Had a lot of travel to do and decided to load up Elemental 1.2 to see what's new and different. Lots of good, lots of bad. My feedback is purely some gameplay bugs that are driving me crazy (as an empire player) :

1. Custom empire races that choose man-type races still can't train Sions after building a Sion temple. 
2. Custom empire races (and some of the defaults?) have Peasant/Peon's combat speed at 1. Workaround is to upgrade your pioneer, but still bloody annoying. Edit: Workaround 2 is to hit "new" and they have the correct combat speed.
3. Apparently researching the second War -25% training tech wrecks War Councils for normal units. In the (enclosed - er, someone tell me how to attach my save game?) game, I can't train groups of anything but umberdroths. Edit: A setback due to upgrading from my Pioneers. Friggin annoying.
4. Custom empire man races seemed to have Peasant combat speed at 3. Was sorta weird when I figured out my team had more attacks than any other empire.
5. AI is waaaaaaaaaaaaay better, but still makes some dumb moves. Hello, Queen of Tarth, all alone in my territory, 1 tile from a city with 6 defenders.. goodbye, tarth empire.
6. Still running into crashes, but WAY better than before.