OK, I finally got the game to work. The last thing I had to do was disable my firewall. That's when my nightmare begun. I'm guessing the game will be playable (at least for me) some time in the second half of 2011.
STRIKE 1: I, too, experienced the dodge/block mightmare. The stats of the units are misleading. I started the campaign and after ~4 hours I had a battle with a drake. It took alomost 15 min to win because the enemy kept dodging and blocking. I had 8 units total with two of them being squads of 8 upgraded peasants. They had 40 attack, 50+ defense, and the drake had 25 defense and 15+ attack (or something like that). But the game obviously doesn't care about the total att,def of the units because thay didn't land a single hit. All the damage was done by my sovereign. Apparently the game compares attacker's att with defender's def and if it is higher, it MAY HIT. If it is the same value, I'd say it hits 10% or lower. If it's lower, don't bother.
Another example is a squad of 8 armed peasants (that's how I named them) with 48 attack and 64 defense facing a Umberdroth with 19 attack and 6 defense. My peasants were barely touching him, doing 2-4 damage whenever they hit, and it was doing 10-14. From that I get that when the programs shows the squad's stats, is calculating the total of the units, but in combat the squads are too weak. I only use them as cannon fodder because they have high HP, until my sovereign takes the enemies out.
STRIKE 2: Another problem I had, is with a ship I get at some point, because its captain doesn't have the same destination as I. It refuses to go where I want and after a while it stops moving. Then it only goes backwards .
STRIKE 3: Many small things, like:
1.When a city upgrades I can choose to get some random guardians. OK, make it random, but I hate it when a city of humans gets spider or darklings guardians.
2.The Auto Expore doesn't work.
3.I believe it would help a lot if I could see the destination I set for a unit, connected to the unit with a line (Red, blue, I don't care)
4.In the tactical map, there should be a way to tell from the icons on the left which unit is selected.
5.In the world map, most of the time I can move mycharacters by pressing the destination on map. When I no longer have moves, I press again on the map to continue moving. Sometimes(especially when I have more than one parties on map) the game won't let me move my characters unless I press the End turn, or even worse it won't let me press End button unless I move all my characters.
6.When I select a party and hover over the icons of the units, the information I see for the unit doesn't change if I move between same units.
7.IMO, the development of the city from LV4 to LV5 is too hard. If I count right, you need 20 huts to get the population to level up the city.
I haven't played yet in scenarios, so I don't know if the problems I faced are encontered only in campaign
