First off all, I want really to emphaze that with the current build I see the game more and more a game. Nevertheless, there are still some sort of show-stoppers that will differentiate between a good game and a suprior game:

* Adventure locations:

As mentioned by others already, they are plobbing out like crazy. Especially, ruins or other ancient locations are created all the time. This is something that feels not natural. I think everything that's not sort of a inn or something similar should not be created after the world is created. But they should be displayed as they are there in the beginning.

* Research tree:

As indicated in another post, in the beginning it takes endless turns for a new breaktrough - even with 2-3 cities. After researched education and build the Hosten's library and established some Lost libraries, this is not of an issue anymore. In the end, if someone goes in the wrong direction for the first 30 turns, they will loose the research race and can quit quite soon. I suggest that there is the need for some tweaks in the amount of research points gathered by the different improvements or the needed research points per breakthrough.

* Building armies:

Compared with recruitments of heroes/companions the building of armies still takes to much time. In the time I upgrade my first town, I received messages from bandits around the world that they wanna take my city. This happens in the first few turns already. In that time - if I'm lucky and was thinking correctly in the beginning I have by chance the first peasant in my town. I don't have really any chance to react on anything going on in the world. Therefore, again the troop recruitment needs to be tweaked to be faster. Simple troops like peasants should not take longer to generate than lets say 3 turns. This would mean that I will be more likely to send troops around. Currently the war part of Elemental is the weakest one. 

They are only there to protect my cities. They are not really suited to support my Sov/Heroes as it always give me the feeling they are more blocking me from wandering around and not the opposite. I know that there are some skills for a Sov that the troops have the same speed.. but in general, they are not fun.

Another part is still that there are to many individual parts for equipment for the regular troops. For Sov/Heroes, this is fine. But troops should really have only the option for an armor, a weapon and an acc. Everything else again is maybe nice but gameplay wise it blocks the fun.

* Magic / Research:

The spell levels should belong to he research trees and not to the Spell research. It feels again not natural. In the spell research itself I should be able to indicate which Spell from those available I want to research.

* City Building:

I really don't know why, but currently the city building was a big step back. The differentiation between resource tiles and city improvement is great - this should be kept that way. But the cities themselve - especially in the beginning of the game - are boring to play and build up. If someone wants to specialize cities, there are by far to less options to build. And those options again limited with the breakthroughs. Again as mentioned earlier, several improvements should be able to build several times per city.  

Additionally, I think there is a bug in the current build as e.g. farms for fertile lands are available to be build as a city improvement. This is missleading and costs a good amount of building time which could be used better in other improvements if someone don't know.

* Tactical combat:

Again, still a very weak part of the game. I think here it shows that there are weaknesses in the UI - direct actions needs a right mouse click, casting spells a left mouse click, spells can only be cast if added as favorite. 

Additionally, there are very few options to perform and the combat speed as the only real value to perform actions is to less. In my opinion, there should be two different types in: combat speed for movement and action points for actions like casting spells, attacking, counterattacks. E.g. if a unit save some of their action points, they should be able for an counter-attack (think of X-Com which in my opinion has one if not the best Turn-based combat available). If they spend all their action points, they are not able to counter attack. Additionally, the game needs far more feats - in that part, MoM is currently still better. And as it was mentioned somewhere else, Archery should have a limited amount of missiles available - this would reduce the being overpowered.

* UI:

Even it was already mentioned that there will still be improvements to the UI after the launch, to be honest, it currently don't feel ready for launch. Several other topics like balancing are a bit more forgiving by the reviewers and players. But if the GUI is not nice or not responsive and intuitive, this will seriously beat the player base. I saw today the mock-up posted by another player and I think that should be the way it should look like. Additionally, I still think that the empire slots needs improvements (e.g. showing troop groups, showing building times for cities, etc as mentioned earlier). And while playing the game more and more, to be honest, I miss more and more a popup screen telling me what happened in that round (e.g. Troops defeaded, town lost, new breakthrough, new building finalized giving me a note if the building queue is empty or not).

That's for now.

BR

Wyl