Ok, this is going to be a bit long, and alot of the stuff has probably been posted on here already, but it's been VERY active on here the past few days, and it would take forever to go through all that. Anyways, here goes.

First I would like to say that the game is definitely progressing well (at least compared to 3A which is the first one I've played). Especially the empire is a BIT better to play with now, but still has a lot of issues. ALOT of balancing still needs to be done in terms of research and resources. Ok, so this last playthrough I wrote down everything I could see as a problem.

2. This isn't regarding empires, but I noticed when you start your world, instead of continents, islands, etc, it's difficulty now. Does that affect the resources or the play of the AI? When you select your opposing factions, there's a seperate difficulty for them. Just would like a little clarification on that one.

C. After 4 turns, the game completely froze, and I had to kill it. After restarting again, game was fine.

4. I love that resources dont have to be right next to your buildings in order to harvest them (farms, gold mines, etc). However I noticed that if you click on the resource and build the building from there, it creates a ghost in the build mode for the city. It will still show the farm in build mode for that city, only it's grayed out. Not a big deal, but usually these buildings dont appear once they are already built. If you build the farm in build mode, it goes away after building it.

V. You can't build up your cities as easily as you can with kingdoms. This is a balancing thing. Either more resources for food, or better techs for getting mroe food out of the resources. Also, a better housing tech would help too. This is a fine line however, as being able to just grow your cities willy nilly is just as  much not fun. I is has grammar awesome!

Sixth, the empire research tree needs a lot of love. I cleared out the domination and sorcery categories in 11 and 12 levels. Some techs that you DO research are a waste of time because they don't actually do anything (on a side note I wonder how many kingdom techs are like this). The big ones that I noticed are all techs relating to experience (zealots, whatnot), and armies, raids, etc. Even after researching both of those fields all the way, I still can only train 1 unit at a time, and the "normal" experience level.

7. I had gone to a quest hut, accepted the quest, which was to dispatch of those loud mouthed hooligan bandits. So, I go with my sovereign and his summoned spy to do so. I win the fight, however my spy dies, and I get dumped back to the map. Nothing about the quest, didn't get anything but experience. The quest spot on the cloth map still is lit up yellow, but when I move there, nothing happens as if it's an empty tile.

H. One little thing I noticed as well is that when you are selecting units to go out of the city in a stack. In order to select them at the same time, you hold down shift, no? Well, if you hold down shift, it works to select multiple units, but the cursor gets "pulled" back the other direction. It's weird, and can get around it by letting go of shift, and only hitting shift when selecting the unit you want to add to the stack.

IX. This is something I noticed on the kingdom side as well. When researching (frantically) for better farming, there's the refined farming option. Now, I must have researched that 5 times. Is it doing anything? It doesn't seem to as my food production never goes up. It's just weird that you can keep researching it. Actually, come to think of it, alot of the "refined" whatevers do that as well. Perhaps its not really turned on yet.

10. Another small thing. In unit design where you pick your armor, it lit four things:

Head Gear

Surcoats

Weapons

Boots

I kind of feel like we're playing a game of what doesn't fit here? By the way, I think they meant greaves.

It goes to 11. Ok, now here's where things got a little messed up. So a foreign city was blocking my way to expansion, so I did what any other sensible empire would do, and I conquered it. It was a city belonging to capitar I believe. This is where I have a suggestion. Taking a cue from GalCiv2, if an empire faction takes over a kingdom's city, the buildings the empire can't use should be destroyed to make way for the proper ones. Vice versa. Ever since conquering that city, strange things happened. Every other turn showed a discrepancy of 3 in my food production. It would go from 6 to 3. Weird. Then, I got a message saying "Destroying this improvement will make your city non-contiguous". Strange because I wasn't destroying any buildings, and was actually looking at my OTHER city at the time of the warning. I looked at my capital and wanted it to grow to level 4. Ok, I had 250 cap now, needed 500. Shanties give you 50 people, so I needed 5 Shanties, right? Well I placed them, and after a while I looked, and it said I had a cap of 400! When I moused over the shanties in the city, the info box on the right side of the screen said that they only increase the cap by 25. It seems the kingdom is infecting the might of the empire! No!!!

Tactical Battles. I like them, though they aren't much fun right now. Magic is way too powerful (although it is cool to wipe out a whole stack of guys with one spell). And turn based makes it kinda awkward. I never though I'd say that. It's just that you can wait for the enemy to come to you, then when he has no more moves to attack you, you attack him. Great start though, I think this can be AWESOME if there's an epic battle going on with 100s of troops on either side. That reminds me, I don't think the system can handle that right now. I had a battle that had something like 100 units on one side, and the game just commited suicide.

Thanks for your hard work guys. Any idiot can see the love you have for your games. No one focuses on gameplay more. And that, as an old school gamer, I truly appreciate.