Still comically easy on Hard difficulty, need to wait on AI changes.
I'll post some more detailed feedback later, but in short: Heroes are still ludicrous, Cloud Walk is still broken, and I never moved a single regular combat unit out of a city (I think I built... three, all game, maybe?).
City maintenence changes were a non-factor, I still wound up building basically every structure in every one of my cities, but that's related to the unit building (or lack thereof), so again, need to wait on AI.
Oh, and again didn't go very far up any of the tech trees.
However, upshot? Performance was a bit better (20-30 fps instead of 5-15!), and I only had a few crashes for the entirety of the game. That at least made me a bit happier 
Also, mentioned before, but this just needs to change:
Two amulets, four rings, a backpack, three stones, a telescope, a compass, a horse, a turtle, and a partridge in a pear tree.
(also that hero who tried to kill Vetrar might have had better luck if he'd used a weapon that didn't deal cold damage)
