Finished my first game and thought I would give some feedback. A bunch of other players have already done a bit so I will focus on areas they haven't discussed.
-Not sure if this is just the tiny map I played but it's horribly designed. The entire map is basically a curved line and you have to work your way from one end to the other. Not only does this meaningless slog take forever but its a massive pain because the AI smashes most the shards on the map and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and you just end up having to walk over all the meaningless territory to find the boss at the end. Having no chance to save these shards is really annoying and kinda defies the entire point of having to protect shards at all. Done well shards should offer you important early game choices and risks, and right now this is far from done well.
-Units become incredibly weak late game. With no way to upgrade the damage on troops they quickly fall behind champions and have no real way to do any real damage. Champions can fight late game monsters such as Harbingers but normal troops just can't hurt them at all. It gets to the point where unless you have champions in an army that army is completely useless. Troops can get high hp and defense but without attack...
-The AI still can't combine troops into armies intelligently. I ran into a pile of 11 armies, most of which were single units.
-Trog archers need nerfed damage wise, they one shot almost every unit. Trog units also need more hp. They are massive glass cannons. One blizzard would usually kill every Trog in an attacking army before they got an attack in.
-I like crafting items but the system for unlocking recipes needs to be explained much better. Its frustrating having so many ingredients and having nothing to do with them.
-A tooltip that pops up when you hover over the items you need for a recipe that shows where to get them from, ie which monsters to kill, is a must.
-Instead of crafting every piece of armor and weapons from base ingredients how about a progression where first you forge for instance a basic shortsword and then combine it with another useable item to make a venomous or magical shortsword. That way you could have more useable items as rewards and you could break down items for parts and reuse some of them.
