1.08 Resource Scarcity.

Never took organized. Never needed it. I play large maps with 9 ridiculous AI opponents. You can adapt to the slower movement speeds. Yes, it does sometimes mean some early game skirmishes with peasants and observers, plus some good summons to make sure you win the battles. AIs that are too close to you and declare war early is actually an opportunity to go take their main city, solving your resource shortage problem. The best defense is a good offense, as they say.

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i actually like the resource scarcity.  before it was just to easy to get a bunch of stuff.  you should be out there fighting for them.

I honestly find abusing summons to be more game breaking than organized. I understand that you should be able to adapt to the situation as you would in any game. What I am saying is whats fun about 100+ turns of fighting with low tier units and summons? I don't want to be forced to rush summons because its the most viable strategy at the moment.

In addition taking an AIs capital that declares on you early is fine but at the rate they declare at the moment taking 2-3 people out of the game by turn 150 is a bit extreme at the current pacing. Plus this early war will put you quite a bit past(in experience) the unmet AIs unless they have declared each other.

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Kadrium, I agree that tiles should have something to them like Civ. Just simply costing more or less to move on them is lacking. I guess the argument is that these tiles provide something in the tactical battles that are equally lacking at the moment.

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Another question is it intended that your mine and food resources should be with in your first city's grasp? Are you finding that you are splitting your food/gold resources into 2 cities?

I noticed that there are significanly less level 0 starting goodie huts. I was actually out of metal for 18 turns at the start of my current game, I couldn't find a wrecked caravan .. should've build that workshop right off .. less huts, less gold purses, less wrecked caravans, less ancient battlefields ..

I use to take organize a lot, but recently haven't (felt that it was just too cheesy since the AI is hopeless with it), so that change haven't done anything for me (I play on a custom ridiculous difficulty without map hack for the AI). It definitely take a bit of getting use to, but once you do, it's not really a big deal. The teleport cost thing did more to change my play style, but all it really did was made me push up tower of essence earlier on my research queue, and now my sovereign never cast anything except teleport (my imbue heroes cast battle spells). It's a bit of a change, but it really didn't matter all that much in the end. I was still able to lure AI attacks with empty cities and kingdom kill them with teleport. 15 turns per faction... until I put up tower of erog.

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How do you do this custom difficulty?

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Brad stated that what makes elemental different from other titles is that you can actually sim battles for decent results. This is because tiles that are within the tactical battles are heavily utilized by the AI. I assume that the type of tile you start a fight on produces more of X type of tile in tactical combat. At least I hope this is how things work. Again I would still like to see each tile mean more or each title able to be improved later in the teach tree like Civ or GalCiv.

A quick mod to toggle map hack off, nothing difficult. The reason I turn it off is because it seems like the map hack hurts the AI more than it helps.

Well, by the same token, what's the fun of rushing to all the uber end game techs? I quite enjoy the early game exploration and expansion with early era (i.e. crappy) units. Whether you rush to take 2-3 AIs out early is up to you, I only do it if they declare war on me or I've totally run out of places to expand to peacefully. If the AI is aggressive and declares war on me, I don't feel guilty at all about putting some fire giant hurt on them and taking their cities.

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It seems to me there are more phases in the game than just rushing to the highest techs.

There is an era where the best of the best are clad in leather armor perhaps with a tier 2.5 weapon(battleaxe/longsword/warhammer I think this is what they are) but more often not. Perhaps you have amulets on your troops if you had crystal early. Spider minions.

You have your first kids in this or the next.

Era of plate if you went warfare or legendary plate and tier 3+ weapons if you had a crystal and teched magic. Your next set of kids is progressively godlier.

Era of best diplomatic minions, units with best weapons/armor, and hard hitting spells. Your kids solo their armies.

My point is that because of the likelihood of early war the robe/staff fighting era is disproportionately long vs the leather armor era. 

Resource distribution is very very spotty.
I'm not even talking about shards or crystals.  They are the super rare artifacts from before the apocalypse.  Fine.

But what about basics like gold or even metal?
In my last game, 2/3 of the (large map) continent had exactly 1  gold mine. (read: one)   The one at my spawn location.

Lucky me I had plenty of metal mines. Alas I could do diddly with all that metal because I could barely afford any troops to use them.
Don't even think about buying some gear for the sovereign because that's "gold only".
And that's the second game in this week where that happened.

So what are you expected to do in such a situation?
It's not like you had any choice to build or pay troops without gold.
You can work without metal to a degree, maybe building lots of longbowmen because your melee troops will get slaughtered.
But that takes a lot of gold to make up the lack of metal.  Which is okay.

Now how would you make up the lack of gold with metal, material, or crystal?  You can't very well recruit and pay your troops with crystals.
All these "additional resources" are just that.  An addition to the requirement of gold.

Guess I'll have to see if I can mix up a Prosperity spell that boosts a city's gold income by... whatever.

Build cities in empty space, use caravans to make food, build merchants to make gold. It's not that hard.

Seems to me the medium map seeds are messed up. Large maps still get a gold mine somewhere near my start. On the medium size maps sometimes not getting a gold mine where now there is always supposed to be one somewhere near your start.

I' after a few games with 1.08 and can't agree with OP. It was quite easy to get +15G and +15F with about four cities. Even without any resource research. The thing is not to start with tech research to early (maintenance) and getting rid of excessive huts in conquered cities.