After an epic 6 hour session with the sandbox last night, I came up with a few minor but important areas that could use some simple improvements. Some of these may be repeats that are seen around the forum, but they probably bear mentioning a lot. 

All from Normal, large world size games...

Order of Operations

This really needs to get sorted out. Maybe this should be a in bug post, but the game needs to consistently order events that happen at the start of the turn. Having a "you're under attack message!' for three caravans, followed by choosing a tech,  followed by a battle,  followed by a spell level increase, followed by picking your tech, followed by a city level increase, followed by picking your spell, followed by another battle, THEN ending with what units died and where, is too much stuff going on at once.

The game needs to resolve all tech and spell issues before moving on to combat, and then end with all the city, empire and dynasty stuff. Or some order, of any kind, really.   

Army Leadership

It's confusing right now re-arrange an army under a different leader, which is important for what bonuses the army has and spells like Teleport. Moving units off and restacking them not only eats up moves, it has sometimes unpredictable results. Adding an entry to unit actions for "Promote this unit to army leader" would be fantastic.

Caravans

-Caravans need to state their city of origin as well as their current destination on their unit card.

-We need caravans that spawn with guards, more health, armor and atk, or both. Having to dedicate one of your expensive units to deal with the smallest of threats to your caravans gets very tedious mid to late game when monster pops start exploding.

-It would be really nice if we could customize caravans like we do with troops, for speed, durability, defense or perhaps some economic traits.

-An overview of your caravan network somewhere would be great. Just a panel listing each city, and who it is is trading with. When you have 6+ cities, it's tedious checking each one. The information they provide is also confusing sometimes (it often lists a city they're trading with, what they're getting out of it, but always says "No caravan sent."

-A possible bug, but it seems like caravans don't always go to the city they're assigned to, if they have an alternate road to another city available to take.

Dynasty

-A pop up message that one of your children has matured would be great. Messages delivered via alerts thingy on the right are easy to miss since so much spam ends up there.

-We should be able to customize our children when they've matured. Currently it seems like everything for them is generated when they're born, including the name that gets stuck in their flavor text,. My kids also need their own quotes, because they're rebels like that.

-Natural mana and health regen feels like it should be a lot rare, and it should be mentioned as a trait of the unit on their unit card. 

-That my kids are born with essence values higher than my sovereign who has invested continually in it seems unbalanced. My 4th child started with an essence in the 40s.

-Children should be able to start with flaws, too. It would give some character and personality to each one. You don't get to pick your parents, and by the same token, your kids either.

Combat Mechanics:

-When a 9/9 unit has one unit remaining, it should not be dealing the units full damage value on attack and defense. I don't know if this is the Super Peasants issue or not, but it means that you have to bring overkill to escape finish fights with the right amount of causalities, and you have to lean heavily on magic to an unfun extent, to whittle them down.

Combat Rating:

-It seems like it doesn't account for the power of any special abilities. It really should. A 350 point shrill army is in fact way more powerful than that, because of their abilities. A 500 point army of Vigilant demons can kill anything in the game.

AI Faction Behavior

-The AI needs to rely on the growth of its cities more to attain new resources. From what I've seen, major factions will build a new city directly next to a new one if it gets them access to new resources. In a game with Kraxis, I invaded and he had over 8 cities and I hadn't even seen the full extent of their territory.  Some cities had 5 or less tiles between them. He would also send strings of pioneers forward, 5 or 6 at a time. I think that kind of expansionism should be reserved for higher difficulties, the spam forces you to start spamming cities just to get a foothold.

-The AI seems to shut down if you deal it a strong enough blow. In the same game, Capitar had all their cities stolen from them. Because I had a non-aggression pact signed, the Sovereign came to stand by one of my cities and has been there for the duration of the treaty. He has available engineers standing next to another one of my cities, who haven't done anything for about the same amount of time. And Kraxis, after I destroyed probably 8 cities after they tried to rebuild some, has finally just stopped expanding altogether. Half of his starting area, loaded with resources, is sitting unclaimed next to his existing cities. The waves of pioneers have stopped too.

Diplomacy

-We need to be able to break treaties. Have it give a -1 to all faction relations if you have to, but being forced to wait out non-aggression pacts is annoying, especially if you change your mind when your allied AI starts trying to build cities right next to yours. We should be able to declare war at any time. If there's some tech component I'm missing to do that (haven't given diplomacy a lot of attention), it shouldn't require one. Being an oath breaking bastard doesn't take much practice.

City Razing

-Shouldn't require a tech IMO. While I get the intention, destroying cities is a skill of warfare, for practical reasons it's something you should be able to do by default. Either because one of your cities needs to go, or you want to restart fresh where a captured city exists.

Summoned Unit Strength

-A Vigilant Demon (or Imp, can't remember), with his Arcane attack, removes all challenge from most fights. At max level, they can cast it three times per battle. At one per caster, I can have 6 in a fight, dealing 180 true damage in every fight. And then you add in 2 elementals per caster, at least, and the fact all of these are available as early as Spell Level 3, and it's just way too much power without enough sacrifices. The only thing slowing you down is mana, which doesn't really apply in the long-term. 

Resource Popping

-Shard spawning is out of hand. I've got probably 12 shards, and there are several clusters on the map with 4 or more shards within 2 tiles of each other. I get that shard growth is supposed to be controlling the growth of magic power, but it sucks to put all this planning in the early game into city placement, then have shards become ubiquitous kind of without warning. With gold and adventure sites, you research for those things. But having lots of resources constantly appearing in new places in the world kind of makes you stop caring, eventually. It's good stuff changes, but it should stay limited enough that choices are still meaningful.

Monster Spawning

-It feels like I have no control over this, even when I purposefully avoid researching adventuring. I've yet to research level three sites, and I'm already getting the "Shrill" rush that the patch notes said was addressed. Again, the player shouldn't have total control over the growth of monster power, but I feel like I have none. It is helping, however, that low level monsters stay in the mix.  

Equipment Limits

-I know this is a repeat, but this one especially bears repeating. There should be a limit on rings, amulets and packs. I personally think one amulet, two rings, and one pack is the right balance.

Inventory Starting Items

-We should be able to trade and/or sell heroes starting equipment. I think this is because everyone needs a default pair of clothes? Can't every race just have a generic skin for unclothed? It's a minor thing, but I like having clean inventories on my characters, and early game I like to shift around weapons if I have to. 

City Building Slots

There should be a number somewhere on the city statistics that tells you how many slots for buildings you have left at your current level.

Cloth Map Detail Alpha Control

-It would be great if we could control the alpha value of: spheres of influence, roads, city names, map sites, terrain and characters as they appear on the cloth map. I've played with the Cloth Map color slider, but I don't see much of a difference. As I'm playing more and more on the cloth map these days, I'd like that stuff to pop more.

Character vs. NPC marker colors

-It would be nice if non-hostile NPCs and monsters used a different color. Say, Gold for non-hostiles and Silver for everything else. It would help us quickly identify, visually and without mousing around, what's threatening and what's not.

I think that's about it for now.