'Master of Magic'?

Well, by my understanding of midaeval medicine and the Elemental cover art, the fith element is actually a combination of all four others. Therefore, I suppose a five-element spell would also require essence to work.

Oh my stars and garters. Master of Magic is the 'spiritual predecessor' of Elemental, and if corporate IP/marketing crapola hadn't ensued, the game might even have officially been Master of Magic 2. 

Gotta love just how flexible the scraps we have so far are when one of us applies our own imagination. One of my background-thoughts for the OP was that I kind of hope to see essence limited to imbuing stuff and that we'll neither use essence for world-wrecking nor see it spent on things like one-time map reveals or granary fillups. Your line about medieval medicine makes some sense to me, but the 5-elements thing has always made me think first of Chinese and Japanese elemental mythology. 'Life' in Elemental is some sort of Wood Void...

I looked at the cover art and thought of the classical earth/water/air/fire system, and it looks like "life" is in fact the sum of the other four. Life also makes me think of essance, hence the essence cost.

I wasn't trying to argue, just typing about how interesting it is to me that we can have such very different responses to the same basic set of limited information. It's not like the devs have given us anything substantive to disagree on yet.

True, true. I typed the last post while eating a bowl of ice cream, unplugging my laptop, and waiting for my favorite TV show to come on, so it was a tad confusing. Just thought I'd clarify.

Maybe it could be a victory condition, amass enough of all types of mana + a significant amount of essence and create the some sort of "Tower of Elements"

Hmm I don't know if there is any clear cut answer to what spell could use all the elements besides for combination spells. You could have all 5 elements combine to produce some non-elemental spell effects such as time dilation, gravity manipulation, dark energy, etc. It kind of make senses if you combined all the elemental forms of energy you would end up with some "exotic" non-elemental form of energy. Of course, the idea of mixing all the elements can seem counter intuitive depending on your stance. Mixing fire and water for example would be odd unless Elemental doesn't employ a polar opposite element system where opposing magics cancel each other out. I personally like the idea of a chrono-degradation spell that would use all five elements to accelerate the aging process for a large area of land causing mass chaos. This would be a lot more devastating then it sounds, crops, people, animals, and buildings aging hundreds of years per turn would not be pretty.   

Going off on a tangent for second I've always found it odd that time manipulation isn't more pervasive in TBS games considering they have a predictable and easy to manipulate time line. Unlike RTS where it is almost impossible to predict what is going to happen and how events will effect the player. 

I'm not entirely sure I'd want this. It sounds like some penultimate god-spell that requires everything of everything. I'd much prefer there to be a diverse amount of very strong spells that are perhaps the combination of two, three elements at maximum.

No single channeler should ever be the ultimate mage of all the elements at once. You should always have to make a choice as to what you're going to have access to. Do I want fire or earth? Do I want air or water? Where do I specialize? Not just "I'll take it all".

In the classical interpretations of the elements, the fifth element is usually "aether", "space", or "void" - depending on who you ask. But none of them appear to be a combination of the other four elements.

In the early Renaissance, the "humors" were thought to be expressions of the four classical elements. I am currently attampting to locate the thing I read that said Ether was the sum of all four.

At the moment, I guess I'm inclined to believe that we won't have element specialization that's analagous to the spell-book specialization in MoM. Your elemental 'alignment,' if it exists at all, will be based on the type(s) of shard(s) that you control. On a large map, controlling 5 shards doesn't seem at all unreasonable, and controlling 5 different types of shard seems at least plausible (perhaps a possibility that can be influenced by map settings).

Picking Call the Void as an example was not so much about wanting a "penultimate god-spell" as looking for an idea that fit and would be familiar to plenty of folks around here. It just seems sorta reasonable that if 5-element spells exist, they should be at least big juju, unless it somehow ends up common for a channeler to have at least 1 shard of all 5 types. Time Stop could be really fun, especially for those "oh, they're gonna kill us" moments that leave you having to guess whether its smart to run away or whether you should get enough forces together to turn the tables solidly when the Time Stop ends.

P.S. Y'all have got me half-remembering yet another brief time with a tabletop RPG--wasn't there some ancient Asian setting where Metal was an element?

I know I'm being a bit of a jerk about this, but I still think there's only four.

Persistent, yes, but not rude, at least as far as I'm concerned.

From the Lore page: "In the final stages of the war, the powers gathered up nearly all the magic of the world and concentrated them into a series of crystals that represented the basic elements of magic: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Life."

I know that content's well over 6 months old, but I haven't seen the slightest hint from the devs that Life is not an element in its own right.

You could argue there are six elements actually since life splits into life and anti-life (aka Death).

Well, there are only four elemental crystal pictures. Since the four were released, why would they withold a fifth?