izigame.me

For reference, Total War fan with 2K+ hours in franchise
Good:
Real time campaign map is unique, and very interesting to see armies following around the campaign map.
The time delay for being able to siege a settlement or pillage a town using an army allows for a reasonable response time before it finishes.
Real time battles were relatively short, and fun, without too many units to make the battles overly complicated.
The supply chain management for building and upgrading buildings is clever, but good in that all buildings of the same type automatically gain the upgrades.
I like that different governors give different production upgrades when assigned to different towns.
Complaints:
AI seems to have an obsession with having archers in its armies, sometimes having only 1 melee unit and 7 archers.
Military unit variety or lack there of. Some factions have a total of 10 units they can recruit, a basic and 'elite' version of sword, spear, bow, melee cavalry, and peasant mob/militia, other factions I've played have a single unique, IE longbow for England. What might bring some more variety would having the 'elite' units only being the middle ground, and have true elite professional or royal guards type units, that might have a recruitment cap and hefty upkeep costs.
Resource caps for Books, Religion, and military manpower. While it is nice that when capped you earn a small amount of money, there is no way to boost the capacity for books or religion when both are valuable resources that can be used up sometimes one action. Part of me would like the option to forgo the gold income and instead just collect forever at a reduced rate.
While it is possible to boost military manpower by building a specific building in a governed city, it would be nice if every city added automatically gave at least a small increase.
Limited size of royal court/governors, Especially for large empires. At most, you can assign governors to 9 cities, afterwards they are not governed, and only produce 10% of the gold, books, and religion, making it very inefficient to try and upgrade them in a meaningful way beyond producing food/commerce.
With 8 'knights' and your king in court, you are forced into an awkward position to balance needs, especially if you have a large or divided territory. Only Marshall class knights can lead armies beyond your King, but too many armies and you can't get enough merchants to make use of commerce, have a priest on hand to quell unrest in conquered settlements, plus a spy and diplomat. Depending on size, it would be nice to have a larger royal court the larger your kingdom got.
Awkwardness of late game balance.
With the only upkeep cost for military units being food, if you had the ability to recruit more generals outside of the basic royal court a large empire could have a stupid number of armies where the only expense being food and general salary, as food is only useful outside of unit upkeep for trade, and generating a 100+ surplus in a large empire isn't too difficult if you aren't also recruiting bonus garrisons for every city. Limited numbers of armies gets tricky when multiple enemy kingdoms attack you all at once as you only have a set number of armies to reply to possibly 2 or 3 times as many armies breaching your borders.
In order to acquire trade goods for the kingdom advantages, you'd be forced to strategically conquer a lot of awkwardly placed territories, or have enough merchants to have enough trade routes to trade for all of the goods, plus making use of the massive amounts of commerce gained through conquest (if that's your play style).
I understand that a lot of my complaints to this point are probably balance choices designed to keep the player from gaining an advantage and snowballing out of control, but if I'm going to play to conquer the entire map, I'd like to do so without having at least one arm tied behind my back.
Battles:
It would be nice if when in a real-time battle the campaign map stopped, so an enemy can't land on the shore, and then march and join my battle before my troops can even close distance to engage.
I also feel that archers have maybe too short of a range.
A pre-battle deployment phase like in Total War games would be really nice, so that for instance, I don't have my catapult awkwardly sitting on the edge of my army formation when the battle starts.
Map variety is very limited to open terrain with limited clumps of trees, and like 2 slightly different city siege maps, one with wooden walls, a second with stone. A river map with a bridge would be cool, where the attacker has to either clump up crossing the bridge, or slowly wade through the water, burning stamina and being an easy target for archers.
There is one noticeable actual problem I've been having, and at the start of battles, it will hitch, throwing my camera across the screen, and burning like 10 seconds of the battle clock if I'm not paused.
Overall, its fun and stable game, but it doesn't necessarily accommodate all play styles equally.