First, let me say I am enjoying the early game quite a bit. I see a lot of fun to be had with this game, and am enjoying it. I find that I keep starting over to play the early game again and again, as the mid game becomes tedius to manage all of the cities. I know in several videos I watched before release, one of Brad's design goals was to avoid the "late game tedium" that most 4x games have due to so many cities to manage. So far I'd say we've missed that goal. Here are several issues as I have seen so far:

I'll start with the bugs, and then move to the issues:

Bugs:

1) There is a bug where the wrong city information bar shows over my cities. Usually it is one of the AI cities ribbon bars showing up instead of my own (though the rest of the city functions as normal when you click on it, the name is correct). This takes away the "at a glance" ability of just looking at a city to see what is going on in that city.

2) Not sure if its a bug or not. I know it has been mentioned on this forum several times. The 50 tile limit is fine, but the fact that your resource buildings take up part of that 50 tile limit if they are "connected" to the city, and do not affect the limit if they are "not connected" to the city causes a huge headache in managing the city layout.

3) To go along with 2: If the resource tile building is next to a city building, the resource building will get added to the city build queue and you have to wait for the it to finish before you can build other stuff in that city. For example: Found your city next to a farm. Build a workshop next to the farm. Once workshop completes, you get enough materials for Farm. Build farm. That farm is now 10 turns in the city build queue, and you have to wait for it to finish before you can build something else. If I instead build the city 1 away from the farm, and build my workshop so it does not connect the farm to the city, I can build the farm AND something in the city simultaneously. This seems like a bug.

Thoughts:

By the time I have 6 or 7 cities via conquest or building, I find that the city management really starts to get boring. Conceptually I still like it, but the interface makes it difficult and boring instead of exciting and fun. Here are some thoughts on how to improve it

1) The addition in 1.01 of the beginning of turn pop-ups was very very helpful. It needs to be expanded upon. Every few turns I find myself hovering over each of my cities in the empire tree to see how close they are to the population limit and how fast they are growing. I do this so I can proactively build housing in the city before it hits the population cap. When there are only a handful of cities, this is no big deal. However, when there are half dozen or more cities, this becomes a pain to manage and rather than feel fun, feels like a chore.

Suggestion: Add a warning to the right hand side notice system when a city is within X turns (maybe make it a setting you can adjust?) of reaching its population cap.

Point of confusion: I haven't yet figured out when a city levels up why it magically has more housing available. I'm sure there is a reason, but it isn't apparent. I don't build more huts, I just end up with more population limit. Example: The city is level 3. It goes to the next level at 100 population. I have 99/100 spots in my city. Next turn I have 100 / 375 population. I am guessing the huts are "leveling up" to go with the city, and providing more space each, but it isn't apparent.

2) City bonuses:

2 issues for me here:

A) When the city bonus selection pops up, I cant easily remember what that city was specializing in. It covers up the city, and I can't get to any other windows to check.

Suggestion: Add the cities information card to this window, or allow a click on that window to bring up the cities Hiergom....Hergam....Hiergem...Pedia entry.

The empire tree is great, but I really need an "at  a glance" type screen that shows what every city is doing. Ideally I can issue build instructions to the city from this screen. Suggestion is to implement a Civ style window like when you Press F1.Also see HOMM V --> Q key --> summary of cities.

I have quite a few other thoughts on the game around other topics, but I have seen quite a few posts covering the AI concerns, magic system, balance issues etc, so I am sure those will get addressed. For my own enjoyment of the game, the tedium of city management needs to be reduced, and I believe these suggestions will help.

Thank for making a fun engine, and what I hope will become a classic game once some of the polish gets placed.