I played a fair bit last night, it was gone 2am before I managed to go to bed. There is definitely the 'one more turn' thing going on.

I tried some of the new abilities in combat. I like the spears, with impale - one could quite often use it to a good effect.

I also liked cleave on axes. There is something very satisfying about taking out multiple groups at once.

Previously (in FE) i had used weapons with counterattack almost exclusively, so I am quite pleased that there are more interesting choices now.

I still do not like using hammers/maces, but they can be effective at getting kills against my units, even when I'm going to win the fight, due to how crushing blow does double damage.

I played a custom race/sovereign with ironeer blood. I was not very impressed by the defensive strike - halving ones own damage is a big price to pay for being defensive. That said, the inate +1hp/level is very strong, so in combination they might well be fine.

I liked 'reap', and it might well be one of those abilities that is going to appear on a lot of my melee troops (replacing charge, which is less needed now fights start at close range).

When designing units, the removal of the different damage types has resulted in weapons being substantially more grouped together for upgrades. Please change how this works, so that weapons with similar abilities are grouped together.

Eg one handed weapons with cleave (axes) should be a group, two handed weapons with impale (spears) should be a group, etc

This would mean that if you upgrade the weapon on your troops, they still have the same abilities.

Fame and heroes - it felt that there were a lot of heroes being made available. That said, some of my earlier heroes picked up a lot of injuries - combat seemed harder due to swarm and starting closer together, making it a lot harder to keep injured units from dying.

New heroes seemed to turn up near my sovereign - I would generally prefer them to turn up at the capital, as then they are in a position to buy a horse, and benefit from some newly recruited troops.

If one has too many heroes, they do not get to be Legendary. It might be interesting to have some fame rewards that make ones existing heroes seem more legendary (rather than just providing more heroes) - possibly interesting items, or level up's for existing heroes?

Unrest in cities now seems a bit harder to control, with the change to the cleric/shrine no longer multiplying the bonus by the amount of essence. This could make a big difference to the importance of essence in ones cities, which might well be a good thing, though.