After playing a few matches I really feel that the game pacing needs to slow down a few clicks.
Mainly city and outpost building. There doesn't seem to be any penalties to spamming outposts and cities.
At present the only way to play the game is to rush the map with pioneers, get the city spots and get the outpost out there and hoard everything before steamroling over the enemy AI.

This pretty much leaves exploration and questing on the sideline, as something you do while passing by. Cause you don't have much time to spare as you need to find the goodie spots before the AI and beat them to it with a pioneer.

You end up losing the epic feeling of it all as the world shrinks so rapidly. I rarely get to the big event areas like the Imperium before all the enemy AI is dead or of no further threat. And then there really isn't any resistance left in the game.
Also you're not even half way down the the tech trees either.

What I suggest is to have a limited number of outposts that a city can support, starting  a 1 and getting up to 3 maybe as you gain new tech and build certain improvements.
Also to limit the number of cities one can spam out I suggest having them unable to support themselves for some time. As in the cost of having the city is higher then its gold and grain output and the rest of the kingdom needs to be able to support it to keep it alive until it is able to support itself. You can also tie in the capitol in this. As to how many cities the kingdom can manage at a time. The more cities you have the harder it becomes to keep unrest down and to collect taxes. And as you gain tech and build improvements it gets easier to maintain a larger kingdom.
Another thing, which also came up in part in another thread, is that city improvements need to make more sense like the water wheel and the dock which can only be build buy the river, and also have more of an impact. Cause at present you just end up queueing everything without any thought to whether you need it or not. It really doesn't matter much.

And personally I would like to have and even larger map too. When I have 3000 turns on me to finish the game, I really don't want it to be over in the first 400-500 turns. And when I say over, I mean that the game doesn't have any more to offer.