Might as well add my thoughts:
Heroes are really boring. They are all basically the same. The only mage is your sovereign or whoever else you donate your sovereign's essence to). All the other heroes are melee by default. Usually their bonus is +1 to resource, gold, or research, which is worthless for the battlefield. Maybe make half the heroes "civilian" that benefit production to the town they are stationed in (like farmers), and the other half be military with relevant bonuses. Also would encourage city specialization.
Is it better to build lots of towns, or a few with large influence areas? It seems like it should be a goal to maximize coverage with the fewest (biggest) cities, but as it stands, squeezing as many towns as close together produces the most resources. Troop production has nothing to do with city size? Just build 10 cities with no housing and you have ten times the troop production, 10x the markets, 10x the study's, etc. The "administration" costs are ineffectual (I don't even know where to see that piece of data).
Balance. I think that the idea is that the world is dangerous and civilization is just returning. As it stands now, it's only randomly dangerous. One solution is to make more initial random spawns with small roaming areas, etc, to keep heroes home until they can defeat that terrible beast that has been lurking outside the city. You should feel hemmed in, picking your way around threats. Kill a baddy, and you can explore and potentially settle that and surrounding area. Or continue deeper into the wilds, risking that more baddy's might back-fill, cutting you off from your city (and having to use Teleport).
Same should go for the AI kingdoms: they should be more cautious to venture forth into the world (and more likely to fortify their own land first).
I think this would improve gameplay significantly, making exploration dangerous, and opening up new areas much more of a lucrative project than a land grab. Feel like you're taming the land...
Why do you have to take the elemental books at character creation? If you decide not to take earth, then spawn next to an earth node, shouldn't there be a way to get the earth book to utilize its benefits? Maybe all books should be obtained in-game, and/or maybe appear on hirelings too? Something to motivate more specialization. Just a thought.
Combat is pretty boring, mostly because of the lack of variety of movements, attacks, abilities, etc. All well-documented by others.
Nit-picking:
-difficult to cast a spell on a specific unit, without separating them out first. Should be able to cast on their tab in the stack.
-I still don't understand how to ensure that all my units have orders every turn. The yellow outline of the units/cities on the hud don't seem to correspond.
