Downloaded the beta and decided to give it a spin with pen and notepad by my side.

Here's the list of issues I found:

1. The splash screen starting the game doesn't have a progress bar; I wasn't sure if it had hung right there
2. The "skip intro cutscene" box in the options can't be checked
3. There are 3 different controls for music volume in the options list, which is pretty confusing.  I can't tell which is which.
4. The "SFX" volume bar makes a little ding noise to give an example of how loud it is, but there's a long space between noises and it only makes the ding when you drag the button, not when you click or stop dragging.  So if you drag from 80 to 40, you get a ding for the sound at 79, but have to pick up the button and drag it back and forth around 40 to hear the volume at the level you actually picked.
5. The victory conditions buttons in the world creation screen don't behave properly when clicked, but only make the world's name get randomly regenerated
6. The coat-of-arms for the kingdoms/empires are difficult to distinguish.  In particular, Athos, Yithril, Parriden, and Kraxis have very similar alternating white/black backgrounds.
   1. SUGGESTION: Have the kingdom banners emphasize the the object which appears on the banner, e.g. the crown, the deathshead, the sheaf of wheat etc.  These objects have distinctive silhouettes and are much easier to learn and recognize (Crown = Altar, Deathshead = Yithril and so on).
   2. SUGGESTION:  Rather than distinguishing cities and units on the map by assigning an in-game color to units, have banners/stanchions of the civilization's coat-of-arms be used to tell units apart.  Your Sovereign could literally be the standard-bearer for your kingdom by holding a distinctively-shaped flag, making him/her easy to pick out.  Alternatively, just having the symbol and/or colors of the faction be the unit colors would make it easier to remember and track one thing at a time.
   3. In any event, having distinctive coat-of-arms background colors that don't overlap much between factions would be nice.  It's not that hard to tell the difference between "pure white", "white/black checkered", and "pure black"; it's difficult to immediately spot which is which among "white/black checkered", "white/black columned", and "off-white/black checkered"
7. There no progress bar visible during world creation
8. The battle report screen is difficult to read.
   1. It looks like the HP bars are supposed to change filled-in status to show damage, but they're bugged and don't change.
   2. The "results" and "casualties" screens don't distinguish between enemy and friendly units.  It would be preferable to split the list into two columns.
   3. XP bars should also be shown so it's easy to see how close you are to a level and how much you just gained
   4. There's no need to display the previous/gained/lost/total numbers for HP and XP if there are already bars; it just adds more clutter.  Put the numbers directly on the bar as an overlay, or let it show as a pop-up when mouse-hovered.
9. The Sovereign's "Sight" stat actually DECREASES upon gaining a level
10. All of the unit stats except "Defense" have the same icon on the level-up screen
11. Using decimals for stats just adds confusion, and adds ugly ".0"s after every stat that isn't actually fractional.  Multiply by 10 if you need more room between integer values, or round to the nearest whole.  Fractions are OK when you actually need to split a real value in twain, but attack/defense values are arbitrary and might as well be easy-to-understand whole numbers.
12. If you hover over something from the unit window until a pop-up appears (i.e. mouse hover over "auto-explore" on the actions tab) the pop-up text will remain even if you switch to a different tab
13. The player begins the game with the research slot empty.  Not using available research is always a mistake, so players should probably begin with a default research set and/or be shown the research screen immediately upon starting so they can choose (like in GalCiv)
14. The "escape" key doesn't reliably exit menus.  Pushing escape in the kingdom management screen doesn't back you out of the screen.  In the build/train screens, escape will open the options menu.  But pushing escape again while in the options menu doesn't do anything.
15. Usable items don't give any tooltips/clues about how to use them.  Is it a left-click like other buttons and widgets in the tool bar, or right-click like other commands issued to units?  No - it was a double-click.
    1. SUGGESTION:  Add a small "use"/"equip" thumbnail button in the corner of an item that can be used or equipped.
16. Typo:  The "Band of Fortitude" item.  In the description, "thrir" --> "their"
17. There's no indication of how many movement points are taken up by moving over a particular bit of terrain (except trial and error).
18. Units that should be hidden behind Fog of War nevertheless become visible whenever you move the map and/or when they take their turns
19. Mouse scroll does not function correctly; I found that the map moved gently to the left when I put my mouse at the right edge of the screen, the map did not move at all putting the mouse at other points
20. The "Kingdom Hovel", a presumably inferior kind of housing, is actually unlocked after the "Kingdom Hut", which the player starts with
21. There's no reason to qualify the housing with "Kingdom Something-Something".  If you're a kingdom, everything you build is Kingdom Something.
22. Because the names of structures can be long (see above), sometimes the full name can't be displayed on the research screen when checking for unlocks, e.g. you see "Unlocks Structure: Kingd..."
23. There's no notice or announcement when you eliminate an enemy Sovereign
24. All Sovereigns have the same unit portrait etc. and are named "The Sovereign"
25. There's no way to tell the difference between "goodies" spots that have been visited and those that have not, making it easy to accidentally backtrack
26. The cost of constructing a building is not charged until the day the building is completed; this also includes special requirements such as only being able to build one palace (it still appears on the list for other towns until it is actually completed)
27. Units set to auto-explore will attempt to move into areas that would require declaring war in order to advance, and probably shouldn't
28. Units with auto-move destinations take their turns immediately, even if you have building/tech/etc. reports that you haven't cleared, so you might got reports/requests from units in the middle of reading turn reports about buildings
29. For some reason, I was unable to declare war on an enemy empire in order to move into their territory (this worked OK for a few times then suddenly didn't).  I was unable to declare war on the Empire of Yithril for no particularly understandable reason; if I cilcked "yes" on the dialog, the dialog simply came up again, until I clicked "no" to break the loop
30. The dialog UI for building roads is not very helpful; it would be easier if you could click on the target city on the map etc. rather than only going by name
31. If you have already ordered a city to build a road, then re-open the dialog and order the city to build a road to a different city, the game hangs and pegs the processor.

I hit that last bug and used Task Manager to shut down Elemental.

I think I managed to wipe out 4 enemy empires in Sovereign-to-Sovereign combat before that, though.  Heh.