Below are ideas for additional game modes that would most interest me and would provide additional challenges and twists to the game.
Survival:
You are given a head start of x turns before survival mode starts, you have to survive y turns to win with every turn over that giving bonus points.
1. Zombie horror
A necromancer has risen and is experimenting with creating undead, he is immortal and every city he captures becomes a spawing ground for his infernal creations. (starting with zombies in proportion to the city population, then stronger undead... plague zombies, skeletons, ghosts...)
2. Demonic hordes
Monsters are being summoned by the shards themselves, expect demons based on the shard type of increasing strength... control the shards to stop the forces from building up before they attack.
3.Natures wrath
Expect the seas to cover the land, mountains to rise, deserts to sweep over farms and villages turning wheat to dust... plagues, famine and war with nature itself... giant spiders wander the land, food for the parasitic wasps, giant worms and armies of ants.
Or, simply the mode when 'Barbarians' are included as either a player controlled entity or AI, see 'barbarian' below
RPG:
You have no control over city building or anything other than your party of adventurers, play for different goals...
1.Open ended
No connection between your party and any civ... you do quests, fight, stay in cities, try to capture a city or raze it... become pirates, brigands or the salvation of empires. Fight powerful monsters in dungeons or kill wandering do-gooders
2.Sov's chosen
You are the chosen of your sovereign and must do all you can to help said AI achieve victory... you get your equipment and spells from that civ... increased levels of techs and city sizes as well as buildings all influence who you can recruit, what equipment you have and spells you can cast... Your sov goes to war? expect to be drafted for daring raids on enemy cities, otherwise you can help your civ locally or spend your time making life difficult for others
3.Story driven
You are given a series of story quests, each of these advances the story and increases the difficulty of all enemies and makes the game harder. You can do as many normal quests as you wish and only some objectives will be timed.
-cure your wasting disease (lose if you die, you weaken every 10 turns)
-end the war (control both sides of the war, find artifacts sacred to each side or become a menace to unite enemies)
-Defeat x (monster, NPC, civ, sov)
-Protect y (as above)
Barbarians:
You control all those wild creatures, defend the ruins and shards. It would be nice to have as optional opponents too... especially if NPC groups are defined such that you can toggle some on/off... like playing against Gaia or Death... Pestilence and Ents... Gods of spiders or invading demons
1.Gaia
You are the spirit of the land, you see through the eyes of every wolf and giant spider and feel the death of every tree. You start in control of wandering monsters and gain power for every injustice done against you and power for every victory done in reclaiming the land. This equates to the power of your recruits from each creature dwelling being dep on the same factors that would normally determine them (turn, number of cities, total population) as well as other factors (trees cut down, minerals extracted, resources capped). You could gain 'research points' for example in proportion to total player research points allowing you to research high strength creatures.
You could gain points from each resource capped by players and each animal killed (anger), which you could use to send monsters from dwellings to attack... however you need 'life' generated by resources under wild control to create new creatures to fill those dwellings. So you couldn't attack players if they tread carefully... but you could fill every cave with troglodytes and spiders and have every tree a living creature just waiting to walk the land smashing down castles. If you have shards under your control you can create enchanted creatures for your dwellings or cast spells (think natural disasters, earthquake, tsunami, fire, floods, volcanic eruptions... no darkness, fire arrows or battle spells, unless you control drayads/sprites or enchanted creatures like spider shaman).
Win by killing all those that would harm you (doesn't include races like elves, nomads, or those that worship animals) or by controlling x/y resources/shards and creating and keeping an embodiment of gaia for 'z' turns, which generates enchanted creatures each turn.
Lose by having no more creature dwellings, or by every resource, or shard, being capped.
2.Death
You are the spirit of death itself, you command the undead and life taints your world. You control the undead, generated after battles and slowly based on city populations natural death rate. You are famine, pestilence and the spirit of war. Expect to slowly have a limited control over the world... try to cause as much damage to the populations as you can with your few zombies and skeletons as bodies are a resource to you... so is dark energy, drawn from the undead roaming the world and killing life with each step... Promote plagues, destroy resources... and watch cities shrink to your benefit. Once you have a significant presence in the world create an undead converter and turn normal living units (not holy/blessed/imbued/mechanical) into undead each turn until none live to stop you.
Win: kill all living units
Lose by: having the ruins cleared, all undead slain, heroes attack you (picture collecting together artifacts of power to kill death itself... with a large battle on a spectral plane or long ritual)
Edit:
If people wanted to make any game mode like this, rather than hoping some are in vanilla then one thing that would really help is the following map making help:
Any editable property should be able to be tagged "decide on startup" with a tab in the editor for startup options, each tagged variable can be given either a drop down list of options (custom), a slider or a toggle. After editing the startup options each variable would then have the settings shown under it...
decide on startup:Yes
Name:Victory condition
Value edited: (same as above by default, option of picking one or all of grouped/linked items)
Type: (drop down, toggle, slider)
Options Effects:(same drop down box or input as object property normally, select what you want)
Custom title: (each option selected to add to the drop down list can be given a name here)
etc.
So, for survival, you could make a map with entry points set, creature progression set... with the initiation time "set on startup" with a slider from "0-100" you could have creature strength be "low, medium, strong, very strong, immense" and starting resources "none, low, medium, filthy rich", time between waves could be a slider from 1-20 turns. You could even make a script giving the player every tech, give it a "decide on startup" flag, edit it to be a toggle option called "Tech mastery" and you have a new twist to the game mode.
For a campaign if you could have starting bonus decided on startup, enemy strength and score modifier (low, medium, high) and maybe even goals... so you could play the same map with different victory conditions and also different objectives.
The idea for barbarians is that you would have a lot of linked variables all decided by the same toggle called "Gaian": lose conditions, win conditions, scripts active (things like: on unit death gain resource 'anger' units '1', on resource capture by computer players gain resource per turn 'anger' units '1'... creature dwellings ownership...etc)
I'm just thinking of ways of making a single map have as much replay ability as possible... because although I love a nice story and well drawn map... it just isn't worth playing again unless you can change something about it... and being able to change it within elemental without modifications to the map itself would really help.