I guess it's time for the customary "wall of text" warning here and the apology for my spelling and fargmented toughts. Dyslexia have I.

Starting with the ata boys. Thank you guys for bustin hump hard to overcome the unfortante broken street date and delivery the game to me and my fellow preorderer peeps. I was blown away watching you guys stick around to the wee hours of the morning flipping switchs to deal everyone their do. I'm also impressed with your quick trun around on the patches and hotfixs to go all termenx on some bugs and dutch boy on the memory leaks. I confess, I was one of those doubters that thought it would be months before it was stable enough to keep me from pulling an Elvis on my moniter. But after the massive imporvment with the 07, I wouldn't be surpiresd if they were all but completly ironed out by the fabled 1.1 do later this month.

Now for some pointers for imporvements. First, the game core concepts are excellent and you should concentate on expansion and convergence of those before reinventing the wheel. Break out those " wish we would of " lists that you mentioned and air'em out, preferably with us. Here are a few ideas to add a little more depth, some of which have already been suggested but I would like throw my considerable girth behind them. A quick warning though, I'm not a code monkey, chip head or a mod freak, so I don't know how doable any of these are, but I'm interested in some feedback see if we can get some brain raining with thunder.

1. Blue jeans and rock n' roll. I like to see some differnet ways to put pressure on the rival factions without resorting to volience. Talking about soft power here. Maybe add a cultural aspect to the influence system. Maybe ecomonically, like explioting a rare resource that the other factions willing to trade for, even food, somehow force sysmobtic realationship with other factions to gain more of gobal infulance. Something that would make other facitons have a vested interest in preventing your premature extinction.

2. Turn the minor factions into any expoiltable resource rather then a independent enitys. Use'em for wars by proxy or provide speciality units like the horseman of the west, or barbains from the north, rangers of the old forest kind of thing. Make it so you would rather control/ally with them instead of conqureing or destorying them. Like the units disband if there city is taken or flee to join a rival faction.

3. Deniable ops with possiable politcal and economic consquences. Sabotage, subterfuge and spying. Maybe knock down a mine, poisoning the well to stunt city growth, disrupt production/training, insite unrest/roit, assainte a powerful npc etc.

4. Champions and heroes expanded to be more than a sword. This has already got some good diversity with supplying additonal x, but maybe a little more wouldn't hurt, like drillmaster reduces training time or adds experience, great general provide additonal morale or other tactical bonus or prepared battlefields/last depolyment, master craftsman make supirour whatever, governers/city mangers that boost proudciton or maintain control, mabye even wet/black ops champs

5. Your people count for something other then stat or a ticker to level up. Allow the populaiton to be shifted to repurpose your cites instead of just tearing down and switching bulidings. Have an unrest/happiness meter, maybe use structures to encourage/discourage relocating form city to city. Anything to make it more then number.

6. Border potral and security detail. Dedicated outposts/forts or ambushing/hidden units with zones of control/intercept. Having to allocate troops to maintain scured trades routes or protect caravans.

7. Mana for a rainy day. Now I say something posted by Mr Wardell about this regarding shared pools and I know he intended to expand upon this later in the week so i'll just throw little something out there. Like say a stragitic resvere, maybe lesser mages chanting for maintance of summons, or rechargable batteries/stones just in case, maybe speical potions made by your alchemist hero guy.

8. Walking wounded and scaled vs stacked stats. It's depressing when you thin the herd but the last man standing is just as effective as the full roster. Reduce effectivness of heros do to a critcal wounds/assaination attempts that require additional rest or magic/medical treatment to remedy.

9. Resources and linking. A quciker visual refernence, like an overlay that can be toggled on/off showing if and where a resource are linked. Also an oppurtunity for popluce to exploited/tasked with.

10. Guns win battles, logistics win wars. "Making war" should be more of a strategic decision, like having to maintain supply lines, maybe increase upkeep for the regualr armies the further they stray from your zone of control, something to make the envelop or breakthrough more of a gamble. Maybe strave them out, something to keep the "stack o death" the only real opition.

 There you go. But for love of everything awesome, please don't sacific complexeity for accesialblty.

Thank you for reading this crap

Brother J