First off, the game has gone a great way these last weeks, so for the Stardock Team.
The stability is greatly improved and technically only minor problems occured, like some slowdowns and occasional save-games-not-loading-on-first-try that were already reported elsewhere. Furthermore, I really like betatesting for stardock. This is caused by the fact, that after providing well tought out feedback, you will find that several off your own suggestions have made it into the next beta version. That makes giving feedback really rewarding.

So here a number of points that have landed on my sheet of paper during the last play through. Some of these I have reported before, but as I stumbled again upon those I feel some redundancy might be ok.

So here it is in no particular order.

A. UI

- Empire Tree still quite useless.
- You still need two clicks to go from building to recruiting.

Kingdom Report
- Caravan Income not listed in Kingdom Report (Trade is listet as 0)
- Kingdom Report should be named Empire Report for Empire Factions
- Extinguished Factions should not be listed as Relations in Kingdom Report
- It should not read "Our Notable Level" for the Kingdom Report of foreign nations
- Wild Creatures and NPCs should be hidden from the Kingdom Report
- A military Overview, a city overview, a Champion overview and a caravan Overview would be helpful

Map generation
A simple way to add some more maps, would be to randomly mirror the maps along the x and y axis. While this does not change the actual map strategies, it makes a difference in the visuals, as maps have a defined "North" direction when viewed on the cloth map (which is typically used to obtain an overview of the map).

Shop keeper
The shop keeper should be of the factions race.

Curgens Excange (Empire)
According to the tooltip this building provides 100 Materials per turn (It doesn't trough).

Squads Visual Representation on the Map
We have still Bloobs of Doom as described here.

Portrait of Emperor Magnar III
The Portait in the Souvereign selection screen does not fit with the other portraits. The coloraition seems entirely off.

B. Pacing/Gameplay

Training Speed
Training speed for units seems still a bit high. I would prefer tuning the default time to train a unit down to 4 or 3 turns.

Initial Growth
The first turns are a bit slow going because you usually have not enough resources. Typically your first gold mine, Old grown forest or Lost Libraray requires your starting city to be of level 3 or above. Furthermore, the resources near your first city are very crucial. As i proposed in another thread, adding a building that can be built into your capital for free, and which produces about 2 Gildar, 1 Materials and 1 Technology Research would greatly balance and speed up the early game.

Spawning of Heroes later in the game
I still could not notice spawn of heroes upon researching techs in the adventuring tree which could indicate that further heroes spawn. This results in lack of heroes in the later game, as sometimes a hero dies and no replenishment is available. Compared to MoM whre heroes were especially available at the endgame. Neutral (Wild Creature Heroes However seem to be abundand. Maybe those spawn instead of the hireable heroes? Bug?

City Specialization
The dialog for specialization seems somehow out of place. It screems: Specializing a city gives it more personality, but in fact it hardly does (You typically have to go for gold anyway). I would prefer if this could be solved by introducing three buildings (one per specialization) where only one of them can be built per town. These buildings than represents the specialization and should be easily recognizable from the distance. These buildings could then, like houses, grow upon city leveling. If you want to change the specialization of the city you can scrap the old one and build the building of the new specialization.

A different approach could be to reintroduce the tile limit and again offer some more upgrade buildings per path (maybe three for each gildars, materials, reseach, arcane research). This way city specialization is obtained by building, e.g., all research buildings.

City Tile Cap
The ctiy tile cap seems to be still in (at least for level 5 cities). However, the number of free tiles is no longer shown.

Caravans
- Right now if a monster happens to move onto your caravan route you have to manually reestablish it. This is quite cumbersome. Could a new Caravan be formed some turns after the old one was lost? This would greatly reduce micromanagement.
- Also at the moment you are not notified when one of your caravans is destroyed (which would not be needed, of course, if they get auto replaced).
(The balancing problem caused by the quadratic growth of the caravan network will be discussed elsewhere).

Capturing Kingdom towns as empire and vice versa.
Upon capturing a Kingdom town as empire i get access to the prebuild kingdom buildings, and can buld my empire buildings. So effectively i double the value of the city. I would propose to allow only one of the building categories per town. So, e.g., if there is already a work shop I should not able to additionally build my labour pit. Buildings without an equivalent by the conquering race might provide the extra benefit through.

Additonal Souvereigns for AI Player
Each AI player has an Champion of type Souvereign and opposing gener spawned next to his starting city. While this might be inteded for reasons of AI-Marriage it seems nontheless strange. At least a random profession should be chosen for this spawned unit.

C. Tactical Battles

Tactical Battles Animation Speed
A rather old game (Hammer of the Gods) which was among the first games to have animated tactical battles had a really great feature. You could switch tactical animation speed to fast, very fast and blurry. The Animations would then play at a speedup of up to 8. This greatly helped when fighting the 100th battle (timewise).

Tactical Battles Favourite Spells
I would like it if you would bring back the favourites (maybe up to three) for tactical battles (sometimes also for the main map, eg. when lowering a mountain range...). If the favourite spells would be placed directly on the main action bar you could speed up spellcasting by a factor of 3 (clickwise). Favourites should however be added manually and not by simply casting the spell once.

Tactical Battles and Potions
Would be great if we could use our potions during tactical battles. (I thought someone else already proposed this one, but i did not find it just yet).

Casting during Enemy Turn
I assume this is already known, but i can cast during the enemy turn. This ia also true for archers who can shoot during enemy turns.

Result Screen and awarded Experience
The result screen from the tactical battles only shows (on the side of the enemies) the target of the last actions. Experience is awarded only for the last killed unit, or so it seems.

D. Unit Designer

Helm clipping for Kraxis.
It seems the Kraxis head is a bit longer than the standard one resulting in clipping on the forehead. (Screenshot)

The default background
... for Empire Factions should not be the green Farm one, as seen in the screenshot to the next topic.

Default Peasant and Pioneer
Should a) Use the Players Race and not use the green Farm background for empires (Picture). The AI actually uses correct Peons and Pioneer models.

E. Equipment

Cost of The Claymore and other weapons
Compared to other Weapons the Claymore is much to cheap. However i feel that the other weapons should be cheaper goldwise. So the Pice of 20 Gold for the claymore is ok, The metal cost could be increased to 10 or even higher.
The other weapons should be priced cheaper. Note here, that some of the more powerfull weapons are also balanced by their reduced combat speed. Therefore they do not have to be more expensive.

My opinion on reducing the damage of all weapons and distributing them a bit more along the technology tree has been offered during my evaluation of the technology tree some days ago.  

Armor
Also the Gold cost of most armor should be halved and the metal cost at least doubled, in my opinion (as again metal should be the primary limiting factor, not gold). With the current pricing, metal never limited my army production and could therefore be simply removed from the game, without changing anything.

Medical Pack and Rings
-Still overpowered to be used for troops (doubling HP). You might consider making only one slot for packs (or moving them to hero only) because with the price of the equipment, 100 Gold for the for the movement, tactical movement and health point benefit provided by the 4 packs seem cheap. To a certain degree this is also true for rings, where a limit per unit should also be enforced.
-Strangely the Scouts Pack and Messengers Pack are not available for heroes.


F. Spells

Enchant Farms:
As there are no more Farms within a city this spell does nothing at the moment. I assume Enchant Production and Brilliance are similar.

Make Caster
Seems a bit to cheap. I personally actually liked the cost of 5 because it made it a real decision whom to imbue with the essence. For 1 Essence its a no brainer to make all your characters spellcasters. I am not sure if that is intended.
Maybe cost Int/4 or at least 2-4 Essence to give Int/2 to the target (which can still not be selected precisely as it seems).

Flood/Earthquake/Vulcano
You should not be able to cast these spells into the terretory of neutral/friedly players. I was able to exterminate a faction without declaring war by flooding all their cities. Furthermore units should not be placed in water after a flood. They should either be thrown to the coast of the emerging sea or be deleted. (I think at the moment only units in affected cities are deleted). The fact that a city should be completely erased, so that buildings no longer part of a city do not remain on the map after a (citydestroying) flood, that i proposed elsewhere is still viable.

Arcane Strike
showed me a Damage of 6 on each unit. However no Hitpoints were subtracted from the target units.

G. Technology (Kingdom)

Advanced Housig/Advanced Farming
+10% extra Food = +10% Extra Housing
So both Techs do the same at the end of the day. I would say remove advanced Housing.

H. Quests

100 Guildar Goody Hut.
With the small amount of starting gold finding one of these is quite important to the early game. I would propose to reduce the quest-reward to 50 Guildar and instead increase the starting gold a bit.

I. Diplomacy

Non Aggresion Pacts
- I can not cancel my Non Aggression Pacts to declare War
- Non Aggression Pacts vanished after some time. No notice of this was given to the player (me)