Sounds good.

I am wondering, at what point are the modding / community sharing tools going to be released? I think it would be excellent if there were already a functioning mod community come launch time.

I'd imagine (completely uninformed-like) the spellbooks would be based on what element/alignment you choose, independent of civ.

I'm assuming that while each faction has their own tech tree and spellbook, they are mostly constructed from "generic blocks". Like there's a spell called "Enchant roads" that speeds up movement on roads when cast, and 3 human and 1 fallen civilization has it in their spellbook(but you need a specific amount of spheres to cast it even then), and "Siege engines" can be researched by all the human civs but only 2 of the fallen ones. Then perhaps some human civilization, let's imagine a barbaric one, has a spell called "Berserk" that is unique to them and can be cast on troops.

Or are all spells and techs more or less completely unique?(somewhat like in Twilight of Arnor)

Oh, and what about units? Are units totally dependant on merely tech, or also the empire in question? Anyone who can research Arcane Steel can get Magic Knights(that are identical regardless of nation), or is it that the units gained from Arcane Steel differ between human empire 1 and 2? Like the knights of a merchant republic aren't as well trained but have better armor than from a feudal kingdom?

It sounds something like:

Faction A- access to spellbook Fire, Water, Air

Faction B- access to spellbook Life, Water, and Earth

Faction C- access to spellbook Death, Air, Earth

Maybe that's too simplified of an explanation, though.  With 6 different magic types, though, that's a decent number of combinations.  And that's just assuming that these spellbooks are that broad.  It could be more refined like:

Faction A- Defense, Economy, and Heroes

Faction B- Channeler Buffs, Troops, and Diplomacy

Faction C- Defense, Offense, and Weather

It will be interesting to see how these spellbooks play out.  And if you can get more over the course of the game.  I assume since you can create spells yourself, there will be a lot of ways to compile a book and how you get access to it.

So, Men and Fallen are like Alliance and Horde, then?

Or we could just refuse to believe in the different factions until sd proves it to us with all the info they have . Still, sounds awesome, are they going to be as distinct as the different civilizations in galciv, or will each race have a similar basic structure. It'd be absolutely amazing if the two races had completely different ways of doing things, and didn't even have the reuse of techs we saw in galciv 2 but were just absolutely different. It'd increase the learning curve a bit, but only two games could give a player a rough familiarity while still making the races feel very different and have the other side's planning feel a bit alien to you.

It would be nice if a spellbook with the spells in it would be published by the developers. So we can estimate the tactical possibilities.

PS: MoM had 210 spells! That was very cool. I hope there are more spells (f.e. taken from MoM+AoW:SM-Spells ) and a lot of spells with intersting effects. Armageddon (MoM), Mass Confusion (AoW:SM) or Tornado (AoW:SM) are very cool. Take a look on: http://aow2.heavengames.com/aowsm/gameinfo/magicspells/

If the game just revolves around spellbooks, maybe you could "learn" them by trading notes.

I like the notion of customizing each faction.  It hinders the "clean slate" philosophy where a player can play any style they want, but I think a very challenging part of any strategy game is to work out the strengths and weaknesses of your own side.  If your side can be any thing / all things, then there aren't so many weaknesses period.

MoMdid a great job here, because it allowed you to pick a race, and then pick your skill points to allocate across different schools of magic and different special abilities.  I hope Elemental does something similar, where you have a couple different axes to work with (e.g., Faction, alignment, etc.) to come up with a faction that plays the way you want to play that particular game.

Apparently the technologies they can develop and the spells the Channeler can research. So I would say spells are both faction and Sphere dependant.

Possibly, though with the emphasis on a modding community, Stardock may not feel the need to focus on developing any 'new' factions (unless they're developing a new aspect of the game that a new faction could be used to introduce).

I'm under the impression that full customization is the goal.