Hot keys, UI, and a couple other suggestsions
Elemental Forums
It is a fun game, and quite stable for a 1.0 release (grats and more grats on that 
After having played a bit, I have decided to suggest some improvements.
The tree view on the left hand side of the screen to track units, cities, and quests is perhaps too flat, and requires scrolling a lot (particularly with many cities). At high resolutions, the scroll buttons are small enough that it is easy to misclick on the background, and it is difficult to target the scroll bar to be able to scroll with the mouse wheel. I would suggest making the scroll components constant size independent of screen resolution so that they are easy to work with.
But a simple approach to improving that interface that requires no change to the visuals (which are painful to modify) would be to add keys to jump through the city list. I spend most of my scroll time looking for cities with empty build queues. It would be nice to have hot keys to jump straight to the next city needing a new build specified. Very nice.
Pressing 'C' is almost universally expected to center on the currently selected unit (or city maybe). Pressing 'W' should make the unit wait to move later in the turn.
An interesting idea for the battlefield would be to allow a unit to pass and simply drop down one slot in the initiative list. This would allow better sequencing of units rather than a take it or leave it choice. For example, you might have a very high initiative melee unit who needs to wait one turn for the ranged attack to soften up his target. Dropping down in the queue would allow going second without losing the whole turn and being stomped by the enemy unit.
It is annoying that stopping in a city makes an army go into sentinel mode and drop out of the unit list. I think going inactive should require a choice by the player. Otherwise, an army should stay active and on the list even if occupying a city. If your sovereign loses a battle, she should automatically wake up after healing so you don't forget when and where.
Another issue is that when a city expands and we choose its specialization, we cannot scroll around the map to see the geographic position or look at any other data. It would be helpful if the dialog box were not modal, or if the choice could be put off and made later. Most of the time when I see an upgrade, I am trying to look at the background location to decide what to do and I can't remember which city this is.
In the battle view, enemy units set up off map and are hard to see or target (if you can scroll, I missed that so far). I used thunderstrike on a group just off the edge of the screen, and the screen recentered on the group, which surprised me and maybe there is scrolling. But either way, the battles set up with enemies hard to see on the edges.
