Yes, you'll be able to lay seige to neighboring settlements, or perhaps you find a abandoned village that, once freed of the infestation of monsters, is free for you to inhabit and rebuild.

At the start of the game, building a new city should be a major decision.

What about technology or spells that make land habitable without essence expenditure?

The idea of putting up Altars, or similar, to spread influence & cleanse the land could be a fun one. The essence drain in putting one up would be fairly large, but the more you put up, the faster cleansing will spread from that point. Depending on the nation, wheter you corrupt the land, drain the land, reinvigorate the land, or all other possible ways to change a land, your nation would gain specific benefits.

As such, two nations could end up "battling" eachother through the altars and the transformative influence. I know that *I* would have quite a few altars along my borders.

In the interview at gamespot, it was said that you could build multiple buildings per tile...I'm curios as to how man that will be. Im guessing somewhere in the neighberhood of 4 buildings per tile that seems like enough to were you able to develop each tile well, but not so much that you won't want several.

Oh I would like that very much.

Only problem I see is an increase in the need for micromanagement, if I have to build a wall in every edge tile of my city.

Judging from this screenshot you can have multiple walls inside a city, which could lead to interesting sieges where you have to conquer multiple parts of the city separately until you can conquer to keep. If you could design the layout of the walls for yourself depending on the map, that could make for very interesting cities (on rivers, near mountains, etc.)

Maybe they could borrow the wall tool from The Sims.   Seriously, though, something like that would be nice for determining the placement of walls, unless that just happens automatically for you and you just need to choose to have them or not (assuming you can afford them).  Or maybe walls will just be included.  I mean, realistically, how many large cities in a fantasy land wouldn't just build in cities as they expand?  I've often thought having to specifically build walls is silly.  Now, upgrading those walls or building walls out beyond just the proximity of the city would be a different matter.

Even if you're playing a nation that is less magic-centric than certain others, magic will always be there, and the cleansing of the land is one of the core mechanics tied to that magic, from what I gather.

If you're able to balance that, then by all means, be my guest.

But true, I understand what you're getting at. Not anti-magic, but rather "the absence of magic". While I don't believe there'll be any magic-less nations, I'm sure you're not going to run the risk of every single one of the 12 nations being high fantasy magefests.

It's just that I think it'll be such a core of the gameplay that being a magic-less nation is pretty much out of the question. It'd be like.. having a nation without a tech tree. As for non-magical ways to settle, that's at least likely. I don't think you'll need to expend magic to cleanse the ground everywhere, every single time you want to put down a system.

Hopefully, cleansed lands will spread from the point of origin, because going around cleansing tiles-by-tiles sounds more like a chore than anything else, and I know that I want the full extent of my land covered in bear-filled woodland!

I suppose one way this could be modified is that non-magic methods can be swapped for essence, say a money centric nation could "buy" essence to utilise and this transaction would take place at time of use.  So instead of (for example) paying 100 essence to build a new city the trader spends 100 gold to build the city.

Hehehe...... a challenge.  Let's see when I get my hands on the game then. 

And I ain't scared of a challenge.  Gee, I made Civ4 Colonization playable.  This should be a cake-walk.