I got the initial 0-day and played the post release patch as well. I have not played 1.05 yet as I haven't had the time. So far:

The Good:

I love the option to build my own sovereign.

I like the research interfaces for both magic and worldly knowledge. Simple, easy to understand.

The map's geography is pretty and easy to read.

The little unit models are nicely done including their animations.

The Influence of MoM is clear and welcome.

Unit design is a wonderful concept.

The bad:

There seem to be major balance issues in combat. I can quickly build units that utterly dominate others. My favorite example are units using Lord Hammers which can be obtained in the earliest stages of the game. Lord Hamer's have an attack rating of *40* which is absurd. stack of 3 guys with no armor and Lord Hammers pretty much roll through everything at this stage. Stacks including more than 3 are the equivalent of the Death Star. Which leads me to:

Magic is nearly useless. In fact I win even faster by simply ignoring it altogether. I create Sovs with no spell books, build no magic research, and my gameplay is not any different.

My sovereign and hero units are nearly useless in the early-mid game compared to the melee units I train as stated above. As long as I start near an Iron deposit my units can have Lord Hammers for a few gildar but buying one for a hero or a Sov costs something like 800 Gildar? So instead of using these heros I let them sit in cities while my cheap and easy Hammerers dominate in just a few turns. That tends to make one of th good points of the game useless (customized Sovs). The Hammerers make Fire Giants look like pikers.

The AI is suicidal even at high levels. It loves to throw outclassed units into hopeless fights with my garrisons. It makes tiny cities outside of it's big ones to no seeming purpose (I just raze them).

If I intentionally let the game go into late turns (it has to be intentional because of the bad AI) then the item stacking coupled with the now overabundant Guildar make my Sov go from early game useless to Combat God with nigh unlimited HP and stats.

Items have no rhyme or reason.... Why is that 6000+ Gildar Elementium sword just a 20 Attack 1 combat speed turd? Why are ther so few abilities for items or units?

Domination or Adventure research seems to be partly broken. I research the right techs to recruit darklings or to use a Demon Gate and randomly the game simply doesn't recognize that I did?

The one time I actually got the Demon Gate tech to recognize and built the Demon Gate, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to "summon demons". The city it was linked to couldn't "recruit" them, they were available as unit designs, and I didn't get a summoning spell to use. I have no idea what the problem is here.

Some of the tech trees are *very* short and you end up researching "refined foo" far too quickly.

The Auto-resolve is a genius in combat. So much so that I feel no need to ever hit tactical combat since it feels very shallow and slow anyway.

Notable locations have almost zero

Suggestions:

Many of the issues above can be fixed simply by tweaking values or fixing bugs. These should be tweaked/fixed.

Different damage and defense types. Piercing, slashi8ng, blunt, frost, poison, etc... the RPG standard. Right now there is just Damage and Defense which gets pretty dull.

Unit and item abilities. There needs to be a lot more differentiation for everything. Let these abilities add the depth currently missing from combat.

More Global Spells and Global Constructs to make casting or building things more meaningful.

That is probably enough for now...

I can't wait for this game to become whole.