Question- did the 1.19 frog AI get put into 1.2, or was it judged to be too slow, or did you find a medium?  AI does seem nastier.

Balance between the default factions seems to have been heavily changed by the new rules- think Irane is pretty weak now (unrest penalty hurts worse than before), Procinipee seems buffed, Yithril still always seems to be in the lead.

yes Brad's improved AI is in 1.2.  It is a little slower in the late game, but only because it is doing what it should be doing (and since it is working better there are more ai units, cities and battles to process).  my tests show an additional 1-5 seconds between turns in the last 50 turns of the game on a large map full of ai players (I didn't have any human cities in my test so the whole world was ai).

nerd stuff: Brad may have mentioned this but the issue wasn't actually an ai issue.  The ai knew what it was supposed to do all along.  It was that the commands were being canceled if they didn't complete before turn processing was done.  Tis would have been worse on slower computers or when playing on larger maps with lots of ai players.  The ai would seem to simply stop moving (or partially stop moving if some units got to move before the issue happened).  I still have no idea how brad caught it (well I do, he sits and watches endless ai games to catch mistakin) or figured out that the turn was processing before their move.  But it was an amazing catch and definitely makes the ai more effective.

With all this talk about pioneers and city spam, I cannot help to think about how they worked at this in the game "Sins of a Solar Empire". Which funnily also bring a big Stardock stamp in your face when you open the game

It works like this: Each location in where you can have a "city", will usually be guarded by "monsters" (ok its space pirates, but you get the idea, imagine they have tentacles or something), this is pretty similar to FE with monsters dotted around the landscape.

When you have blasted these "poor, defenseless" pirate/monsters, and bring a unit to settle this new city, the city will incur a negative income until you have spent an amount of resources to build up the infrastructure... (Reminds me of some other game... but lets keep it to the stardock game )

This help alleviate the feeling of having to spam each city now and ignoring improvements until after every damn corner have your logo on it. Since if you do this, you will have a massive penalty to gold income, in this concept you have to spend some gildar/resources to build up your cities to atleast reach an equilibrium of income before its really a good idea to expand further (well you can keep 2-3 cities with a negative income if you are an aggressive expansionist, but you get the idea).

If a similar concept was included into FE, it might be a negative gildar income at city level 1, it won't hit outposts, so you won't kill the interest and resource grabbing in the early game.
  hey I might be even more inclined to put down and outpost instead?
also it might make prestige slightly more valuable, I probably still will largely ignore it, but hey, atleast I feel there is a difference.
  I usually ignore prestige, cause I either need massive amounts lategame, or I hit the city-cap pretty quickly early-game.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

In the 1.20 game I am playing a spider monster army sacked on of my cities twice. Both times the land was salted leaving no resettlement options.

My Henchman can cast spells from the "book of" techs even though they have no magic skills

When a city levels up you are locked on the upgrade screen until you pick an upgrade. This is a problem as you cant look around, move the map and see what resources the city has ect to help you decide which direction you want to go. I also think the city types need more detailed descriptions on what buildings each type can build.