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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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