I played both men and wraith. Kingdom was just like before, no problem with items, harbors or anything.

As for empire, I unlocked most of the military techs without having the least armor item, even though I had some armor related breakthrough. Impossible to have any neither in shop, nor in unit design... I also had techs allowing lumbermill and harbor, but they never unlocked the actual buildings... Same with sorcery tower and many other buildings I could never build, even though I think I should have.

Anyway, the gameplay was "uncomplete" with empire, but it didn't crash even once, unlike kingdom, which crashed quite often.