Where as I have the opposite problem. I like square grids and have a lot of trouble playing Hex based games. I'm actually finding it quite frustrating in the Gal Civ III Alpha having my ships snaking everywhere, instead of travelling in straight lines.

As for Legendary Heroes, haven't played in a while but what I'd really like is the ability to create custom blood/racial traits in game, without having to go through and edit text files. Or at least be able to copy an existing racial and give it a new name/icon, as it's a bit immersion breaking when your carefully created new race who have no connection to Gilden still says Ironeer Blood or whatever.

I too am not a fan of the hex-grid. One of the many reasons I dropped Civ 5 and went back to Civ 4.

I'm a fan of no grid of any type whatsoever!  On a strategic map, it can be a necessary evil, but even then you can work around them if you are creative enough.  On a tactical map, however, it can be very easily worked around, i.e. move a number of 'inches' instead of a number of squares.

Building a 4x game without a grid of some type would present it's own unique challenges, of course... it's much easier to code a 'tree square' than 'a grove of trees of this size and shape'...

Another problem is finding specific heroes when my kingdom has grown large. If a hero was defeated or left in a city I have to hunt through each city to find them again.

I'm fine with hexes or squares in tactical battles, just not squares that act like octagons. They can use squares that act like squares if they can make it look pretty, but it looks bad now and functions worse.

I haven't played too much, but these are my main concerns about the game:

1) Lack of diversity:

Everything feels the same. I do not find myself trying new things, because either I have no reason (see below) or because it's not different.

The one main difference between games are if your sovereign is a caster or a melee. Caster is for endgame where you can throw mana around, melee is for early game. Beyond choosing that, I play my race and tech tree the same way, pretty much ignoring the traits I picked for my race (I play custom usually) etc.

I wish for something more like MoM (insecticide patched) where I have a dozen of options to try to beat the game when it's on 'impossible' difficulty. The patched game is extremely hard, and you have to use a 'broken' build to beat it. Some builds are too slow, while others are not powerful enough. I have found 4 builds that managed to win it, and there are probably more.

Fallen Enchantress (and most other games when I compare them to MoM and MoO2, including the civs), as it is now, is really bland compared to a game from 95- we don't have as many spells, the races are nearly the same and there is not nearly as much versatility.

2) Lack of AI:

If I play the game on high difficulty, I simply reach a point where the computer sends wave after wave of magicians till I'm down. Due to the very low rate of experience heroes get from destroying armies, it means that he overwhelms me at some point.

If I play on "normal" difficulty, I am simply cleaning my zones till I feel bored, build a stack of doom and start destroying the AI till I feel that "GG I won" and go away.

The second option happens because I expanded a lot faster than the AI, cleaned the zone faster and got my hero to a higher level (which in turn means I can do this all over again and snowball).

note- I feel about the same option regarding civ4, civ5 and AoW3.

3) Game progression:

You start with a city, research techs and expand. All is fun and well, but the techs are boring. Researching better weapons just means that "yay my units grew stronger", in a very linear way. There is no real thought into it.

I expected at least a tradeoff that was supposed to be in the old Elemental that "I got this new shiny armor, but it weighs so much I have to give up on my giant sword. What to do?", or "Do I have 10 turns to build this unit, or should I build a few weaker ones?". The first is not an issue anymore beside choosing the weapon, and the second has one answer- yes. That is because the units in the game come in tiers. Units in different tiers can't do anything to units in higher tier, due to a much higher defense, much higher offense and a lot more health.

In civ and AoW, deciding to take 3 bad units for the price of 1 big unit could be a serious decision, if I actually believed that they will be able to kill it and survive in some form (in civ many of them will die, in aow a few will die, in mom a few might die depending on the gap in power). I do not find I believe in this kind of tactic in FE due to cost of the death of units, amount of units it's possible to bring to battle, and the gap in power.

I really can't just pick one, but the two game-breakers for me whenever I try to come back to this title (because I want to) are:

1. Immersion/Personality

All the artistic/creative bits of the game just don't gel for me to give me a will to play.  I could go into more detail if asked. It's not about technical artistic quality.

2. Basic melee combat

The ability to manipulate the first strike so easily against the AI, and the fact that it makes such a critical difference. It's always the best tactic to use.  HOMM style turned based combat is more satisfying.  

Maybe if I could get myself to play for long enough, I could get over #2, but it always ruins melee for me.

For a game that does unit customization right, I would go for Starsector (previously Starfarer) and maybe the first Sword of the Stars.

Immersion is really off in the game. It just doesn't pull me into the world like other 4X games do. Part of this is due to the art style which I will get to later.

The factions and world just isn't diverse or interesting enough. Everything is far to same.

I really REALLY dislike the art style. I don't mind cartoony or stylized art at all, in fact it's often better than doing realistic styles which age poorly. But the cartoony/stylized look here is awful. It's really muddy and boring. The monsters look dull. The spells, and actions on the battlefield are atrocious. Watch some of the spells, or actions occurring...it looks so bad. I can't even say one thing in particular. It just really blends itself in this muddy, boring, dull style. Nothing sticks out or looks good.

Tech tree is lame, and unchanging mostly for factions.

The tactical combat is really boring.

Oh and Lightning Bolt is grossly overpowered. For 19 mana you can scythe through entire armies. Makes for very boring combat, just get two casters with lighting bolts and force the enemy to fight in a checkered pattern and its game over.

1) Art style was absolutely bland, uninspired and generally repulsive.

2) Lack of dynasty building.

3) Lack of minor factions.

4) Bland unit types (see Age of Wonders III for example of how "generic" unit types for different races could be done perfectly right).

5) UI was improved in FE over EOW, but even in LH there still were some pretty uncomfortable things.

It seems lot of players are using this thread to air long held grievances.

Here are some of mine:

Balance: Trained troops are not balanced with magic or monsters. They scale so much monsters are a joke after boar spears. Some of them have one hit kill spells or super high damage but that just leads to everything becoming a glass cannon late game. Trained troops just scale with larger group sizes and better equipment while monsters and spells don't. You can easily quadruple the hp alone of trained units. So many spells, summons, and monsters are only balanced for an incredibly small portion of the game. Also whats with such low max army sizes. It just forces you to use all elite units. I would remove upgrading group size period, what does it add to the game? At least boost the starting size to 5 so each additional unit isn't such a huge improvement. Yes I know that would require a complete game rebalance but at least it wouldn't require any coding. The ability to spawn and summon units at your highest group size would also be nice.

Unit Design and Combat: As others have said it's not done very well. Not enough traits, limits, or real differences between equipment. See my Blood & Mana mod for some racial traits. We just plain need more traits and items that grant abilities and real noticeable differences between units that allow them to fill different roles. A stronger negative relationship between attack and defense would also help. Right now you just build the strongest unit possible and throw them in waves. Defenders are only real specialized melee unit and the AI has no idea how to use them. Your supposed to lead with your high armor units so they absorb the first blows, not charge in with all your low armor units first.

Map:  You use stamps so why is their so little so look at in this game? This game desperately needs some props thrown in liven up maps and give areas distinct feels. Sprinkle rock formations, ruins, beaches, and whatever across the maps. Sea cliffs in particular are practically disturbing in that they all look so alike I'm half convinced Elemental takes place in some weird demented nightmare world. Throw some rocks and doodads into the ocean please!

Vestigial Remnants: It's really annoying seeing so much stuff that has been removed or ignored remain in the game in some weird unholy half life. Caravans are a prime example of this. They serve no real purpose except maybe scouting anymore so remove them.

A completely trivial thing but it BUGS ME SO MUCH : The amount of time a game turn represents.

With each turn being 3 months it can be decades before much happens. My early heroes (I'm being charitable and guessing that the sovereign is somehow immortal) should be either retired or even dead of old age by then.

GalCiv2 has the opposite problem. Each turn is only a week so in a few years I colonize the galaxy and populations increase many times over. What are we bacteria?

I know... I know... this has no effect on anything but it is my nr. 1 peeve with stardock games.

One thing that I really don't like is the inability to edit a custom sovereign/race (at least not easily). One of my favorite parts of any game that offers custom races is to tweak them to game to game.

1. The graphical presentation. For instance, the leveling interface looks way too bland. Make it sparklier! Considering how many aspiring modellers/animators are around places like Polycount I feel that the models could look nicer as well.

2. The empire-building part is just "alright" - the dynamics between the different city types could be much more polished, as could the city founding. The individual cities don't really feel "special". This is not something most competitors do well either though. I'm thinking a design choice has to be made; either do very intricate and dynamic mechanics or very simple ones. Example of good intricate ones: Master of Mana mod for Civ IV, example of good simple ones: Warlords III DLR.