Elemental strikes me as an extremely good platform for a mod about space colonization, a la Deadlock, Alpha Centauri, etc. I'm thinking mostly about the sophisticated world generation and terrain deformation (like terraforming and such).

I've been writing up materials for a mod. It would be about opposing political factions competing to build the dominant colony on a planet. Depending on their economic strategy, they'd try terraforming the planet to make it hospitable for life, or poison it to strip it of its minerals and deny the other factions access.

At first the objectives would be pretty standard fare (conquest, diplomacy etc). But if one colony seems to be too dominant, other factions may get a kill order from their command, ordering them to use weapons of mass destruction to make the planet unlivable and deny it to the other faction. The dominant faction wins if it can save the planet from destruction, while the other factions can force a draw if they manage to destroy it.

If a world get destroyed, it gets saved so you can have a new game to attempt to recolonize the planet's wasted shell. It would be littered with abandoned cities that the previous colonists built.

That's the basic premise, anyway. What do you guys think?