Things get broken, or appear broken, when the suspension of reality is removed (i.e. buildings don't eat food, people do). Even spells have some logic associated to them, higher level spells & stronger spells should have increased mana costs, when this "logic" is broken, players revolt (increasing the teleport cost to 15 from 5).
Immersion is a key factor in every entertainment medium. When done right, suspension of disbelief happens naturally and the medium draws you in without fail. In books, movies, and TV, the process of creating immersion is fairly straight forward, as sections, which fail to draw in the audience or break their suspension of disbelief, can simply be removed or modified to lessen the issue. However, in video games, a developer must make carefully weighted decisions to maintain not only immersion but the fun level. It is easy to say that logic dictates this or that, but this "logic" is merely a predefined rule set one has brought with them to this game medium from those previously experienced. Players did get upset with the teleport change because logic was broken, it was the hardship added to balance out the effectiveness of teleport, which negatively shifted the pace of the game play for many players.
In its current state, Elemental is an interesting sandbox, but lacks the immersion one expects from either a straight 4x game or an rpg. What ultimately differentiates one town from another or one champion from another? To cite a good example, we should look at galciv 2 and consider why one planet is better or worse than another. When one colonizes a planet in galciv2, a couple of things can occur in the game which changes how you consider a given planet's role in your civilization. The first are random events which force the player to make choices about the future of his planet and his civ. The second is the existence of special upgrade spaces which add some bonus to improvements built upon them. Elemental, much like in civ, uses the idea that the surrounding area of a city determines much of the future of your cities, and due to this, the good player preplans his expansion and is rewarded for optimizing space between cities and the resource collection of each city. It is this kind of static experience that drives players to use well defined strategies of optimization, since ultimately a faction taking care to optimize map utility will only improve.
The same is true for the sov and his champions. Since the special abilities of these units is ultimately static, the only method of change is leveling the static stats and purchasing the static equipment. This ultimately leads to no champion feeling meaningful and the player is again left to simply optimize his fortunes. If we look at the Total War games as an example, not for size of battles but for their handling of champion units, those games have each hero unit change over time, sometimes for their better and sometimes for the worse, based upon both randomness and how the game is progressing. Anyone who has played those games long enough knows the dread of finding out your new grandson is a Hooter or that great general you have has become an incompetent city manager. It is these unknowns or random chances that push the player to form new and varied strategies for his play.
