After playing through one game of beta 5C and halfway through two others, I wanted to share some of my thoughts:

First off, I really like the state of the game.
Regarding recent changes, I think the new early game items are a nice addition.


Stability
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The game still crashes for me quite often, on average maybe every 2 hours. But it's not bound to playtime, happened to me right after
I started the game. Mostly when moving a unit on the strategic map.

Much more often, instead of a CTD, I get a frame-rate drop to about 1 frame/sec (I have to admit, my rig is fairly old, but with reduced screen resolution and disabled shadows the game usually runs quite smoothly).
This is not a new problem, I had this in varying degrees in every beta. It usually happens after I looked at a unit or city details,
level up screen, research breakthrough or a similar pop-up window. As an additional symptom, most of the GUI overlay disappears,
rendering the game mostly unplayable, even when bearing the frame-rate drop. Sometimes it disappears after a while, most often I have to restart the program.


Bugs
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As I reload so often I recognized some odd behavior: after every reload, the AI personality attributes are changed.

Some animation bug: when casting a random target spell like storm, the damage goes to a different unit than the animation.

I saw several outpost build on quest locations, goody huts and even cities. I've also seen a enemy army on the same square as a monster one.
When declaring war while having units inside the enemie's territory, those armies get moved, probably to get them out of the territory. But it happened to me several times that they got moved in the wrong direction, once even on top of a city.



Strategic AI
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While the path finding is mostly fine, units exit cities at very suboptimal positions, like in the middle of a forest instead of
on the road.

The AI is very bad at defending their cities. Several times I approached an enemy city and had to stop just outside, giving
the AI at least one turn to react on it (sometimes I even delayed the attack further to see whether there is any reaction at all from the AI). If one of my cities is in a situation like that I usually go through a series of emergency measures, none of those I observed to be done by the AI:
- concentrate all available forces in the city.
I've seen several units, including the enemy sovereign, wander around just outside the city, even though there were still slots inside the city for additional defenders
- cast strategic spells
My army is in their territory, there is are spells in nearly every school of magic available for buying time, e.g. via tremor, or weakening the attacker.
- cast unit or enchantment
similar to the above, the defenders need every help they can get
- rush a defender unit
Often I see a military unit queued in the attacked city, only a few turns from completion. Those should definitely be rushed.

Even if it were questionable whether the city could be held in this way, the AI should try by all means.
First of all, fighting inside one's own city is the most favorable battlefield you can fight on.
In addition, this is not only a question of good strategy but also of giving the player a good fight.
The AI should focus as much on providing a satisfying showdown as on winning in the first place.

Tactical AI
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The tactical AI came good way from mindlessly storming into melee range and takes into consideration who has more ranged damage potential. Nonetheless I saw several ways where it could be improved.

The AI is a bit too fond of small steps forward now. I saw several occasions where the AI approached much too carefully,
allowing me to retreat while using spells and ranged attacks.
I also often saw the AI behave like I had no ranged damage potential, disregarding damage spells.
For example in a fight against a forest drake it approached my group by staying just out of range of my melee fighters, trying to get into a first strike position. I just retreated one tile every time, and killed it with a series of storm casts. It never did any damage to me. It would have caused much more trouble, had it just stormed in.

It also AI does not, in any way, respect splash or area damage potential. A juggernaut, blizzard or fireball can decide the battle instantly. The enemy should try to spread out a bit to prevent such blowouts.

Also, it is very fond of buffs and debuffs. But buffing a unit that is unlikely to see its next turn is of no use. Also debuffing an enemy unit if the rest of the enemy army can very easily beat you, is of little use. The AI should focus more on dealing damage, I think.
An extreme case is when spiders try to web my ranged units, as if it wants to prevent them from fleeing, disregarding the tactical situation of a bunch of melee units coming its way.

I've never seen an enemy unit move before casting or moving away from one of my units to attack another one.
This really handicaps it compared to tactics available to humans.
The only time units moved away from a melee engagement was when they tried to flee. This is a good way to preserve damaged units.
But only of use if the overall battle would be won, otherwise fleeing units just die last. While fleeing units make sense flavor wise,
this again is a handicap compared to player units (unless you add a moral system )



Balance
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Some random balance remarks:

Ignis' are for some reason rated very high in their combat rating, three of them considered 'strong' I found them to be inferior to all but the very weak early-game units.

When focusing a bit on Initiative in your unit design/enchantments/equipment, you can run in circles around enemies.
My whole army often moves three times before a troll warrior moves again. While this is cool, I think it makes things too easy.

The death shard demons are leveled to company size very easily if there are some easy critters nearby. I just wanted to play a slow game of teching, now I stomp everyone with those demons in the early game.

Juggernauts are beasts, never saw an Army that stood a chance.


Fun
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I rarely have any idea what the AI is up to. Not that they don't do enough, I just don't see much of it.
As suspense is better than surprise (as Hitchcock said, I think), more information about AI ambitions, successes and strength would help to make the game more enjoyable.

In my latest playthrough that I won via conquest, I found out in the end that the last enemy I attacked already had build two of towers needed for the
spell of making. I only found out about that when I already took the city, so it was more of a 'oh, nice' than an excited  'oh, I have to hurry up'. If I had been to late and the AI would have won that way, the enjoyment would also have been very low, I think. The AI already brags about its research, I think that system should be expanded.

Wildlands are often harder to beat than AI players, and they don't really block paths between players, so they can usually be ignored.
I especially dislike those narrow landstripes around them that allow you to go around. And cities on that landstripe look like they don't belong there, like on the frame of a picture. Maybe just remove those "frames"?



suggestions regarding movement
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Movement, especially on the strategic map is full of artifacts from the grid/turn structure.
For example, the movement penalty for entering river tiles has no effect, if that happens to be the last step for that turn anyway.
Maybe it's too late for that already, but how about:
- either carrying over of negative MPs to the next turn (So when entering a forest space with only 1 MP left, you get one MP less next turn)
- or not being able to enter spaces if you don't have enough MPs, but unspent MPs carrying over to the next turn (but not more than one turn worth of MP can carry over)

And while we are at suggestions:
- How about multiplying diagonal movement cost by 1.5?
- How about ZOC on the strategic map? It's way too easy to maneuver around enemies/too hard to block enemies.


random request
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When I reload a game after a crash and enter a goody hut I previously entered, I often get a different item.
This feels like cheating when I get a better one and like I have been cheated if I get a worse one.
Couldn't the content of goody huts be determined at world generation time?

That's all for now, thanks for reading
edit: got some more

Some other bugs I encountered
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City militia sometimes does not disappear after a victorious defensive battle
and stays in my army (disappears again once it enters the city) happened to.
Happened once to me and once I saw them in an AI stack.
This happened in the .982, so maybe it that is already resolved?

I saw an army of an air-elmental and some air-shrills located at the top of a mountain. As only the elemental, not the shrills are supposed to fly, I wonder if that was intended.

When a unit consisting of several individuals is shrinked, only one of the individuals' size is actually changed

A list of age-old glitches that go back many versions:
- The highlighting of the selected tile is glitchy in tactical battles: when hovering above a blocked tile or of the battlefield, the nearest tile stays highlighted (which is fine) but one of the 4 lines then suddenly is several tiles long.
- The area of influence updates with one turn delay. As you can already start building on resources that came into range that turn,
  visuals and mechanics seem out of sync there (if you start building, the visuals actually update immediately)
- HP bars don't get updated or appear as two bars, regularly
- sometimes the first time I get to move a unit in battle, the spell/skill bar does not appear
- trees are sometimes without texture (this disappears when zooming in)

more suggestions
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- Resource building update possibilities should show up in the nearest city's build menu,
  right now they only show up if they are part of the city
- I am still missing information on the city level-up screen: the actual location on the map is often the info I need to remember what my plans for that city are -> let us see/scroll the map in the city level-up screen