I have played several 2 to 3 hour games using the 1.1 beta patch.  I used a large map with seven opponents on the easy difficulty setting.  I played the sovereign Relias and the kingdom of Altar.  I did not customize my sovereign or faction in any way.  My primary focus was on adventuring, with magic as a close second.  Overall, I liked many of the changes.  However, I did notice a few problems.

First, the new mana scheme provides too much mana, especially in the early and mid game.  By the time I built my fire shrine of my starting fire shard, and researched fireball, I have well over 200 mana points saved up.  I could literally cast fireball every action.  This is just too much.  There needs either more useful spells early on or to be some sort of cap on mana. Perhaps spells that increase movement range for one round or other short term effects may help.  Nevertheless, I think the better solution would be to limit the maximum of mana to about 30 per shard.  This would actually make the shards into the mana batteries as they are described in the backstory.  Of course is number could be modified by technology and improvements like essence was in the prior patch.

Secondly, I believe it was a mistake to remove much of the upkeep cost from the city improvements.  A lot of turn-based strategy games devolve into building every improvement in every city.  Before this patch, there were reasons not to place merchants in cities which did not have gold production multipliers.  I thought this was a strong point of the game, because it allowed for city specialization and allows the player to focus on other things, such as questing and magic.  Under such a scheme, cities would grow as influence expands over more resources, which the player could use to convert into other resources by building city improvements.  This is much like real life; you can't build a factory for five million dollars and have it spill out shoes forever without any further division of resources. If anything, I thought more improvements should be made like the old merchant improvement.

Next, I notice that spells always display maximum damage, even if they do less damage than maximum.  A fireball spell with one fire shrine will always display 12 damage.  I've seen it subtract as little as 6 damage from a target, I think from a young ogre.  I know the new spell resistance attribute was just coded into the game, perhaps the damage displayed by a spell does not count spell resistance yet?

Finally, some of the quests do not seem to be implemented into the new patch.  Over each play through, I had both level one and level two quests, and literally the only quests I got between all games were the magic compass, three moonstones (both sword and shield), and both lost lost alchemy quests so many times I lost count, I know there was multiple times for both alchemy quests in a single game.  There seem to be a lot more quests before this patch.

Other than that, I like about everything I've seen in the latest beta patch.  I like the new spell book organization, but I do believe we could use a few more spells.  Overall, great job!  I am really impressed that with what most companies do with the expansion pack, this company is doing with a patch.  I cannot wait to see what expansion is like!