Hard world, Hard AI difficulty, Medium size world
Still too easy, conquest victory, though could have been alliance pretty easily had I bothered.
The whole sovereign dying causing insta-loss thing has to go, it's just too easy to abuse against the AI. Take nearby city, kill sov, empire eliminated.
This was also without using a cheesy custom hero - I just used one of the bog standard ones (Ceresa) and an Empire faction.
On the upshot - no crashes.
On the downside, still <10fps due to this bug https://forums.elementalgame.com/391334/ :/ I'm still playing on the cloth map 
I actually tried to use magic and tactical combat this time around, but there's just no real point. With mana regen the way it is, and the speed of new children being born/leveling to imbue vs the speed of simply building mass troops, tac magic reached irrelevance very quickly once again.
Tactical combat makes it even easier than autoresolve in a lot of fights, you can abuse AI behavior easily.
The Organized perk and the Teleport spell are both wayyyyyyyyyy too powerful. Part of the reason I took a basic hero without Organized was to see if it'd affect a conquest army of doom strategy much without Organized - it did, mostly just slowing down offense.
But the Teleport spell renders any sort of threat from a far flung attack moot, and allows for ridiculously fast transit + army resupply.
I realize Teleport/fast movement is important for very large maps, but it feels like a really gross hack to deal with the problem. I'd rather see Portal Gate type structures that can be built midgame with a combination of civic/warfare/magic research, that allow you to move between cities (possibly with a delay).
There's plenty of other ideas that could work as well, but a 5mp spell that moves your stack of death anywhere in your empire makes transit and threat projection as well as defense trivial.
