a lot of the usability changes are nice and needed.
improvements like resources per minute are good for the game and help give players more important information such as the income you are actually earning through different strategies and build orders. it removes guesswork and opacity and allows players to plan ahead and compare and improve themselves in a reproducible and verifiable manner. changes like this are what I expected out of de, and hope to see in aoe4.
the range indicator is also a great change, giving critical information directly to players without need for guess work and “feeling it”, and hopefully preludes work to the individual unit ai. there is no reason for cannons to prioritize buildings over units in range, and unit ai should have initial priority targeting of units in range if they currently have no targets with their preferred weapon mode and target, similar to StarCraft. that said attack move and pathing still need work.
being able to filter notifications of chat through the toggle is great, however page up/down functionality line by line still isn’t restored and opening chat often starts it at the very top of chat history. fixing these issues and making chat filter togglable would further put the game in the right track.
multiplayer social/personalization aspects are still lacking compared to legacy, there is progress but more work is still needed to reach parity. this is an area that I would have expected de to expand upon, not be behind. there should also be a return of medals/achievement pages and the ranked season system.
on some of the balance changes:
mansabder units costing the same pop space as their normal counterparts is a good change, and something I’ve wanted to suggest for a long time. imperial sepoy gaining an extra 10% stat increase isn’t though, I would rather have a boost to late game sepoys through an age 4 card rather than mess with age upgrade boosts. something as simple as adding it to battlefield construction and moving it to age 4 would give the same affect with respect to treaty without messing with the games constants.
on france changes, standardizing base stats to colonial is something that should happen to all regular units instead of this haphazard and inconsistent system we have now. why stop at cuirs? halberds, warwagons and jaguar knights should receive the same treatment. on the matter of cuirs in particular, increasing their base hp and reducing their siege damage should make them more appealing in fortress and less oppressive in imperial. directly increasing courier cost by 5-10 food and their train time by 3 seconds may also be a better solution than reducing their starting food by 50.
I dislike the aztec age up changes because they push the civ too hard into rushing/all ins. perhaps changing 2 skull knights into slingers would be a good way to reduce the bite of their rush. inca may need to have their rush toned down a bit as well through their age up choices.
the Dutch changes are good, increasing eco potential at cost of mil potential, but rather than adding 5 vill limit to the bank cards its better to directly add them to the base civ. increasing base settler cap to 60 would have the same effect while making it clear what their max eco should look like.
for the Lakota, siege ceremony should be removed fully and their units given a base siege increase, as well as access to siege weapons such as renegade mortars. civ wont be in a good place while it keeps its mobility and absurd siege damage combined.
on the bad side of things, there are way too many bugs and crashes recently, and its really hard to continue playing the game when things out of your control mess with you. I hope that you implement a test server and get these bugs sorted out, and the game gets to a stable state by the time of the fan preview event.