I said in an earlier post that Elemental could learn a few things from gal civ 2. I feel that the way caravans are handled can benefit from the way starbases are handled in gal civ 2.

You should have a limited number of trade routes you can hive internally withing your kingdom and a limited number you can have with other kingdoms.

You need to make a trade treaty with other kingdoms in order to send caravans into their territory (zone of influence)

sending additional caravans to the same cities let you purchase additional benefits for your trade route - it can be more gold, or better protection for the route, or other resources such as matts, crystal, horses, metal or diplomatic capital.

In gal civ 2 you have influence which you can use to take over other worlds. I think it would be neat to extend this concept to Elemental's prestige concept. You can use your influence and prestige to overpower the moral of cites and units and take control of them giving another avenue of power and another means to win the game (this also open up the civilation tech to a possible game winning scenario where you build a wonder of the world that boosts your prestige to game winning proportions - why should all the other tech paths have game winning scenarios and not civ ? civ feels lonely, ignored and left out and wants in on the action).

This gives us a better purpose for the buildings as inns and all the others i currently never use because there is no point.

I also think the inn could be used as a source of information kind of like the way many other games report information such as best hero in the game per faction, best unit, best magic attack spell, strongest enchantment etc etc. This could also tie into giving the ai some of the information it needs to properly set its priorities. I'm a strong supporter of only putting things in the game the ai can use so it does not have to chest, but lets put neat stuff in to.