I don't really care too much about these nitpicky details myself, but your feedback is indeed constructive and deserves discussion.  So I'll toss in my two cents worth:

I don't mind message pop-ups if they are truly informative and tell me useful stuff.  But I do agree with you about the "Lord Relias is under attack!" pop-up.  To ease the transition into combat, this could be replaced with the map zooming to focus on the two opposing armies, along with a quick animation of the two sides initiating battle, followed by the pop-up asking if you want to auto-resolve or go to the tactical battle screen. 

I don't agree with this.  I like to take the time to read things, especially new messages that I haven't seen before.  Auto-fade is annoying if I haven't had time to finish looking at something yet.

I like the War of Magic style event log where you click the event's icon to make it go away.  This is the same style as Civ 5, which I find works quite well.  No changes needed here.

No.  Why should this auto-fade? You need to make an important decision here: auto-resolve or fight manually. The grayed out cancel button is kind of weird though.

That's the whole point of auto-resolve.

I like all these, but I guess it depends on your point of view. I can see how some people might get annoyed by the "clutter".  There should be an option to hide these sorts of boxes, like in Civ 5.

Agreed.  This seems like it could be exploited by the player, and is not the type of strategy an AI would think of.  When champions get defeated, they should be forced to drop most (if not all) of their equipment as they make a hasty escape back to town.  To the victor go the spoils!  This would make people think twice about sending their champions on suicide missions.

Don't take it personally. Everyone's too busy stuffing themselves full of food during the one month of the year it's socially acceptable to gain fifteen pounds. 

ErikCurre, cool!

First, to summarize my main point here. There are a lot of dialogue box is just 'informational'. As long as they are informational, I do not want to 'click' them in any way. I assume gamer will always notice it because gamer is watching the screen, so these dialogue should auto-fade itself without me reacting to it. If in some cases that I need to look back at what has already been faded away, I can browse the event log to take a closer look.

For why I want some of the "Your Forces have Been attacked" dialogue boxes to get the auto-faded treatment, it basis on the same principal above. There should be some unimportant battles that I don't really care about, e.g. some wandering spider is attacking my elder dragon. I should not even need to click the auto-resolve button at all. The outcome of the battle is just informational, not even worth my time to click auto-resolve.

The crux about this design is what is important, what is not.

I have not been around for some time, so I have a question. When pinier was about to settle, one could see that each tile has some properties (I do not remember what are those, food and manufacturing?). So, it looks very Civilization-ish. However, I do not see people working tiles or tile improvements as in Civilization. So can someone explain mechanics behind those?

MxM111, the way it works is that wherever you settle, your town gets a permanent food & material production bonus based on the 9 surrounding tiles. Different kind of tiles give different bonuses. Apparently rivers are especially good tiles. The properties you see on the tiles are the summed up bonus that you get if you settle on that tile.

Apart from this base bonus, to our knowledge the different tiles do not yield any other specific bonuses (but buildings might require to be on a river tile etc). So there are no tile improvements that you need to do after settling.