Pretty spot on. The game has a bunch of fascinating parts, that onto themselves work well, but it hasn't coalesced into single good game experience yet. Cities and armies have to be more meaningful. One idea is I think cities should be un-razable, right now the easiest way to win is simply destroy everything. Almost the exact opposite of the purpose of the game, to repopulate and re-civilize a damaged world. Right now, soldiers are useless against anything but other soldiers. You can't create enough cities, that each can't create enough troops or resources quick enough to make armies anything other than a waste of time. Heroes are quickly powerful, armies can't defend anything, cities take hundreds of turns to be meaningful, and are undefendable, thus the best strategy is simply rolling with powerful heroes and razing all cities. What do I need from the cities? Gold? Nope, don't make armies earn better gear from wandering around. Resources? Nope, no need for those if I don't have armies. Mana? Don't need to use many spells, can do without.
It does feel like you are playing two games at once, and they tend to get in each others way. The RPG and the city bulding. Cities need to be far more important. They need to be far more powerful, far less fragile. Armies need to be a threat and in greater numbers. Even if a great hero could take on any single army unit in the game, several should always be a threat, and he should not be able to engage everything the other nation can through at him. Yes, the sov can beat this army, but can he beat the other five I have on the map, wack-a-mole. Immortal sovs and heroes make this difficult too. The game needs more cities and more armies. And we need to take out abilities that decimate units in one hit.
