All right, we are stable again, I can play for long stretches without crashes, and get to reload save games. Time for testing.

This newest version of the game is very VERY close to "Excellent". There is a great deal of good polish in the last few releases which have made the game look, feel, and act like a finished product (something that no Elemental related release has done before, so kudos on that). There are still a few significant things that really impact the feel and playability of the game which have really stood out to me.

Cosmetic: Most of these have a pretty significant overall impact on the feel of the game, but are of limited mechanical impact.

1. Roads are nearly invisible under forest tiles. It would be nice if there was a larger break in the trees around them so they became more visible.
2. Ranged Champion magic weapons (the Hailstone Staff, in particular) still has a really long (5-10 second) hang after shooting and then deals damage with no animation.
3. Occasional extreme animation slowness during tactical combat. It seems to be most prevalent with large monsters (trolls, for instance) and/or with lots of particle effects in play.
4. Overworld Viewport Manipulation causes the screen to spin 360 degrees very quickly after changing the angle or direction of the camera view. It's crazy and annoying.
5. If playing without auto-turn on, there is no apparent visual indication of which units have yet to act for the turn, and which are out of actions. This leads to confusion about why you can't move forward and frequent missed opportunities to act with units.
6. Enemy units will animate as though they have moved away after you have selected them for attack.
7. When engaging in combat, the camera scrolls to another random unit.

Mechanical There are LOTS of significant issues with timing that I assume come about due to how the game was multi-threaded, and it makes the game REALLY trip up over itself in a frustrating fashion.

1. If the player has auto-turn turned off, the game will frequently hang if there is a city with an empty queue when you go to change turns and will not move forward until the player has selected something in the city build queue. When they do that, it immediately ejects them from the city and moves forward with the turn.
2. Some times, when all units have acted, and you are doing city maintenance, when you select something to build, it will boot you out of the city and move to next turn (as above).
3. Stacked enemy units make it incredibly difficult to choose which army the player intends to engage, and can lead to stupid goose chases tracking down the last of an army stack of 3-4 armies. We need to be able to pointedly select which army from a stack we are attacking, or better yet, not allow armies to stack at all.
4. Related to the stacked armies, in 0.951 I have a relatively consistent situation where multiple army stacks attack a city I am occupying. After winning the first fight, I am informed of a second which never starts, and then breaks my ability to advance the turn forward. I assume this has again to do with a thread dropping a command somewhere and hanging, since it knows a combat is supposed to start, so I can't skip forward a turn.

Balance A lot of this is simply my opinion, but I feel they are worth noting.

1. Armor is still king, absolute; Getting into an altercation with another faction, if you do not have the weapon to meet their armor, it is a dramatic and serious disadvantage. Not really sure how to address this one well, but it still seems a huge factor.
2. Trained Units are ridiculously powerful when they level up; 3 units of 5 men in light plate with maces should not be capable of single handedly  destroying an entire faction. Played carefully right now, they are. A unit's accuracy and health go up every level. Their damage does not. What that means is that a level 10 unit of 5 will have many many times more hps than a freshly trained unit, identically equipped. Essentially, if you can get a unit 5 levels, they will be very difficult to stop at all simply due to their ability to outlast opponents. They outclass monsters and champions in almost every case once they hit about level 10. I would seriously consider capping their health growth around level 5 so that trained units aren't nigh-invulnerable after they survive three or four fights. This would also make it easier to gauge an army's strength.
3. Guilden has an amazing array of tools for getting established and consolidating a kingdom. Don't take this to mean that I would like to see them weakened, as I would prefer all the other factions be as solid as Guilden is all the way up from early to late game. So far, all the other Kingdom empires falter in the midgame by comparison, and really only Magnar seems to hold their own all the way up on the Empire side.