I've noticed a few small differences.

First, the capital city / every other city is now using different cityhub internalnames. Those tags have been there all the time, but weren't used or functional up until now.

Secondly, obviously, accuracy, dodge and running population cost of buildings is in. Lots of new spell tags, particularly interesting is the tag you can add to make a unit always stay in a city.

Mounted units for empire got moved into their own tech. That is a HUGE help for me doing mount mods, you wouldn't believe what a difference it will make. I doubt it was done to make modding easier, but I take what I can get.

<RequiresCityImprovements>1</RequiresCityImprovements>
    <RequiredImprovement>K_Earth_Shrine</RequiredImprovement>

These tags have NOT been fixed. Any improvement that has these tags require that the building is built INSIDE city walls. So if you want to build towers of essence/towers of doom, you'll NEED to build the shard improvements within city walls. I'm sure we'll see people asking about that on the forums later on. Edit: Actually, they're called temple of essence (k) and tower of souls (e).

Edit2: oh yeah, the loot system is activated.

Oh, I thought you meant this topic as a sort of "what's new for modding".

If you're looking for a playable game, there's no point in updating to beta. The AI is utterly incapable of playing with the new rules.

They've made two large steps in the right direction. The game has improved significantly.

Thanks for the updates.  I had wanted both modding and gameplay opinions.

I guess I'm a bit skeptical that the change to a global mana pool is a good idea.  Individual mana pools was not the reason magic sucked.  It sucked because the existing system was poorly thought out and balanced.  I'm not necessarily opposed to the global mana pool either though I prefer the individual.  But if the entire magic system is properly thought out this time then it will be an improvement.  Ironically, only one of the needed improvement needed much game change.  Just reworking the spell books and a little more thought on the mana regen facet of the game.  The only major game change really needed was to take the spell books off the creation screen and make them all researchable.  All a sovereign should start with is a couple of basic spells including a basic magic attack spell.