Howdy,
1. Champions are not, in fact, recruitable NPCs, they are aggressive NPCs. You'll note that any NPCs that are in fact able for recruitment have names and such. It's intended to be this way.
2. They are indeed back, bot not to anywhere near the degree that they were at way back in the day (for me at least). Right now this seems like a minor issue.
3. This isn't too bad, they're not overtly aggressive at the start, which is okay, and having some strong creatures around gives a bit of challenge to the game, also with the new revamped magic rolls it's not too hard to take out these kind of creatures. The scalability of creatures over the game is definitely starting to improve, but it still needs some work.
4. The seed system is still a bit rough and definitely needs some work, there are definitely enough variable food sources that there should be no excuse for one not appearing where it definitely should, and maybe more sources of gold would help this as well. That being said, I always like to have a bit of a meander at the start of a game to find somewhere that suits my lifestyle.
as 5. isn't really worth comment.
6. This is yet another attempt to stop things like city spam and other common 4x problems, but yet again it's not really going in the right direction. As you've said, gold is quite common, and is in a situation at the moment where you're starved for it up until a point, and then it just gets ridiculous how much you're earning. If they want to stop city spam and ridiculous imbalance between early and late game resources they really need to implement a more advanced upkeep system, it's a basic requirement in any high end 4x.
I have to say, the game is starting to feel a little less rough around the edges, there's still work to be done, but it's starting to look like there might be a ray of hope somewhere in the distance, or at least a cloud with moderately greyish silver lining. Stardock has realised what they've done and are starting to make steps to reverse it.
I say good job 
, keep it up guys.
Regards,
Paradoxical
