I think it would be interesting to have in the game a series of single player and multiplayer challenges with specific rules and maybe even stories to go along with them. I recall Civ had something like this and while I don't think EL should be indentical to Civ I think it could be fun to have this system that changes the standard rules somewhat.



To give an example two challenges I had in mind were:



The Dust is Dying(SP/MP)

In this challenge the winter's would get more frequent and after each winter tiles would start to lose dust until, eventually, all the dust on the map is gone. I feel this would force people to either rush a victory before every body else or stockpile dust/luxuries(to sell) to survive the time when the dust is gone.



The Race to Convert(MP - 4 players)

In this challenge each of the four players would be forced to play the Cultists and each would start in a neighbouring, indentical region. The goal of this would be to either win normally or have the most converted villages by the end of the time limit. The players would be forced into a perptual cold-war so while they can't raze each other's cities they can attack their villages and their armies.





I don't know, I'm kind of just rambling at this point. What do you guys think? Could a challenge/gamemode system be fun? I do think it would need good mod support is the only thing, and I don't know the current state of mod support for the game.