I'm still fairly new to the game, so only playing on the normal-range level, maybe a bit higher.. Due to this, i don't usually build huge armies, but have the Sov with some imbued champions out as my main attack/defense crews.

What has now happened a few times to my great annoyance.. Is that while I'm out exploring, expanding, building, etc.. I suddenly get a message that X city just got defeated by monsters....  HUH???? 

Ok.. I go and look and find out that yes, that city just got razed.. (and the most recent one dammit had a fire Shard).

I don't usually over-spend lots of money on building standing armies in each city. 99.9% of the time so far, there's no need. the 'outer' cities in my expansion are covered.. but not so much some of the 'inner' ones.. 

I don't play in wide-view cloth-map mode.. and for there to be no actual warning that 'hey, some enemies are getting close', just seems silly to me. 

I've found that magic is god in combat on the whole. Though while the sovereign is powerful (mainly that lovely Imbue Champion spell)... the Sov is actually weak compared to the kids you have (EVERY SINGLE ONE, including the dynastic marriages... EVERY child of sov's all have the heal-in-combat and recover-mana-in-combat capability. I don't mind this of course, and it does make sense). 

I've always got at least one 'party' of champions with enough mana to teleport to any of my own cities to defend.. but dammit. .I NEED TO KNOW TO DEFEND... . I've never seen a city of mine so incredibly surrounded that a 'messenger' couldn't escape to warn. Or you'd think a basic warning/message spell could be used. 

(as a smaller side-note, the upper-right mini-list of what updates each turn, is so easy to ignore/miss/forget... I just tend to forget to keep building up cities once the build-queue has finished.. An option to shift to any just-empty queued city would be nice)