Aha!  That's a wonderful bit of news!  I'd been thinking that two races wasn't going to allow for that much variety, but twelve factions makes much more sense.  The more I learn about Elemental, the more excited I get 

Sounds good.

I am wondering, at what point are the modding / community sharing tools going to be released? I think it would be excellent if there were already a functioning mod community come launch time.

Are the faction spell books mostly different in theme (Ice DD spells vs Fire DD spells vs Both Fire and Ice but less damaging) or substance (No DD spells vs no Healing spells vs no Summoning spells)?

Sammual

I'd imagine (completely uninformed-like) the spellbooks would be based on what element/alignment you choose, independent of civ.

Spell books make use of the various types of mana in the game.

I'm assuming that while each faction has their own tech tree and spellbook, they are mostly constructed from "generic blocks". Like there's a spell called "Enchant roads" that speeds up movement on roads when cast, and 3 human and 1 fallen civilization has it in their spellbook(but you need a specific amount of spheres to cast it even then), and "Siege engines" can be researched by all the human civs but only 2 of the fallen ones. Then perhaps some human civilization, let's imagine a barbaric one, has a spell called "Berserk" that is unique to them and can be cast on troops.

Or are all spells and techs more or less completely unique?(somewhat like in Twilight of Arnor)

Oh, and what about units? Are units totally dependant on merely tech, or also the empire in question? Anyone who can research Arcane Steel can get Magic Knights(that are identical regardless of nation), or is it that the units gained from Arcane Steel differ between human empire 1 and 2? Like the knights of a merchant republic aren't as well trained but have better armor than from a feudal kingdom?

Thanks for the clarification.  I was a little concerned about "two races" when I first heard of it.  I should know by now you guys would provide more diversity than that.

It sounds something like:

Faction A- access to spellbook Fire, Water, Air

Faction B- access to spellbook Life, Water, and Earth

Faction C- access to spellbook Death, Air, Earth

Maybe that's too simplified of an explanation, though.  With 6 different magic types, though, that's a decent number of combinations.  And that's just assuming that these spellbooks are that broad.  It could be more refined like:

Faction A- Defense, Economy, and Heroes

Faction B- Channeler Buffs, Troops, and Diplomacy

Faction C- Defense, Offense, and Weather

It will be interesting to see how these spellbooks play out.  And if you can get more over the course of the game.  I assume since you can create spells yourself, there will be a lot of ways to compile a book and how you get access to it.

This is great news to be sure. I look forward to seeing faction profiles in the near future - hopefully...

So, Men and Fallen are like Alliance and Horde, then?

Definitely the best news I've heard today. Now we get to sit around and speculate about what six factions make up 'Men' and what six make up 'Fallen.'

Or we could just refuse to believe in the different factions until sd proves it to us with all the info they have . Still, sounds awesome, are they going to be as distinct as the different civilizations in galciv, or will each race have a similar basic structure. It'd be absolutely amazing if the two races had completely different ways of doing things, and didn't even have the reuse of techs we saw in galciv 2 but were just absolutely different. It'd increase the learning curve a bit, but only two games could give a player a rough familiarity while still making the races feel very different and have the other side's planning feel a bit alien to you.

The problem with that is it renders *any* form of tech trading impossible, which most people will find as a surprise.  The alternatives (tech swapping accellerating your own research of 'related' projects, maybe) will probably be difficult to learn / hard to code.  But oh-so-nice if they could pull it off.

It would be nice if a spellbook with the spells in it would be published by the developers. So we can estimate the tactical possibilities.

PS: MoM had 210 spells! That was very cool. I hope there are more spells (f.e. taken from MoM+AoW:SM-Spells ) and a lot of spells with intersting effects. Armageddon (MoM), Mass Confusion (AoW:SM) or Tornado (AoW:SM) are very cool. Take a look on: http://aow2.heavengames.com/aowsm/gameinfo/magicspells/

Wonderful news, and I who thought the game would be shipped with only 2 races as basis but that could be modded. This opens up for so much more variety. 

When it comes to alignment it's not really clear to me how it will work, if you can choose it, could you then e.g. play the fallen with good alignment?? Also, I hope that good alignment will not be punished like in GC2, this would be extremey annoying in a fantasy game.

EWoW rocks more and more...