Thankfully, Beta 1B has arrived. I love a ton of what has been added, nearly all of it. This'll be a quick pro/con listing. When I don't have classes, I'll add more.
Pros
More resources +
More buildings +
Research items ++
Random Map generation +
Cons
Crashing has drastically increased --
City building is all kinds of broke --
Camera occasionally does weird things -
I've noticed several things with the new Beta, most of it good. The only downside is that it does crash, much more often. I crash most often in the research screen when researching higher level subjects. But I have crashed by skipping the intro also. I haven't seen if it still crashes when I die (as it did in the previous Beta).
There are some strange hickups with city building, which saddens me, since this is the feature I most want to play with, but is often the one that works the least often. When building a city, level 1 must be spent completely on houses, anything else, and it will not level up. Likewise, destroying tiles doesn't allow you to build, which is weird. the glitch seems to be that the population goes over the cap, and then it's stuck and cannot go farther.
I love all the new resources, especially the way they are randomized. Sometimes I will build a city with two shards, a bee hive, and a relatively close iron mine, and feel I lucked out. But then I'll find a location that would offer lumber, multiple farms, a shard, some iron, and a dock. They are generally spread out well enough so that you are encouraged the build cities logically, instead of spamming them. However, since I cannot tell how big cities can get, I am fairly limited at present.
I look forward to the next update, that will hopefully minimize the crashing. 
