I completely agree with this, and I think a lot of the community does too. As the core mechanics all get worked out and become much more interesting to use, this is one part that still seems kind of wacky. Recently, I was talking with Cari_Elf and she said that most of the devs have taken to simply turning off the "Nothing Building" pop up. In general, pop ups can be hard to deal with as they tend to take over the system until they have been dealt with. I think in general the devs should probably think about creating a creating some kind of dialog queue which holds all the dialogs which have requested to be shown by the system. The trick here would be that the dialog queue only spits out a dialog box once the game has returned to its "wait" state on the strategic map. This way, the user is shown only one system generated dialog at a time and can use those to navigate to the various other dialogs which to give his/her inputs. The end result would be something more like civ 4 where the user spends some time at the beginning of each turn dealing with the various parts of the game require their attention. Yet unlike civ 4, the number of dialogs would be minimized by the user selecting to not view the "nothing building" pop up, which can become the most viewed dialog.

I completely agree, though running into wolves with 46 hit points or a group of like 12 monster units ( I had saw one with bandits, spiders, wolves, and darklings ) makes the early game pretty frightening.

After 1.09n came out, I brought a very similar point to Cari_Elf. However, in that conversation, the problem I felt was one of global population v. local population. Currently, one can build up a great amount of population in his/her core cities and simply move a pioneer behind a war party to set up a unit producing city on the border of another faction. While this city would not be able to build parties of troops, it could be used to build single harassment troops capable of attacking any weaker cities or caravans. Assuming this user can take a level 3 city, the unit producing outpost can be dismantled and the new city can now start pumping out parties which are also fueled by large core populations and the new populations stolen from your opponents. This type of strategy is one of many which are only possible using a global resource system. In general, using a global resource system makes some game mechanics easy to manage and easy to maintain, yet at the same time, this kind of system tends to weaken city specialization as a resource production of a city can become more important that the city itself.

This may be the smoothest release yet. 2 hours, and while it's not been totally bug free, no crashes that I can't avoid, the monsters aren't too insane, and all the questing stuff seems mostly sorted out.

I had a game where a darkling traveled a long distance to attack a new village.  It actually pathed around my capitol to get to the village and crossed the entire range of my domain.  A wolf was in spotting distance of the village, however it was not strong enough for the unit guarding the town....  The darkling, however, was, and the new town was sacked.  Since then, I have decided to treat all of the NPC creatures as if they communicate with one another and treat them much more seriously now.

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-The 5 materials at the start of the game are a huge improvement. You can even produce a couple early soldiers now if you so choose !

-I love the current monster system. Yes, early game is tough, but that's even better. It brings a natural selection: who's going to expand the most despite being under constant attack by barbarian tribes ?

-I still dislike the resource spawning system, but well... okay, it's not gonna change in 1.1 anyway.

-I agree with the sword of wrath not being a good item. Its attack is overpowered, its drawback is too extreme. Two wrongs don't make a right here, and I'd rather see a 50 damage item with a 5 constitution penality (and the great scimitar at 45). Right now, if I see someone with a sword of wrather, I'll just bombard the dude with (2) spells to take him off. Had he arrived in the melee... well, he'd have one-hit-killed everyone , because it's still early-mid game. I like the idea of a powerful weapon with drawbacks, but that's just too much.

-Overall, the combat values are much better, though a few weapons are in need of (a bit of) love. Short sword, I'm looking at you. As I said on the changelog thread, a very small boost to mace and broadsword would also be perfect. 

-There are still a few bugs (the action points bug where you can move to an enemy and hit him and the 2 last action points for moving through the last square won't be used).

-Some spells need of rebalance. I mean... almost all the single target combat spells aside from arcane arrow. With 20 intelligence, I don't need any other spell. The others do the same think, except weaker. This might be due to one scaling with Int, and the others not.

Havent managed to play 1.09q quite yet (current status: 2% of 1.9 GB downloaded, I managed to un-install elemental somehow, and Impulse wont restore the old archives), but there was a strange thing in 1.09p. Somewhere just outside the influence zone of a neutral empire, there seems to spawn an entire 2-3 level city worth (about 16 x 16 tiles full) of quest goodies. I set my sovereign and a hired champ loose on them, cleared every one of them, received countless +1 to attack, def, charisma, etc, and after some turns, the goodies re-spawned in the exact same location.. (except maybe level 4 and above locations)