Oh, of course. Even some of the most modded games like total war or bethesda RPGs are played in vanilla state by many many players, so the base game should always be good.

about sovereign vs people, what I'm going for there is the idea of government more than anything.  If the sovereign sees a pretty girl on the street does he selt limit his power or does he have the guards carry her off to the palace.  If he decides to go to war, do the people have some say or is it "I have magic, you don't lets get it on!"  Those are the kind of things that really define a leaders nature, so even though the people might follow him they may not be keen on being his personal play things when he's in a bad mood and wants to practice some fireballs.  : )  Though the chance of being hit by a death ray or have your daughter carried off might be less horrible than if the next wizard comes in and just turns everyone into undead servants.  Gotta think of the nature of this world in a post-apocalyptic place with few real cities and huge monsters.  People would flock to an evil sorcerers cities just for the decreased chance of being turned into troll food.

You talk about caricatures, but think about it.  These guys are genuine sorcerers in a world populated with probably fairly ragged, frightened people.  Some might work to the savior or the hero, alot of wizards though would be narcissistic psychos who considered lesser humans unworthy of serious compassion.  But not as evil as the next one.  It happened often enough in history with people who weren't shooting magic rays and teleporting around the world, I'm sure those with more power would be even more likely to view others badly. 

And morally, some economic models are evil by nature...

Truth to tell, there is enough Role play aspect to this game for players to have whatever side they want be evil, conniving malcontents.  Besides don't all tyrants view there adversaries as evil?  A player sovreign can play the noble King Arthur type, rich in virtue or the pre-emptive GW Bush type, or inexperienced Obama type or the uneducated Palin type or the radical Ahmadijkdjfslk-dude in Iran...

1. The Empires[i] can be made different from [i]The Kingdoms by having different fame systems. The former could rule by fear, and the latter by loyalty, for lack of a better word. Different actions would result in reputation gain. Kingdoms might mostly value building of civilisation, perhaps diplomacy. Empires might value forcing one's will, assassination, killing of champions and dynasties, razing cities. More ideas in The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli and this thread:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/347570

2. Making Empires and Kingdoms differ from among themselves:

- one way to do it is by some customs. Squirrels report it is currently impossible to remarry if your spouse dies. The limitation should be lifted from most factions. Select few factions might be very strict about this, and demand that you be burried with your spouse when s/he dies (See one of tales about Sindbad the Sailor). This could be an interesting, additional loss condition and a drawback of an otherwise strong faction.

My guess would be Book 3. A small team creating their own engine while dreaming big can only do so much. I would have preferred less tech trees, more special units/abilities/buildings different for each kingdom/empire, less spell levels with more interesting spells - like change land in order to create new random resources and so on.

I don't know, i think it might be added in the next patches. As you can see, there's not a lot of content in the game so you might think it would come sooner or later.

Anyway, back to topic: as empire channelers have access to death mana, it could be cool to implant necromancy !

Animate Ruins from AoW SM. The fact that you can conquer a city from other faction without revolt seems broken as well.

I didn't play AoW SM, care to develop what it does ?