Reminder to polish visuals of foliage generation (its unintelligent and messy) as well as how textures blend in the environment, and quality of biome assets like foliage, trees. Currently, most biomes look like a sandbox open empty space, and share too many assets between each other. The trees are generally too small. The game should aim to make them look more like their real life equivalent (Gobi desert for instance looking nothing like it).
Add more biome variance by making different fauna, berries, fish and environmental effects like wind/sand/snow/footsteps/buildup. Think about making clusters of biomes like tiny generated swamps or a grove, or an open plain–basically, the first point again about smart generation with an aim to make it feel like their real life equivalent.
Lighting needs to be worked on too. It is entirely too flat, dull and colourless, and give no benefit to the game and assets within. Esports gamers are wrong, stop listening to them. Make so the maps all have a slight variation in lighting (not day/night time) but just a slight shift in position of the sun, so every game doesn’t feel exactly the same.
Make production buildings 4x4 again.
If you have access to higher quality textures for unit models, add it as a pack or option. I’m entirely dissatisfied by how blurry everything is (Byzantine’s broken castle age and Imperial age Limitanei is pretty sad, varangians are very blurry too).
Here are just some short biome suggestions that aren’t another grassy location. Southeast Asian Mangroves. Mediterreanian/Southeast Asian/Carribbean beaches. The actual Gobi Desert and not whatever we have ingame. An actual jungle/rainforest (the bambo one we have ingame is incredibly lazy). A tundra/fjord mix biome that highlights rockiness, moss and dense forests. Indian shrublands. Maybe some seasonal variants for the existing grass biomes like a fall skin.
And yea, many many many more. Be more creative with biomes PLEASE. On a final note, the new savannah biome is top tier, more of that creativity and style please.