I will quickly list some really serious issues I have with the game at the moment.
1) Please change how easy it is to destroy improvements inside territories. It should take much longer than one turn, and it should only be possible by armies of a certain size. Solo spam champions who just re-spawn like the living dead over and over are constantly running around destroying improvements in one turn that might take me 25 or more to rebuild. It should take much longer to destroy these things and issue a warning message.
2)Town hopping the champions are powerful..in fact they can overrun almost all armies in the first half or even 3/4 of the tech trees. Cities are taken way too quickly in this game. A little more time to react and move forced to counter would be nice. It would help stop the roaming army spam that constantly creates and re-spawns the champion armies. Right now its quite frustrating to create a territory and police it. I can easily hunt down the enemy lord and eventually kill him, but it ruins the whole kingdom management part of the game when it takes forever to train units and they can so easily be dispatched by NPC armies with champions.
3) Mana is too scarce for casting spells. All my casters use range weapons, and the only skills I cast are buffs and debuffs, and maybe an AOE spell very occasionally. The mana use is too intense. My biggest reason for even making caster champions is for the single unit buffs. A large portion of the strategic element in combat is missing because of the prohibitive costs of spell casting. My suggestion is buff the spell affinity ability and make it tiered like I II and III. Maybe start at 25% reduced cost and go on from there.
4) BUG BUG BUG quest locations plain stop working. Its very unreliable. Some of the game generated ones dont do anythign when I move my army over them and VERY OFTEN when I use quest maps those quest eventually bug out and do not work. Please look into this, its a real game breaker, as I cant stand having quest locations littering my territory that I cant get rid of.
5) Change AI diplomacy behaviour. The computer is so predictable. The second his "power rating" exceeds yours by one point you are no longer "close" anymore you are going to be enemies immediately. This leads to the untimely death of many a NPC sovereign. It also takes away any strategic gameplay as far as diplomacy is concerned and makes the whole system feel too simplified. In reality there are many nations (on Earth) allied that have wildly varying military and economic power abilities. Your AI is particularly annoying because the enemy just starts to run amok destroying my improvements, and annoying me until I just quit the game. I can kill the enemy sovereigns and wipe them out...it just sucks to have to do this all the time. But in order to make the annoying unit spam stop, and stop the annoying improvement destruction I am forced to eliminate factions and it makes the game quite boring.
6) For the love of all that is holy please give us away to turn off the monster armies sacking and destroying (Instantly) our cities. Nothing enrages me more than a spawned AI monster army for one purpose...to sack my city and destroy it. Its absurd, they often seem almost to be helping enemy NPCs. In fact I know the AI code must be made to target my cities in particular. Because I cheat and teleport these mobs all over NPC cities. The DEADLY ones! And do you know what happens? These monster armies ignore the AI armies and cities and march RIGHT BACK to my city the SAME one to destroy it. I can toss these monster armies across the map. They still make their way back to my city. Its like they have a AI function destroy city X...and they will do nothing else until that function is fulfilled. I don't want my cities to be razed to the ground by a Pack of "Strong" Wolves. So can we just turn off monster razing our cities?
Not as serious
6) Please add more clothing and item options for the lord customization. People like the Ironeers have almost no options. Nothing has been added since WoM...its the exact same front end....at the very least just add more of the existing clothing options to all the factions via the XML. I know this is possible I did this myself for WoM.
Other than that, game is fine, but really I honestly think you need to look at the these things before releasing this game. The performance seems to be much improved since last patch. Its a little laggy but nothing like it was. Its stable which is a big plus.
