Make sure there is enough variety that the same terrain type can look vastly different depending upon what tiles are applied. (Spooky swamp with lots of dead trees and bones vs a swamp with an abundance of healthy plant life)

Speaking of terrain mattering, the next UPatch for Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic will feature walls made of ice that 'melt' when the terrain under them changes.

I'm going to say it again .

It would be nice if caravan's in elemental steal a page from starbases in gal civ 2 - being able to upgarde your caravan's to modify the growth of your economy into other resources so that caravan's are not just about gold and are able to defend themselves. Otherwise i'm gonna spam that zone of control to keep the monsters back.

I think the most interesting land system I've ever played was Age of Wonders climate system.  AoW had a lot of empty land spruced up with cities and capture points, but the land itself still had a large impact on the game.  In AoW, crops only grew in certain climates based on race and military units got morale penalties/bonuses depending on land.

For example, Frostlings grew crops in the ice, got bonuses in the ice, had creatues that hid on the ice, and had spells that turned land into ice.  As they expanded their conquests, what was once desert and grassland got swallowed up by frost and it added immersion to the game - you weren't just fighting the Frostlings to defend your city, you were deploying magic to resist the encroaching glacier that threatened your army and economy.

How could we adopt this in elemental?  We have 10 predesigned factions, many of which could have land based 'themes' from what the limited backstory we have in WoM.

Tarth - Swamp
Gilden - Mountain
Yithril - Barrens, desert?
Magnar - Defiled land
Paridan - Rejuvinated land

You could have maritime, steppe, winter, etc. themed civilizations.  If you don't want to go that route, you could leave all the civilizations essentially equal but have magic work with the land.  Let factions with 3 water shards turn their land to swamps and expand oceans, let them create Frost Elementals, Swamp Snakes, and Giant Squid to fight, etc.  If you wanted to be daring and take a chance, there are a lot of things you could do with the elemental engine to take the game to 11.

I hope to see tile yields or augmentations (like in MoM a mountain tile gave % increase to hammers).

Otherwise, as someone astutely pointed out, it is no different from a space game with vast distances of nothing

I wouldn't even need this so much.  I'd prefer some thing more along the lines of

A Sawmill (wood cutting camp) must be built on or next to forest tiles.  The amount of forest tiles one can fit under the, "Area," of the saw mill placement determines the materials produced.  In other words, a player needs to work the tiles with a specific job inorder to produce city/empire usable materials.  I'd also expect Old Growth to be surrounded by other layers of forest, not some square off in the middle of no where with no relation to an ecosystem.  I want placing (building) a building to be a strategic choice instead of just saying, "Oh, it gives +25 percent increase to wood (materials)."  I'd also like to see some thing along the lines of city, "Health," like Civ iV had lending to Elemental style techs that modify this.  Perhaps the Fallen ground is poisoness or unhealthy for Kingdom people - the Titan source terraform warping versus the Elemental natural environment.  At any rate, I am intrigued by notes posted.

what I want to see... besides more variety in the land plots,

1. increased line of sight if your on a hill, cause I mean that just makes sense.

2. forest tiles are able to be on hills, currently you can't have forests on hills.

3. Improved rivers... this I know is being worked on haha...

all I can think of at the moment.

No it isn't Civ.  But there's nothing wrong with borrowing from a successful and fun game system.  As it stands, there is absolutely no reason to place a city in any particular spot, unless there's a resource nearby, which there usually isn't.

There is no strategy to city placement right now, and that's definitely not fun.

An alternate method to do this would be to trigger changes at city levelup.  Say the radius of change is 2 tiles smaller than the cities zone of control.  Then the tiles in that radius could be checked- if they contain an improvement tile (building, resource, housing, etc) then it does nothing to them. If they contain the revitalized land (ie the green tiles) that doesn't contain an improvement then it assignes one at random from a generated pool (such as one showing a kind of homestead, one showing more robust plant growth, one with animal life, etc.) to show its 'claimed territory'.  If it already contains one of the 'claimed territory' tiles you could have it alter them by a set randomness or ratio.  Say that the homestead tile has an 80% chance to stay the same, a 15% chance to improve to a more improved tile (advanced homestead), and a 5% chance to drop in grade (either back to a nature tile, or better yet to a dilapidated building tile- which would then revert to a nature tile at the next step).  It could be set up with a kind of branching advancement path that way where if it hit the right change rolls go thrue a cycle of improving and degrading to different states (ie a field to a camp, camp to a homestead, homestead to an abandoned building, an abandoned building to an overgrown brush tile, then to a few trees to a lot of trees, etc).  Something like this would also help make tile repetition less apparent. 

A similar system could be tied to turn advancement to have something like in civ where a forest could claim a tile or be destroyed by weather, though that kind of ties more into events.