1: In Elemental 1.09(t) I noticed that in combat, the floating numbers (-4, BLOCKED, etc.) sometimes turn into bars that appear to be from completely unrelated graphic textures or even memory bits. Unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to take a screenshot.
This sounds like a GFX issue on your end. Combat damage messages and floaters have been screwed up forever. They report the wrong thing sometimes, if they report at all. That you get weird artifacts and such on top of it makes me think it's something related to your drivers.
2: Magnar gets +1 goodie hut/quest levels. However, that seems to mean there spawns ONLY lvl 2 huts near the capital. Those are less useful to a starting civilization than level 1 ones. Shouldn't there be both level 1 (basic) AND level 2 huts (as if from if you 'buy' the tech) ? If not this is nearly a drawback.
Having used some of those techs in a custom faction, I've gotten both lvl 0 and lvl 2 goodie huts. Level 1 huts (i.e the Inn) appear, but there are like, 2, in comparison to over 20 Lvl 2 huts and over 100 level 0 huts.