I'll throw mine in:
1. It was pretty easy to get the red dragon to join up and it is immensely powerful. Because of the way combat works currently he can destroy entire armies by himself with relative ease. Combine this with the spell "freeze enemy" and you can pretty much do the entire master quest with your dragon and your sov. The final battle with the hermit in my last game he never even got to fight back as he was always frozen, so despite having 500 hp the dragon still killed his entire army and him without getting hurt at all.
2. Many of the dungeons stopped working after I did the dragon quest, I think it may be because those were all dragon quest dungeons as well? Either way if it's inaccesible now it'd be nice if the dungeons disappeared off the map so we don't waste time running around to nonfunctional places.
3. Master quest line seems far too easy to be a game ender. Spell mastery requires control of all the elemental shard types and is a lot harder to accomplish. The master questline might have had some challenging battles if units had abilities and the combat wasn't so very simplistic but the locations were all very close together and all within my territory.
4. Making units seems rather pointless when compared to summoning instead. I made a company of 20 units in masterwork full plate with claymores and horses. They were lesser in every category to summoned units I'd had since the beginning of the game. To top it off it took a ridiculous amount of resources to create this company of units AND 58 turns to train them.
5. I like the idea of research to increase essence so when you imbue a hero they can at least have a small mana pool to start with. However I only ran into one champion In my game, married her but never produced any children (are dynasties disabled now?)
6. The warfare tree seems bloated with technology compared to the others. Diplomacy has a very small list of techs as does adventuring, it's quite easy to get to the master questline in adventuring before you get anywhere near the repeatable techs in warfare. Ideally I'd like to see all the other trees expand to the level warfare is now, if not further.
7. Tactical combat is very bland and simplistic. I didn't even bother worrying about terrain bonuses because it really didn't seem to matter all that much. Unit speed is ridiculously important in comparison to other stats, especially as a casting sov. With the unit HP levels where they are now, (my 58 turn build time company had like 30 hp) I could wipe out thousands of gold in units in my first turn just by casting two aoes back to back. Also a way to set up formations before the battle would be great, I don't want my caster sov to be standing in the front line while all my infantry and giants are standing behind him.
8. I love the new city building mechanics and resource control setup, much better than the original methods imo.
Suggestions for tactical combat:
Larger maps so there is actually a decent amount of terrain to fight over. Requiring some actual tactics
Ability to move and attack in the same click (minor but annoying just the same)
The team that goes first has a tremendous advantage if they've got a spellcaster, you can cause a large amount of destruction or disable key units very easily if your team goes first. Unfortunately I don't really know how to deal with this I just felt the need to point it out.
I think unit abilities are on the table for the combat to make it more engaging but I'm not positive if that was a dev post I read or a suggestion post haha. In any case there really should be varying attacks for the units.
Please add an option to speed up the movement of units in tactical combat.
Counterattacks, this goes in line with the first turn advantage issue, at least allow the units being attacked to fight back, even at a reduced rate, something to even the scales a bit.
The scale of all the units in the tactical combat seems a bit wonky, while it's cool to see the dragon towering over everything it also makes it difficult to see the battlefield and quickly becomes annoying. My company of 20 cavalry looked like a big messy blob of horses and swords on the field as well, and they were disturbingly slow for mounted units. Don't think horses are working right just yet.
The potential for great combat is there, and if your changes to the city/empire building section of the game are any indication they will end up being great as well. That's all I've got for now, getting ready to start a new map
