Since this game isn't set on Earth a day doesn't necessarily mean 24 hours everyone is just assuming that. So the amount of time that passes in the game could theoretically be whatever you wanted it to be. That being said I like the idea of an interactive weather system and a day / night cycle. An added bonus as another thread suggested would be battles that take multiple world map turns to complete.   

I personally think that weather effects would be really cool.   Like Lord reliant suggests, you could get a skill or ability as a channeler that might let you predict the weather (maybe the ones that choose the meteorician skill at the begining of the game will know what the next day's weather will be)

I see some ideas for spells too

Rain mastery >  increases chance of rain in area + provides boosts to some water spells

Storm call  >  causes rain effect

Thunder strike > direct damage spell boosted by rainy weather

earth to mud > slows units crossing mud terrain > area effected increased by rain weather

Blizzard > causes heavy snow weather effect

freeze > has a % chance to freeze the foe solid > chance increased dramatically if in heavy snow

freezing wind > direct damage spell that does extra damage in snow

water bolt > direct damage spell that has an added freezing or slow effect when in snow, extra damage in rain

eternal night:   Darkens the skies cooling the land> boost undead and certain other 'dark creatures'

light of day:   holds the sun in the sky raising temperature> boosts all light and fire creatures, harms certain 'dark' creatures

the power of the sun:  A unit ability that means it gains bonus during sunny days, but handicaps during cloudy , raining, or otherwise dark days

the power of the night:  A unit ability that means it gains bonus during dark days, but handicaps during cloudy , raining, or otherwise sunny days

Fires of the sun:  A direct damage spell that is boosted by daylight

Chill of darkness: A direct damage spell that is boosted by darkness

UPDATE:    (more ideas)

Dread rain:   Causes the magical storms stike fear into enemies and rally support for your cause:  Adds a moral effects to rain weather  

fire storms:   Causes rain effect with high chance of lightning strike, except the lightning does fire damage rather than electric damage (ie, fire creatures could be immune)

drout:   Drys the land > removes chance of rain effect and lowers production on certain tiles.

There's no 'd' in pigeon!

I am always in favor of any feature being an option if somebody wants it, so long as it doesn't take too much of the devs' time. (Or completely go against the style of the game, such as if somebody requested for there to be a mega event where the world is invaded by Carebears, leveling all evil in their path with their Carebear Stares...)

Yeah, I understood that. But first of all, I don't see how it would work. If you've played 4 games and your channeler is still alive, and you start a new one, you're starting out with a much more powerful channeler than you would normally, but without any of the infrastructure or civilization that should come with it/enable it. It wouldn't be that hard to end up with a game where on Turn 1 all you have is a backwards band of 100 followers, but a channeler capable of destroying the world.... Likewise, if the channeler is the only thing that carries over between games (and not technology, cities, armies, etc) it would be abusable. People would likely play their first few games with a focus on improving their channeler, and then when they play their next game (probably their last with that channeler), they could just go all out. Secondly, it just doesn't make sense. One moment your channeler is the leader of a civ that has taken over the world, and the next he's sitting in the boonies in some undetermined location with naught but a ragged band of followers?  So much for immersion...

That, I don't have a problem with - as an option. It'd be like in Civilization, really. You can play with a turn limit there, but I personally never do. What I am opposed to is being able to start a new game with a channeler from a previously completed game. 

on the subject of age the channel spends taking over the world(s)

I actually want to have a strong variable for how many turns can be expected.   the difference between the different game speeds in Civ 4 makes Civ 4 such a great game, in my opinion.   I love playing marathon games (1000+ turns) which I think is close to how MoM was back in the day (I always recall the game being many hundreds or even thousands of turns) but I like playing by e-mail as well, in such cases usually the games are only like 100-200 turns, because you put it on the fast speed and you basically can cover the map in 5 turns.   I would never play that way in person over lan or something, but I love having the option.

it also brings up something important to how the game will be played.    If the channeler is a mobile unit that can lead armies into battle, assume he isn't as worthless as the wizards in AoW (they didn't do anything in battle they couldn't do from their tower, I think) then it will be benifitial to use them.  This means the wizard will be out capturing nodes and cities and such (things that normally you'd have to wait longer to get a bigger army, made easy because you have a power-house of a wizard in your ranks).     This means, if killing the wizard is perma-death or even if it just pulls and MoM and sends them to the shadow-realm, err, I mean limbo....     you basically now have free raign in their turf early game, since they wouldn't have much of an army.  So you charge your channeler into the enemy capital and wins the game.   this means, games could potentially be rather short, and such things as age don't matter because the game won't last long enough to really fully develop the tech tree anyway if it turns out to be benifitial to hero rush somebody (i.e. warcraft 3)

Something to consider

That could be really cool if done well. Especially if their names and skills/beliefs reflect their heritage. It could potentially allow for some LoTR-like stories, even. That said, I'm very wary of it. Heroes dying of anything but combat puts me a little on edge, especially because of the investment of essence that they require. I mean, generals and all the other units dying in Total War often bothered me, and they didn't require any corresponding permanent investment from you. It's kind of depressing to finally get one of your generals to really shine, only for him to die soon after from old age. I don't know about you but I tend to get attached to my characters in games, but if you know they're all going to die of old age then it kind of forces you to detach yourself from them, otherwise you'll just become frustrated. So like I said, if done well it could be really cool, but doing it well seems like a really difficult balancing act.

I'm not happy about feeling like I have to agree with you about the "difficult balancing act." But, I'm a terribly demanding computer, and my interest in something like a multigenerational line of heroes is driven by the idea of a 'truly epic' fantasy game. And given the lack of info so far (plus Stardock's lonstanding rep for responding to player feedback), your worry about losing the essence investment when the founding hero of a lineage dies is an open question. I still prefer the idea of Dead Channeler = Game Over, but I have no problem with the idea that a hero can have a successor who will inherit the essence when that hero dies.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I also get attached to 'prominent' units in my games, but I'm just getting old enough to be basically convinced that any serious claim to being 'epic' means you need multiple (or many, many multiples of) 'mortal' generations. After all, it's much easier to think of a statue in the town square as the portrait of a True and Pure Hero if that person has been dead longer than anyone around you has been alive.

Sure.  I could see it being a changing number that is based on several factors.  One I would want to add is 'game length' so that as time went on, you could get more heroes.   "war tension" or something similar would also work.   Like, so that the hero cap is higher at late game than at early game.

I think it would be alright if you had something like 'great leadership' or something that you could pick at wizard creation that let you get more heroes then others.   Then the number of heroes could be soft-set by a 'Hero count = high, medium, low' setting at game creation.   So if the game is going to be swarms of heroes, it would be set to high.  If heroes should be rare, it can be set to low.      Then the channelers that focus on hero building get more heroes than say, the one that plans to focus only on summoned units, but it is still adjustable at game start.

Each turn was a season, and there were 5 seasons (including the 'mystic' season or whatever it was called, where all you did was allocate your magic points).

If they actually implement meaningful weather, for a 4X game like Elemental I'd prefer multiple turns per season. If each season is represented by just one turn, you can't really work weather into your strategy very well. For example if your make heavy use of Mammoths and you want to invade your neighbor, you might wait until winter to do so. So on the winter turn, you take over an outlying outpost. Next turn, springtime! Too bad, your mammoths are only at 80% strength now, must retreat! It'd be very fidgety. On the other hand if seasons are represented by more turns, you can actually create long-term plans to utilize the seasons to your advantage. Whether each season is 5 turns or 50 turns that would still be the case, but the longer each season is in turns the more important it becomes.

I'd say botch the idea for turns being "days" or "weeks"; simply have "turns" being "turns".

Add a regional weather system, and seasons that last 24 turns each (long enough to be felt, but not so long it'd start to annoy you), and divide a year into 4 seasons (96 turns, which sounds a lot more than it actually is).

This'd allow us to have our seasons, have our sense of temporal flow (4 seasons = 1 year) while everyone can make-believe on their own how long an actual turn is, without breaking immersion (as previously stated, who's to say that this planet have a 365-day year?).

If weather is added, have it be determined by a tile-by-tile basis, turn-by-turn, with adjacent tiles having a higher probability of having the same weather as other adjacent tiles, multiplied by the number of adjacent tiles (to avoid having a completely random weather system, with a completely dry spot in the middle of a raging thunderstorm).

Some friends gave me the Children of Hurin for my birthday last month, and the volume (which includes lots of editorial content by Christopher about his father J.R.R.'s lifelong work) plus this thread leaves me even more hungry for what is probably (at the moment anyway) an impossible feature: some sort of 'geared' calendar for singleplayer mode.

I'm sure many players would not care, but there's clearly a good early faction of folks who love both wargames and epic fantasy novels. I want them happily married, but that would need some way to have a game that spanned at least a few human generations. The idea of having 'meaningful landscape features' is in there also--if you slaughter a vast army and pile the corpses in a great hill, shouldn't you eventually be able to see that hill become landscape, perhaps even a new Place of Power? Heck, even a great hero's grave should be able to work like that.

But I have no idea how a modern 'transmission' for a game calendar might work. The only thing like it I've seen is the progress through historical ages in Civ, where the turns stepped down to be shorter and shorter calendar chunks. In wishes-were-fishes land, I'd like a singleplayer mode that shifted the time/turn ratio according to context--shorter turns when combat, trade, or diplomacy are 'hot' and longer ones when things are quiet from the player POV. A nigh-impossible thing like that might also be good for seasonal effects, since war in a frozen winter (or even a serious monsoon season) is something many culture's traditionally avoided. March got its name for good reasons, after all.

In agreement.

It could be kind of fun to have the weather in the game driven by the equations from chaos theory. Considering the small scale, that shouldn't bog down things too much. Then again, programming it...

In the end, if weather effects are implemented, they should be placed so that they have a noted effect upon the game, be it for resource creation, consumption or military '(de)buffs'. It also opens us up to a whole slew of weather-effecting spells. Perhaps you could create a heat wave in the middle of winter and melt the snow around your capital alone, so that your defenders have a greater advantage?

Er, apologies. I actually meant to put more than that in there! Posted it as I was being called away to breakfast, so I didn't double-check it. Fixed.

As note, I don't want to simply remove weather and seasons from the concept either. I just don't see the benefit of having turns being a specific, Earth-based length of time. A season is as long as it is, and that could be a game-balance issue later on.