First time FE player (feedback)

I just had a chance to play the Fallen Enchantress beta and thought I would give my thoughts. Haven’t played or have been on the forums since EWOM so my apologies if the things I’m mentioning have been discussed to death. So from a first time player, here it goes:

-It would be nice to name your cities and hero’s as you create/acquire them. It’s a small feature that goes along way. I like creating my own adventure and being able to name these things would help with the immersion.

-When you acquire an item and want to equip it, it should bring you the character screen. I don’t remember the stats of what I currently have equipped.

-In the late game, the city HUD always covers up my towns/quests in the lower left hand corner. It looks a bit messy. I understand this is going to be cleaned up in beta 4?

-Not sure what I’m supposed to be doing at times. Sometimes, it will just say “turn” (not highlighted green) and I just sit there wondering what actions/units I have available to me. This becomes very confusing in late game. In Civ, it would just rotate through all your idle units or actions you had available.

-Trying to get units garrisoned into a city and then take them out seems a bit clunky to me. I find myself having to click on the unit multiple times to finally get him to pop out of the city so I can move them. And when I finally do…I sometimes get a loud “BUM” sound and it doesn’t tell me why I can’t move it.

-When I get to a refined “tech” stage, I always get a pop-up that says “open research” and the “continue research” is grayed out. When I have nothing left to research but refined tech’s it gets a bit annoying. If I want to continue researching the same thing, it should 1. Give me the continue research option or 2. Just keep researching it until I change it.

-Could there be a better way to pick spells? I like the book but it gets a bit cumbersome at times. For instance, if I want to use the same spell 2-3 times consecutively, (like lower land), I have to keep going into the book and flipping pages to find what I want. Maybe have a quickbar or something?

-I heard big cities are going away? That’s ashame! Having a mix of huge cities mixed with small towns was one of my favorite parts. I understand streamlining and minimizing the upgrades...but I don’t want to lose the visual of a big city on the map! Having a couple of sprawling cities mixed in with small towns and outposts made the map more fun.

Those are what I would call the negative but as you can see very minor. Other than that, I had a BLAST playing this game! Compared to EWOM, a few things I've noticed:

-Graphics are smoother
-Spells are WAY more fun
-AI is noticeably smarter
-More variety of monsters (was really cool to see them for the first time)
-Quests are more fun
-City building was fun (my favorite part)

I want to congratulate the elemental team on what they’ve created so far. You guys are doing a great job and it was because of you I was up until 5AM doing the "One more turn.." game. Can't wait to see the final product and hopefully an expansion or two. Cheers!