So I've been playing non stop for a few weeks now and here are some of the observations/comments/suggestions I would offer on the game.

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The display of units and cities is not practical and should be streamlined.  Instead of having to scroll up or down the long list of cities and heroes and garrisons - why not a button for each type opening another window?

Trade is *very* limited.  Caravans should not only trade food but also any of the other excess resources (metal, crystals, horses).  As far as I know it's not possible to have a caravan establish a trade route across an ocean.  So I suggest to have a new unit - the merchant ship - that would do the same thing between coastal cities with a port.  Also I think the road building should be handled by a different unit than the caravan.  Or we should be able to upgrade caravans and merchant ships to give them soldier protection.

I think 'Adventuring' should be independent from the standard technology tree - and parallel since one should be able to increase one's adventuring skills while simultaneously increasing one's general knowledge.  The current setup forces us to delay learning essential techs in order to advance the adventuring ones.  Perhaps tie it with the XP progression of the heroes?  Something like for each XP going to a hero, a fraction would go to a central pool and when you reach a certain lvl you get a pop up offering you to expand your adventuring skills.

Heroes should see their specialized bonuses increase as well over time from 1 research for instance to a max of say 3.  Perhaps this could be tied with the global XP pool mentioned above.  Upon reaching a certain volume of global XPs you'd get the pop up and get to choose between increasing your adventuring skills or upgrading one hero.  Heroes could also have other attributes like those in FFH - I mean other than the 'merchant, librarian, lore master, etc).  In fact I think if there's one editor that's missing it's a Hero Editor so we could add our own creations to the roster we have already.

Speaking of editors, the Sovereign and Faction editors should have a larger variety of positive and negative attributes.  Oh and do create an editor interface so we don't have to waste time digging in XML code, coming back here for clarifications, waiting hours or days for an answer, then back for another stretch...  That is very aggravating.  And I personally would pay an extra for it.

I'll add more as I go.

G.