Here are 5 things that don't seem to work the way I would expect/want them to:
1. Path of the Governor. The irritating thing about this is that to be effective, the governor needs to be in a city. But to level up and gain more powerful governing skills, they have to go out into the woods and kill wolves. I like the idea of the PotG, but I wish the experience mechanics would change by allowing them to gain experience staying in cities doing what they do best. I would like to see traits in PotG that lower costs at the shop and hiring champions (and I will second the call for Adventurer to halve the cost of hiring them, instead of making it free. Adventurer with Betrayers lets you spam scouts and run around the map recruiting all of the champions on the map for free...)
2. Pathfinding - Logic issues are already pretty thoroughly documented in this thread, but I'll echo the following: Letting us see the intended path before we click would help. Units that arrive at their pre-selected destination and still have movement points left should gain focus so the player can continue to move them, not end their turn.
3. UI - Level Up windows for units and cities don't display all of the attributes that are affected (Spell resist, mastery, etc) making it frustrating to weigh perk options. Please make "empty" essence slots more visible on the map than the little indentation in the city banner. I think someone's mod put a little circle outline around the space. I haven't seen it, but something like that would be appreciated.
4. Autoturn - Still broken--ending the turn with cities still idle and units left to move.
As soon as all of the units have moved, the game should start cycling through idle cities--allowing me to hit the spacebar to let the city remain idle that turn. Additionally, when you come to the last idle city, the game shouldn't end the turn as soon as you select something to build, it should wait until you close the build/train window with "Done" (so you can queue things).
5. Faction Colors - Some of the color selections in the faction setup screen aren't explained very well--when/where are they used? Also, it seems like most of the clothing/armor options ignore the primary/secondary color selections (I'm looking at you, Monk Robes!). It would be nice to see those colors represented--so that spearmen from two factions all wearing the same armor are still distinctly different. It would be even nicer if I could adjust a unit's color scheme when it's designed, so that my normal spearmen and royal guard spearmen (with different traits) are visually different.
If I were able to offer MORE than 5, I would include:
Train Henchmen available as a faction perk, and female henchmen enabled. (I know a mod has enabled them and I've done so, but I think it should be in the core game.)
Units that move onto stacks or cities should not automatically be "joined" into a stack or set to "guarding" in the city.
Fix the health bars not updating in combat after damage/healing done until it is that unit's turn again. As soon as a unit is the recipient of some effect, the health bar should update and redraw itself.
***EDIT: Also, I would exchange the defense values of Leather Armor and Monk Robes, so that Monk Robes are def 2 but have a dodge bonus, whereas Leather is def 3. When I set the unit designer to use the best available, I end up with a world full of "troops" wearing monk robes. (That don't match my faction colors. GRRRR!)
***EDIT 2: I'd like Champion/Sov armor color schemes to be changeable, too. I hate having a Dark Lord sovereign running around in a lily white magic robe because that's the only armor he's found so far....
***EDIT 3: The XP awards for killing units of other factions seems to be MUCH less than killing monsters of comparable difficulty. I'd like to see larger experience gains for defeating faction units.
gs