I'm aware of the last mini-patch and if any of these issues have been changed or adressed I apologize, but I thought my feedback could still prove useful. These are mostly first impressions over about 4-5 hrs of gameplay and reflect the experience of a player with next extensive TBS experience, but that hasn't played this game in previous beta builds. I've experienced some crashes, but since I'm currently not on that computer (can't post reports or SC) I'll stick to other issues.

[Heroes/Champions]

I played about 3-4 different starts, out of the 4, none of which I had the loner perk, only one game did I actually started next to any sort of specialist, one game had no champions of the opposite gender in the immediate area (exploring quite a bit) for the first 30-40 turns. One of the 4 games might have even been with that Race where it says you start next to extra heroes, but got none. I don't know if this was a bug or intentional that you get extra champions lateror do you want us to start like the E3 demo next to 2-3 heroes and recruit one or two depending on what resources you want.

Would be fun for it to be a bit more clear or less random as to what happens when you start a game. On higher difficulties it's not uncommon for a top player to reload the map to get slightly better resources, wouldn't want to end up champion/dynasty-less because of very bad starting load.

[Food]

I played one race from the bottom (The one with demon sword research if it means anything) and one race from the top "good" side (the one with Mills at start).

As I researched farming as the evil race, I got access to relatively cheap/buildable farms which made building up a new town relatively easy and food ressources on the map next to useless since it was relatively easy to get a lvl 3 city with just the ?Skath? farms.

On the other hand, with the "good" race, I got access to none of this with a good 5-6 levels into civics and nothing in sight that would give me an equivalent. This made me build new settlements desperately trying to place them near a food source, otherwise it could be stuck at level 1.

Not sure if any of this are bugs, but the balance felt weird.

[Turn ends]

This is more of a peeve from my experience in various other TBS (mostly Civs). When I all my units have moved and are happy, it's cool that my turn either ends or it prompts me to end my turn quickly. When I'm moving around my sovereign alot in the first 30-40 turns, and I finish building say a pioneer or a building I get a nice little button on the top right. However the game doesn't cycle thru those, and if I keep moving my units, it's silly easy to miss it... So my pioneer might not be moving to settle it's new location, that city might be wasting time it could be producing units and or buildings.

Maybe I'm just playing this too much like a Civ game, but it's these little things that streamline the experience so you can focus on more overarching things.

[Thief perk, Negative gold?]

This game I prolly should have taken some SC to explain or show some of the unique bugs. I went with the female character that had the thief perk.

When I would kill something in the loot I would get some gold, but I would also get this [1 extra gold ability] thingy next to it. I didn't really notice how much this stack up (will say this early game it's not a very profitable profession). Built my first settlement, eventually built my second. At some point after that I build my second one by pioneer. I had some of the aforementioned food issues, but was still more than playable.

Now this is where I saw some wierd stuff. The order of things might not be exact, but at some point that [1 extra gold] became some super 4 e #%#$%#$  gold. It didn't actually give me any extra gold, but it looked wierd. In that same game I finally found a male champion which I immediately married. I then build my 3rd town, it cost 200 gold, but I had about 175 at the time. The game still let me build it, but I went negative gold.

No real penalty other than 3-4 turns where I couldn't really build anything.

I then eventually got a third pioneer which I then proceeded to go build a town not exactly knowing the cost. I get to the spot, the button highlights as 0 gold.... but when I build it I go down 300 gold it seems and into negative 250 ish gold. This looked wierd to say the least and wasn't what I could call a recommendable build strategy, but should the game even let you go that much in the red?

[Tactical Magic]

I know this isn't fully implemented, but intentional that you be able to nuke 3-4 times in a turn with spells?

Anyways, I'll have a ton more to write at some point and hopefully from my computer I'll be able to include crash logs and SC of what I saw, but I figured any of this might be more useful than saying nothing. Good first impressions so far! Keep up the good work

Fury