List is missing:

Strategic & Tactical AI improvements.

Fantastic! Thanks for all your hard work on the game. I'm especially excited for the return of essence as a "true" stat.

Now that's change we can believe in.

Sweet zombie jesus yes. Best news since release.

And, hopefully, the harbinger of more dynasty improvements to come? That change alone will be good, but better if defeated sovereigns have their kingdoms split between factions with claims to the throne, those with stronger claims getting a bigger piece, possibly resulting in a sort of civil war. Better yet if dynasty connections have more meaningful diplomatic repercussions while the other sovereign is still alive; a practical game mechanic that encourages you to actually stay allied with a guy your daughter married a few turns back, and penalizes you for turning on them, and vice versa?

Don't get me wrong, this is a great change on its own, but it basically amounts to "if I lose, you can have my stuff" - the dynasty system still doesn't really encourage two kingdoms/empires to work together while they're both actually playing (on the contrary, if you're married into a sovereign's family, you'll want him to lose so you can win his kingdom - you might even try to help the process along..), again I hope more dynasty improvements are to come.

Essence: I'm going to throw out this idea. What if you could muliply imbue a single character with essence (assuming you had it to use).

Think of the following. If you found a badass champion, wouldn't you want to make him more badass? So here is what i'm thinking.

• Essence = 0. Normal character
• Essence = 1. Caster
• Essence = 2+ (10% bonus to all stats, might have to tweak the number). So if your sovereign starts with 10 essence, he basically has twice the stats as a normal person. But if he wants, he could take some of that to create a champion of sorts. There however are some questions,

1. If a unit with essence is destroyed, does the sovereign get it back? if so at what rate (1 essence every 20 turns etc).
2. Can the sovereign withdraw essence (you find a better champion).
3. Could the sovereign improve his essence stat via level up.

Just some thoughts. I like all of the ideas on the list. Maybe after my first Shogun 2 total war game, 1.3 will be ready.

This would be way better, with entire kindoms beings swallowed up into one large conglomerate, it's quickly going to be game over - for the smaller AIs at least. The game is most fun when there's multiple factions competing at about the same level. The game should try to maintain that balance of rivalry for as long as possible. Imagine stealing just one entire empire, already that launches a player into "Operation clean-up" mode.

I'm all posisitive about this update !

Especially this:

• Notable locations will no longer require a tech level
• Quests will no longer require a tech level (though that doesn’t mean high end quests will be showing up early)

 Death of a sovereign will cause the rest of the faction to go over to the faction with the best dynasty connections

I would have preferred that it goes to one of the sovereign's children, but this is a step in the good direction.

Staying tuned. Very encouraged. Hope the folks who think the devs never listen read this and understand what it says about how y'all do listen.

Great list! Thumbs up!

Very positive changes.

The death of a sovereign change I like very much.

I also would like to see the return of minor factions at some point.

Keep up the good work.

One request- random factions/random intelligence like in GC2?

Second idea/request- allow units to have "backup weapons"  Switching weapons takes 1 AP.  So you could give an archer a shortsword as a backup.

Third idea: tie that movement speed increase to map size perhaps?  Alternative #2: buff horsies

Fourth idea: more mount types.   Maybe as rare techs (concept I'd like to see returned)

(sighs) Meant to do one idea, ended up giving a list.  I should try to keep it down- only do much you guys can do at once.

I really liked the minor factions in GalCiv 2.  Hope they get come back sometime, maybe in FE.  Just the one we have now is a bit better than nothing, but I could live without it.

If quests & notable locations don't require tech, I hope/assume they will be defended.

Like some posters above, I would like more-varied mounts.

Most of the rest sounds good / noncontroversial.

So what's missing....

Would like to see caravans get some love, especially clickable messages showing where the caravan is that is trying to set up a duplicate trade route, or where the one was that just got destroyed.

Would like fewer messages at next-turn in the middle of the screen that you have to click on but can't do anything about at the time.  I don't think I'm alone here.