiplayer game and even inviting new people or letting the AI take over. it seems simple, but not even current games always provide such mechanisms.

another game of a similar style would be disciples 2. its art is much darker compared to the rather fairytale-like age of wonders. what I liked was the leveling system. creatures did level with xp, but not only grew stronger but changed class completely. which class they changed into depended on the buildings you built - you had 2 mutually exclusive options which changed the way the creature levels. (ie healers for one unit growing up to be able to resurrect or choosing the other path where the healer had a group heal, but no resurrect. you couldn't combine both so you had to decide how you wanted to fight your enemies).

I've enjoyed both games extremely and think everyone liking tbs could potentially love both.

ora

Your best bet is Amazon or Ebay. I picked up 2 extra copies a couple years ago for LAN games through amazon for about $10 each.