[Cohen]

Here my first opinions:

Better Pretender and Nation balance.
National Troops *always useful*, perhaps enhanced with more battlefield spells and such.
Better Divine/Unholy Spellcasting, perhaps a dedicated magic school, and forging.
Improved Messaging interface.
More orders for troops, spells in queue.
More skills and special abilities.
More terrain types and more influence of terrain type in battles.
Improved siege.
More indeps unit types and magic site recruits.
Heroic skills assigned related to unit base skills.
Experience gains different from magic summons and national troops.
A random national hero generator (pick a base commander, add something, and create it when the default ones are ended).
More battle maneuver, like flanking (delaying your troop but they enter from flank or rear, doable only by light cavalry for example).
A wider range of events.
Some scales need to be worthy and not exploitable to take negative, especially growth.
Primary and Secondary castle choice, perhaps the secondary allowing only to recruit your troops/mages in, and the primary giving effective defence.
Movement order given by a "command rating" (something like a strategy skill) stat assigned to commanders.
Battle movement given by a tactic skill (if your commander is most skilled you could be even able to move twice than enemy, but only troops are affected, or you move first only ...).
Different kind of battles or order issued (hiding troops could get an Ambush order, to attack only a group of the enemy force for example, this could make useful even villains or such).
Conquering an enemy controlled (from more than X turn --- to avoid a take and retake of a lab in a war, before the lab is filled of stuff it should be considered secure) laboratory could give you a loot due to sacking, stealing gems and perhaps 1 random item from enemy lab.
Better assassination calculation or different way to do that. The assassin could wait for the victim to sleep or to be distracted instead of attacking it in a battlefield.
An assassin could have an assassination percentage that is the chance of success he's, this is augmented by items and experience, and lowered by the amount of bodyguard assigned to the victim. You should be able too to choose who to assassinate.


Now stomach claims something to fill it.