I've apparently done a poor job expressing what I meant.
Territory doesn't seem to matter in this game. All influence seems to do is make the ground pretty and let you access special tiles.
The terrain around cities doesn't seem to matter. I expected that the ground turning pretty meant that I'd get more gold, or food, or whatever. You know, getting rewarded for "rebuilding" the broken world. I expected that dropping a city in a desert would make life harder than dropping it in a grassland, or in a forest. As far as i can tell, it doesn't.
I'd like terrain to matter.
In MoM, cities got certain bonuses for being built on certain kinds of terrain. You could screw up the surrounding terrain tiles through magic like Corruption or Raise Volcano. There were special tiles, and targeting them first was of course a good idea, but the buck didn't stop there. Given enough time, the entire area could be destroyed, severely crippling the city's usefulness.
In Age of Wonders, cities would gradually grow farmland around themselves which raised gold output. Certain spells could destroy that, especially Death and Fire-type, if I remember correctly. There were also combat bonuses on certain kinds of terrain, if I remember correctly. Undead, for instance, fought better on Wasteland and worse on Grassland.
In Alpha Centauri, citizens had to "work" the tiles around their city to generate resources. The tiles could be improved like Civilization, but they could also be messed up. Firing a missile full of xenofungus at an enemy city could render their terrain worthless, resulting in starvation and revolts. Raising and lowering terrain could change rain patterns, which screwed up, or improved, food production. You could even sink a city entirely if you continued to lower the terrain around it.
These are just some examples of how other 4X-es have handled terrain and its relationship with resource production.
Elemental is running into the Chekov's Gun problem. You're letting me change vast swathes of terrain through my magical influence, but it doesn't do anything. The land goes from broken to beautiful and my people are no better off for it.
This is why I don't like the current special-tiles-are-the-only-tiles-that-matter system. Every other tile is just dead, empty, worthless, boring space -- no matter how cool it looks.
