Greetings all. I have been lurking through these forums for sometime now and I feel like now is the perfect time to finally post something. Overall I love the direction the game is going in. I played two complete games this weekend and had only maybe one or two crashes in about 10+ hours of play. So I must say stability wise the game is on the right track. I did notice a lot of UI and graphical glitches but I expected those in a beta. Well rather than write a big wall of text let me list out the things I do like and dislike about the current build:

Likes:

• Heroes are now an important part of your army and gaining levels actually means something now.
• Lots of varied loot and quests compared to WoM.
• City building is much improved compared to WoM. No more just spamming of studies. Each building has a unique or semi-unique role. No spoecialist population to worry about. Also the level up bonuses are more interesting this time around.
• Magic is more useful overall but is still somewhat lacking (I will explain more below.)
• Adventuring is now fun. Love UI icons on the map that tells me what each location of interest is. Before it was really hard to tell if there was a treasure on the ground.
• The tech tree is much improved over all but it seems to take forever to research stuff.
• Outposts are awsome!
• Tactical battles feel better with the new initiative system.

Dislikes

• Mana seems to be pointless around mid game. You pretty much have an unlimited supply it feels like. We need to add a per battle limit based on intelligence or something.
• There are only one or two useful spells per element. I find myself only using direct damage and healing spells. The status inducing spells don't seem to have much of an affect and strategic spells overall are not worth the maintenance cost.
• Also spells don't scale very well. There needs to be some that take intelligence into consideration too.
• Imbueing a champion should have an upkeep cost or have the base cost increased. It's basically a no brainer to imbue every champion you have that can cast spells.
• Heroes are a little too powerful. Maybe it's their base HP or the fact that they gain levels so quickly. I Brad has said splitting up the XP per party member should help.
• Biggest Pet Peeve: Why don't the UI elements grow to fit the screen? I shouldn't have to click a "more actions" button when there is obviously enough horizontal space for everything to fit.
• Some of the talent paths for heroes are severly underpowered and the rare items come up to frequently.
• Standard army units seem to have no place since heroes can take their place. I haven't had the need to train any because it takes to slow to get them up to speed with heroes.
• Tech tree seems to take forever to research. By the time my armies have basic leather gear and swords my heroes are level 15+. It makes more sense to research the civ and magic trees.
• Caravans should be less tedious to manage. Maybe when you select a caravan it should just list potential cities to go to and you can pick one.
• Capturing resources don't seem to have a major impact (besides maybe mana shards). Either that or they pop-up to frequently. I still haven't found a need for metal or crystals as I don't even need to train an army.
• I've had no use for diplomacy yet.

That's all I have time to list at the moment. Don't take the larger list of negatives as me bashing the game though as I just think those are the changes to make the game perfect. As it is in this stage of the beta I have faith a lot of these problems will be fixed.