New player who bought thanks to 1.1 - feedback and questions

Hi folks,

I just purchased the game, I bought Sins and loved it, and was a huge fan of MoM back in the day, but the negative feedback for the retail release put me off an immediate purchase. With 1.1 out and seemingly solving a lot of problems, I took the plunge...

...and I must say I'm enjoying it immensely. The game has undoubted issues, but I've found a huge amount to enjoy. 

• I'm loving the look and feel of the game.
• As a strategy game I feel I'm confronted with the correct amount of complexity at a given point in time. Games like the Total War series, for instance, become micromanagement hell in the end-game - I've played a few games to completion now and I'm delighted to say this isn't an issue.
• Love the RPG mechanics, the city building, even the relatively simple tactical combat.
• 1.1 seems pretty stable to me, I've had two crashes thus far, both OOM. Some performance issues at the end game. 
• I've found the city-building part of the game uber-satisfying, and very intuitive. I do like that I can spend some time getting a city going and then largely leave it be.

All in all, really enjoying it, and had a huge amount of entertainment for my money thus far. Got a few questions / comments - if any of you could enlighten me, great

• Magic. Thus far, I've felt absolutely no incentive to really utilise it beyond the absolutely essential teleport, plus a few buffs. A quick perusal round the boards reveals this to be a fairly common perception? It's a pity, as there's some great sandbox potential here with the terraforming stuff...
• Although I started on easy, I've worked my way up to challenging (both world and individual faction AI) with the following strategy absolutely steamrolling the AI - I basically turtle for a bit, get two or three cities, blast down the Military tech tree for some decent equipment, then progressively arm my sovereign to the hilt and continuously grab champions here and there, train em up, equip them, then leave one in each conquered city. I literally never train a unit. I simply have a squad of my sovereign plus a couple of champions on the go who I peel off and leave behind (never more than one) in each city I conquer. Pretty soon I'm unstoppable. Will this strat fail on hard and ridiculous? Essentially, it feels like a cheesy strat, I'm looking for an excuse to go deeper and actually build some units
• The AI on normal and challenging doesn't seem to be concentrating its forces enough to even beat my sovereign when he's rolling solo (which is often), especially once I'm kitted out in the enchanted armour, the 5k magic sword etc. He feels pretty unbeatable. Again, is this a problem with sub-hard difficulty levels?

Whole swathes of the tech tree seem pretty redundant to me. Now I'm somewhat unconventional in that I consider perfect balance a non-essential goal in strategy game, but an important indicator of strategic depth is forcing the player to adopt a wide array of tools and tactics to deal with different situations, and I find I never have to deviate, which is a shame. I admire those players who essentially role-play and force themselves to utilise sub-optimal strategies to get the most out of the awesome sandbox which the game provides, but I'm sadly not that kind of player It would be great to see the game force this kind of play from gamers - bringing in specialized troops to crack a particularly fortified city, sieges,  all that good stuff.

On the whole though, I'd like to emphasise how much fun I've had with the game, I've spent countless hours over the festive period playing it, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where the game ends up. Good job!