I agree, it's a huge improvement..  I actually finished a game!

I agree.  I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and I noticed I was actually in the red and was down to 10 gold trying to figure out a way to save my economy, when I got war declared on me.  Luckily I could still steamroll the AI with a few summons and magic.  So I took some of their towns and now have an abundance of money.  Once the AI is where it should I would have been utterly destroyed, and it caught me off guard to actually start paying attention to my cities.  Not to mention with universal essence I'm less inclined to imbue all my heroes, instead only saving it for a few.

I bought the game over this past weekend.  After reading the initial reviews, I was surprised how negative they were but I had faith Stardock would patch it to be fun.  My first night playing it, I think I stayed up until 3 AM (the wife was not impressed ).  It's pretty darn fun at the moment.  There are imbalances.  There are parts that clearly need to be fleshed out more (I'd love to see Dungeons get a little better treatment than just some flavor text and a random battle- maybe a little random map that you wander around and find the actual loot in?).  I think I've encountered a few bugs or glitches.  I've had one crash to desktop.  And that's it.  Not horrible at all, at the moment (for me at least).  I've only played one complete game so far, but I had enough fun doing it that I know I'll be playing it alongside GalCiv for some time to come.

Wasn't MOM pretty much an unplayable mess until 1.3ish?  I seem to remember MoM getting a lot of flak for that too.  And that was back in the QEMM386 days, no?  Oh, my do I not miss messing with autoexec.bat and config.sys anymore.