Should every turn matter so much?

Remember that there will be big changes to AI and the game in general in version 1.1 to be released within a few weeks. I think this discussion will be more interesting after that. Still I would say that each turn is just as important in CIV IV on higher difficulty levels. In Elemental the AI is a pushover no matter what you do in my experience.

I would say it's more a matter of pacing. Since one can achieve victory so readily (if not easily), there's nothing to draw out the experience and generate dynamics in the gameplay. This makes the early start much more important since you get that first advantage and that's all you really need.

To be fair, MOO2, which is arguably one of the best 4x games of all time suffered the same problem.  Even on impossible, there always came a tipping point that if you could withstand, the game invariably became one big downhill mop-up.

But I do agree that this seems more pronounced in Elemental.  The game simply doesn't draw you along like Civ does and force a pace that nearly guarantees each 'x' to be fleshed out.  Early rushing and city spamming is basically available with no downside from turn 1.

so why haven't you increased the pacing setting? I'm trying a medium map on hard with a fast pacing to see what happens if you will...

In 4x games as well as RTS games the early game matter a ton going into the mid and late game era's  since these games are essentially economic or population growth games they are geometric or logarithmic growth sims to some degree and the faster your growth engine the less handicap or greater strength you'll have ...  fundamental trait to these types of games ...always has been and I think always will be.  Almost by definition...

Unless I really don't understand what the pacing setting does I don't see how that would help.  My issue/complaint is partly that things move too quickly.  Accelerating the speed of research and city growth will increase the problem.

Using research as an example, on normal pacing, once you get a tech resource or two research never takes more than about 5 turns, and as little as 1 turn.  This means being even a turn behind another player (AI or human) is a big deal.  If research took longer, like say ~20 turns, 1 turn wouldn't matter so much. 1/20th of a tech behind or between 1 tech and 1/5th of a tech behind?

The way it is right now it just feels like a single turn matters too much.  I'm comparing to games like MoM and Civ where a single turn isn't such a huge deal.  The games drag on well into the hundreds, if not thousands of turns (not often), and so a single turn becomes less significant.  In EWoM a single turn can easily represent 1% of the total game that actually matters, as opposed to 0.5% or less.

Pacing makes research (tech and arcane) takes longer or shorter. It's not uncommon to have a later tech taking 10-15 turns on epic, where as on fast, it is very short (5 or so). So if you want to draw things out, it would be better to play on Epic. Also, rushing is a major no-no if you want any sort of challenge, the AI doesn't do well enough to counter this, and taking over a few early capital gives too much of an advantage. Of course, no matter what you do, the AI will still be lacking, so it's not like it'll magically make a difference.

Expansion and starting position issues has been discussed quite a bit already in other threads.

To be fair, I think this is pretty common for many games of this genre.  I often quit my Civ IV/GC2 games far before they are over because they become boring mop-up games.  The most interesting and fun parts of these games for me are at the beginning where every decision is much more critical to your success.  On the other hand, the AI does need drastic improvement, which I know it will get.  The AI in GC2 was pretty good, so I'm sure that the AI in Elemental will be getting some major love.  Once the AI is improved, I expect victory won't be quite as easy to guarantee as it is now.

Try the epic pacing setting, it definitely helps, especially on large maps.

Yeah, it seems the nature of the beast of 4X games. And it's not like we can just 'recognize' that you've won and are in clean up phase easily. Moving the victory conditions further inward so it happens sooner just moves the cleanup phase with it. Perhaps simply a 'Retire' command that ends the game right now and assigns victory based on that (Retirement Diplomatic Victory versus Full Diplomatic Victory). So at least there's some reward for getting to the clean up phase."

But the "epic" setting doesn't mean the game will last "longer", it just means it will be more exciting and dramatic, right?

Seriously, though, this issue should probably wait until AI has been fleshed out substantially.  I don't think there is a way to ever completely fix this issue.  Every strategy game in existence suffers from it to one degree or another.

Yeah, I'll just bite my tongue on that one.