The ai is definitely playing the game better. They are definitely making better decisions in unit selection department. The ai still needs some help in the city building department. I conquered an empire and ended up demolishing half of the structures due to the fact that they had an insane number of monuments on a level 3 and 4 city and no room to build more stuff. At that point the ai should start scraping structures that aren't necessary for the city to expand so it can expand. 1.1 made the game playable, this update just made it a lot more fun.

Most of the problems i have late game come from me getting the out of memory error and the fact that there is a 5-10 second delay every time my turn ends. the game runs fine in the beginning but really starts to stutter as the game goes on.

edit I just witnessed the ai kamakazee his sov against my army controlling his city, causing him to lose the game.

This might be a bit late but here's how I personally fixed the 1.91GB install thing in my case.

I had the 1.91GB download thing initially.  The issue seems to be that Impulse wasn't detecting my elemental 1.10 install, so to fix it.

1.  Use the "detect application" (in the menu button to the left of explore).

2.  In the dropdown boxes: Product Category -> My Games.  Product -> Elemental: War of Magic.  Click Import.

3.  Right click elemental, update it.  It will turn into a 9.08MB or so patch because the game will be detected as version 0.00 instead of 1.10.  Once its downloaded, you will be updated.