I picked up Elemental:FE just the other week, and I'm already greatly enjoying the game. Started off playing on very easy mode due to being traumatized by the AI in GalCiv, but the FE is less like playing the defense minister of Poland, which is definitely a plus. Wonderful game so far, and the modding options are great. I've already been doing a bit of tinkering. =D
I do have a suggestion however. My suggestion would be to allow an option to allow some aspects of the game to be automatically managed. With very large games or long games there can be a great deal of busywork that needs to be done very turn by the player, which really doesn't add anything to the game except to make turns take longer.
The first thing I would recommend would be a way to have cities automatically build improvements whenever they are idle. My suggestion would be to have an idle city automatically queue the improvement that costs the least amount of production to complete. When idle it will then pick another improvement, then another and another, until it eventually builds all improvements. As it would start with the lowest production cost items, it would roughly evenly build up the entire tech tree starting with the lowest tier buildings, eventually building everything possible.
I'd also suggest that included with this city auto-management would be outposts or resources within the city's range. If there is an unclaimed resource or an outpost missing some improvements, these will also automatically be queued by the city in order starting with lowest production cost to highest production cost.
When the city is upgraded to the next level, the player should be prompted as to what kind of city you want, as that is an important strategic decision. Having a fortress vs an enclave, or having a prison vs a strike garrison are useful decisions for a player to make. Building a well first or a market first really isn't that big of a decision. Its quite trivial, so that can be auto-managed so that the player can focus attention on things that matter.
Adding in a check mark box that can be selected next to each city to toggle on or off auto-management (default off) would allow the player to easily decide to micromanage or not micromanage a city.
On a similar topic as this, I'd suggest an option for research. For long games, everything will be finished except for the repeatable technologies. With larger numbers of cities, it only takes a single turn to research these things, causing the research window to pop up every single turn. This can get a little tedious sometimes. I'd suggest another check mark box to allow research to be handled automatically, such as a random technology being chosen each time, but the player will not be bothered until the player decides to change the decision to auto-manage by revisiting the research screen.
Edit:
My apologies if this is already in game. It seems somewhat basic. If this is already in game, I'd greatly appreciate knowing where these options are. I tried to RTFM, but I might just have the dumb. 