And I don't know if it's a good thing if someone can neglect the citybuilding and just boost up heroes and powerup his spellcasting....it will become harder to balance if there's different ways to play. If everybody have to atleast build some cities then the game will be easier to balance because of the similarities.
We already know that one of their goals with Elemental is to allow for many different ways to play the game. Obviously that makes it harder to balance, but it also makes for a better game. Secondly, this is going to be a singleplayer game that is going to happen to have multiplayer support, so perfect balance isn't such a dire need like in RTS's. You don't want things to be out of control balance, but you've got a lot more leeway.
More importantly though, like someone said it's much easier to go with magic power and a few heroes instead of multiple cities (like the difference between a assassin and a general in Demigod perhaps).
Easier is irrelevant, really... And also totally subjective. I actually find generals in Demigod easier to play than assassins (at first, no - the opposite, but once I got used to the game I have a much easier time playing as a general even when my attention is divided).
Also, one of the two playstyles WILL be more powerful on maps with a certain distance between startlocations and that advantage will only grow the bigger the map....
Why? And you're also forgetting the millions of shades of gray between the guy with 1 city and the ultimate channeler and the guy with 10 cities and a fragile channeler. I think the beginning is really the only part of the game where it might be really hard to get a good balance between the two extreme forms of play across all map sizes. Past the middle stages it seems like it'd be less of a problem to me...
