Bought the game on release...

and here are my thoughts.

First, I love this game.  It's the first game in a long time that I've been absolutely engrossed in right from the get go.  I've been having a blast, despite some problems I've run into.  I'll definitely be recommending it to some friends that enjoy this sort of game, thought I might wait until some of the bugs get cleaned up.

My complaints:
For one, I love that some of the heroes are a little OP.  I do however wish that there was a bit better balance in some of the heroes.  Namely: I've noticed that the Frost Lords hero kinda sucks.  Maybe I'm missing something, but I've gotten every hero so far and he was by far the most disappointing one (the dwarf spider rider also kinda sucked, his abilities just look incredibly meh).

As others have mentioned, the minor races are also rather lackluster.  They don't do much, just build up large armies of weak units that just wander around.  Sometimes they'll build pioneers and build a city, but mostly I just ignore it all and ally up with them.  Not a huge deal, I just wish they did a bit more on the map.  Also, side note: I noticed a bug in my last game where New Pariden built Imperial settlers to go settle cities (failed though, because the random map put them behind a mountain range and they couldn't escape until I harvested their mountains).

Here's my biggest and only real complaint:  The Sorcerer King himself.  I absolutely love the idea of threat level, but as it is, it feels like it doesn't work.  I havn't played on Insane yet, just Hard, but I feel like the game should fundamentally work at Hard difficulty and Insane is just for added difficulty and possibly power gaming.  And threat doesn't work on Hard.  Both of my complete games, I was at 1 threat the entire time, despite killing the lieutenants and expanding out of control.  The Sorcerer King complained, and I just told him they went wild and it wasn't my fault.  Sorcerer King says an army is on the way to "test" me, nothing ever shows.  I ignored the outposts he had by my capital all game, because the units never moved because the Sorcerer King was never scared of me.  After complaining that I need to stop expanding, I just ignored him and he stopped saying anything.  I could control 75% of the continent, still 1 threat.  I was at 1 threat when I busted in his door and attacked him (and I 1 shot his entire army with buffed up dwarf lord, that was hilarious).  There was never any point where I was actively fighting his armies.  The only reason I'd actually declare war on him is to protect shards, but at least on Hard difficulty it was easy to keep the Doom counter at 0.  I feel like he should get fed up with you and continue to demand more and more from you, and there should be a fundamental point where you decide to take the risk of fighting the Sorcerer King and actively wage a war against him.  Something like he keeps demanding your essence to prove your loyalty, and stacking up doom more and more so you're forced to eventually stop and fight or risk doomsday.  As it is, I've never reached that point.  I just talk my way out of it, then he stops bothering me by ~turn 70, and I just conquer everything, build up an unbeatable army, and then kill him.  It ends up feeling cheap and easy, since the big threat in the game just never does anything to me.

Note:  My games all ended around 140-160 turns.  By that time everything was incredibly easy and I just ended it because there was nothing else to do.  So if things changed around, say, turn 200 I never would have experienced it.   I'm going to hit up Insane difficulty next, I suspect it'll just delay my early game (which was painfully slow playing as default Tinkerer with Dwarf Lord last game.  Oh man they are weak early, but it pays off late).