While I want to love this game for its ideas and scope, the AI is still not up to par for TBS games. Here is a list of some key issues with suggestions - it's by no means a comprehensive list.

1) City Management

-- There needs to be an overall "Cities" screen where you can see what every city is doing at a glance - name, population, fighting units stationed there, economic stats, and most importantly, what buildings and/or units it is building. Being able to see what all my cities are building in one screen, with the ability to then change the build from an overarching screen like this, would make a world of difference.

-- Get farms/mines/shards/etc. into the main build queue. A farm should show up just like an arcane workshop in your city build options if it is available, greyed out if you don't have the materials. Don't make us futz around on the map to build this stuff.

-- Speaking of build queues, get one. This is the 21st century. Not having a build queue is a real time waster. Updated: yes, you can queue things, but you can't see what you've queued clearly, as far as I can tell, so it's not very helpful.

-- Give an option to have pop-ups when stuff gets built. Without this option, and with turns ending automatically (see below), it's extremely easy to go on to a next turn with a city idle when it could be building something. Currently, the only way around this is to slowly examine each city every turn. Excruciating.

2) Hero/Champion Management

-- When a hero is selected, there should be a clearly highlighted area to which he can move this turn. This way you'll know if you're out of movement, and you'll also have some notion of which terrain is impassable and which isn't. As it currently stands, to figure out if you can get over those hills, or move on that square next to the coast, you have to click on each square individually. Awful.

-- Heroes should be distinguished in some way when they are out of movement.

-- Heroes shouldn't be able to move until the turn is ended with a hit of 'end turn'. Without this, you start moving someone on their next turn before you've assigned your city to build something (a problem exacerbated by the necessity of manually checking each city to see if it's done).

-- Disappearing units - when units are in a city it's a pain in the rear to select them. Make it easier

3) Make End Turn Button Mandatory

-- Stardock obviously thinks it's a great idea to be able to keep moving without hitting end turn. It isn't. At the very least, make this optional. All this does is make one play slower so they can triple check everything before accidentally moving on to the next turn before you've done everything. Updated: Ok, didn't realize it can be changed it settings - I still think the default should be mandatory.

4) Diplomacy

-- Make this less klugy by not forcing the player to figure out that he's got to click on gildars to make a deal work. If the treaty offer isn't good enough yet, it should say - "I'm afraid your offer is insufficient" or some such. Then add a button that says "Sweeten the Deal" or some such, so you don't just get a greyed out 'accept the deal' button and have to figure out that you would need to improve it to have it be accepted.

This list, as said at the beginning, isn't close to a comprehensive list of things that make the AI klugy, but it would be a start.