This post also got me thinking about how few interesting strategic choices there really are in the beginning of the game. As I outlined above there were approximately 2, maybe 3 choices that I really had to make during the first 20-30 turns turns. I hate to compare with civilization, but I'll compare it to Civilization.

What choices do you have to make in the first 20-30 turns of Civ 4:

Do I build a worker immediately?

Do I build a settler immediately? Or do I build a scout to pop more goody huts and possibly score something big like another tech? These are huge decisions in the early game.

What tech do I research- do I go for techs that help me connect resources or do i beeline to archery or bronze working?

Do I go for a tech that could score me a religion?

Do I start building Stonehenge in my capital?

Do I start building a granary?

All of this takes place in the first 30 turns of civ 4, all are momentous decisions that can affect the remainder of the game having dramatic effects on total population, production potential, income, happiness, health etc.

In Elemental i currently have:

Do I build a hut or a workshop 2nd?

Do I build a build an arcane temple or a study 4th?

I guess you could start building a pioneer early, but a pioneer is such a low commitment of resources that its not much of a decision. Building a pioneer or a soldier also doesn't stop you from building any structures. The only resource most of them both share is materials, and generally my unit production is constrained by gilder not materials, since gildar has so many other uses. Materials usually just build up until their never even a concern, then there's never a tradeoff between building production and unit production. 

Additionally, none of these early decisions have a real impact later on down the road. So what if I built the hut instead of the workshop 2nd? Basically just means my pop is 5 turns behind in growth, a few hundredths of a guildar per turn. No real strategic difference.

Not saying that elemental should be Civ 4 with magic, they're VERY different games. However, I do think i should be faced with a few more momentous decisions early in the game. More than just: do i build that hut in turn 5 or turn 10?

Population isn't used solely for buildings, it's also necessary for military units too, which is when it can start to be a constraint. I never build the beacon straight away; why waste it on your initial city when you can use the prestige boost to push borders into a neighbouring kingdom?

the way i see it is that it's very difficult to increase population costs without pretty much handcuffing people in the early game? personally i think the quick and dirty fix is to simply give the player more population in the first place (ie, start the capital with ~30 people), then the game could just about handle an overall doubling of pop requirements. i'd also recommend making the citizen costs of troops to be several times the number of guys (representing the fact that you are taking breadwinners)

i do agree about the lack of options at the start of the game. too much in this game is locked away from the player at the start. no groups of units, no armour, no equipment for the sovereigns, no spells (how does he know he's a channeler if he can't cast any spells?) and no reseach of either kind. to me the game feels like one long earlygame during whoch i can't do anything fun, while i race to the midgame. and then once i get there it's totally anticlimactic because the AI still isn't using groups and builds too many settlements so they never get economies of scale.

to counteract building spam, improved versions of the workshops/studies were introduced for higher level cities. so effectively we have a system where number of buildings is limited by pop, and their production limited by level. i still think we would have done better limitting the number of buildings by settlement level and have them produce proportionally to population. or simply add more settlement levels and just say " 4 of these buildings at level 3, 5 at level 4" and so forth

giving buildings a fixed pop cost in a game where you can be dealing with towns of 10 people to towns of 1000 people is always going to a tough deal.

It's kind of a mistake to try to use just one resource as the grow limit, a balanced game should have players be limited by different resources throughout the game (people, material, gold, metal, land, etc.). In Elemental it seems you are only limited buy not researching something and not by the actual resource itself. Right now it's too easy to sit back and let (people, gold, mana, resources) build up, while just waiting for the next research to complete.

I actually agree with you on my first two solutions. I think they cripple things to an unnecessary extent. I actually prefer solution number three of making local city population important in some other way, e.g. speed up production on high level units/buildings.

I think this is still the best solution in my opinion. Keep the same population requirements for the level one buildings and ramp up the pop requirements for the higher level buildings. Also there does need to be some sort of cost to spaming the low level repeatable buildings... If we had a cost on spaming building on the same cost (say more upkeep) then we could have a higher level alternative that does the same thing as the lower level building but requires a much much higher pop cost. For example if studys had a punishment for spamming you would have a new level three or four building that takes up four build tiles offers 4/8 tech but costs aload of population.

Really it is up to the devs, but I feel there needs to be tigher balance on pop use... if I want to build 2 world wonders and a palace in one city (which I have in my current game) I should only just have enough pop to do that and field a very modest sized army to defend the city. I should be made to feel that by choosing the put some really cool buildings in one city I have had to sacrifice my ability to use the population as units.

Hmm oddly what is going to make that balanceing act difficult is the fact that just 24 pop could be made into a very decent army so how can you possibly get the balance right when my population is 750 (used to be 1000 before the patch). 

I see two ways theys could go to solve this (I am sure there are more)

1)

firstly they could increase the unit sizes. currently it goes from 3/6/8/12 (or something) if they changed the unit sizes to something like  5/15/30/50 or 25/50/75/100 suddenly armys sizes are more relevent to city population sizes. This however would cause them all sorts of hastle as combat calulations would have to be all reworked as well as actual building costs for units in the unit creation/hireing screen.

2)

secondly instead they could make it so that for every level of armor or weapons you learn in the combat tech tree you have to build something in order to be able to equip troops with them (just like you currently have to do to get archers) These buildings could require fairly large amounts of population (would be up to stardock to tune that balance). This would mean that if you want to build a decent sized well equiped army you could, however importantly you would now have to dedicate a large portion of that citys population to do so. Very little of the population is needed to be the soldiers but a much larger portion is needed to run the buildings that will equip them. The more population you use for war buildings and your army the less you have for the other buildings. You could forget about having an uber army and those world wonders all coming out of the same city and isn't that what we want, to have to make key choices with how we use our population.

Sorry for the wall of text, not even sure how well that reads. But I do feel strongly that this should be looked at before 1.1 and I really like idea number 2.