Great update, despite the severe bugs and game play balance issues. Even with the game being virtually broken right now, I am extremely excited for what this game will turn into! I will buy anything stardock at this point!!! Anyways, here are my insights:

Bugs:

-Crashes 70% of the time when you try to load a new game

-I received a "virtual function error" or something like that, just for playing.

-The damage shown on the battlefield isn't what's shown on the enemy character card, or the actual hp on the stat page for the enemy (they seem to have 3 independently different ideas of what damage is happening) 

-Long waits where you click on "end turn", where you can only proceed by making all your units move individually. This usually happens when there is a quick attack on the map, or a dialog with another civilization waiting to happen.

-The game seems to crash like crazy, just in general. 

Balancing issues\ Recommendations:

-Some of the fire spells aren't scaled to your intelligence, or even your fire shard collection, making them very useless compared to your normal spells. (They would be awesome at a lower mp). Recommendation: maybe make fire spells leave a burning effect on the character that does gradual damage. The burning effect is determined by how many fire shards you have, while the base is determined by intelligence?

-Minimap is virtually useless. Perhaps you could make it larger, and zoomable, like in GC2, except making the unit icon size bigger (so we don't have to switch back and forth between all of our bases to make sure no NPCs take em over).

-Dual-monitor support?

-Too many champions. I find myself housing bought champions in my cities and never using them other than for their passive bonuses. Perhaps all units can have a passive bonus to the cities they reside in, instead of some just having global benefits?  For example merchants might give 2 gold/turn, but in a city they could also raise the gold income percentage? Maybe even have adventurers give some local bonus like "random chance to obtain a relic" or something (as they are adventurering when you're not using them)