I'm playing this right now and a lot of things have been changed. F.e., the leader/hero skill trees have been made into actual skill trees you can grasp the complete picture of. However, there is still something off-putting about the whole thing that I can't quite put my finger on. The setting is just too high magic for me and every unit is overdesigned into the ground. Cultures having replaced predefined factions I'm still not on board with. AoW4 is just too random in everything, nowhere will you find any coherency, even neutral stacks are literally just random units taken from literally anywhere. Like there's a Nemesis Mage creature with 3 units with the angelic transformation, 1 small magma elemental and 1 crow. Or a human knight with an undead ratling, a gargoyle and a lightbringer (the strange fish creature that can dominate). While I understand this can lead to varied challenges, the fact you autoresolve 80% of neutral stacks means it's moot anyway and it just servers to showcase how random everything is.
I'm not willing to put a bunch of hours into this game tomorrow and on Monday to properly get into it to see whether these initial impressions are warranted and whether they've at least tried to tackle the balance issues it has (I know for a fact that the Feudal and Dark cultures are unplayably underpowered). All the time while I'm playing there's a nagging thought in the back of my mind saying I could be playing any other AoW title or Conquest of Eo instead and it will be a much better experience for me. The deluge of DLC doesn't make any of this better because it just adds moar random into the mixer instead of adding meaningful content. Oh, and the game is still lacking singleplayer content, it's random maps all the way down.