Just finished my first game, it's looking great!  Gameplay is significantly improved, though there's still some balance to be done.  The bug / crash issues I encountered were:

Crashes from 0.77 that are still there:

Hitting 'e' on non-heroes causes a crash [edit: saw this was fixed in 0.86, woot!]

Bugs from 0.77 that are still there:

Maul weapons still causes a slight pause before and after attacking

Holding down shift while selecting multiple units in a city still makes the mouse not move smoothly

Crashes in 0.85

Hitting Ctrl-N to regenerate the map sometimes causes crashes

Bugs in 0.85

Still no warning when there's no research selected

Loading sometimes causes nothing but the base ground to load, or sometimes misses graphics like swamp or trees

Archivist choice says 10% research, tooltip says 20$

Maul weapons reduce my chance to hit to 0 on the second hit despite the champion having 34 accuracy

Sometimes AI units will never stop the moving animation. I cannot attack them when this happens.  Happened to me once also, as a unit passed through a equip. cache on a long path

Values for things during diplomacy are off - hitting the "50 gold" adds 50 value, but typing it in adds a lot more.  Removing the typed-in 50g doesn't 0 the negotiations.  Doing that, I made 10 diplomatic capital = 2000 gold