I agree on the issues of Balance. The easiest way to make a game balanced is to have everything equal, but to me this makes the game a lot less interesting.

In game design there are a number of principles that need to be followed (I've tried dabbling in Board game design as well) and there are two that to me apply here:

1. Game Balance - everyone should have an equal chance
2. How does someone coming last catch up - there should be some mechanism in the game to allow someone thats behind to catch up.

From my design I want to approach each one seperatly.
1. Game Balance - as each race will use a different set of resources the game balance will come through finding how many of each resource the various races need to gather. (Does killing a farmer give 3 or 7 blood points, does a human cutting down a tree loose 10 or 2% of the elven beauty points). The amount of resourcing will then enable the strength of the race (obviously this will require a LOT of testing )
2. Each race should have a way of catching up. Now I find this difficult to apply to the elven Race I've suggested but if Humans are lagging behind the elves a sudden effort in cutting down the forests - resulting in a large war would immediatly slow down the elves. Humans lagging behind the humanoids could possibly raise a militia from their towns folk for a short period etc.

I dont make any excuses that balancing my ideas will be easy but I dont think that should be an obstacle.

I dont plan on an AAA title - I hope for a decent Indie title.

Reiner has just added a builder sprite to his web site

So for Humans I have
Farmer, Carrier, Builder, Woodcutter, Swordsman, Archer, Knight, Ninja (and lots of others)
Humanoids:
Gnome, Orc, Ogre
Elf:
Archer, Swordsman, (Could modify some others quite easily to make priests, mages etc)
Barbarians:
Pirates, Barbar, Barbarian King, Female Barbarian (This is probably not enough for a human race....)