I have one word to describe this demo:

WOW

The cavalry charges are awesome and do a lot more damage on the initial charge than in MTW (MTWs charges sucked).

The graphics are kind of dissapointing because of the way they chose to do them. If you zoom out enough to actually be able to see more than 1 unit all of the units get blurry and the graphics become about the same as MTWs (for infantry anyway). This might just be my cruddy graphics card though. I'll change the settings a bit and see if I can find something that helps.

The Game performance is surprisingly nice as I had barely any lag with most settings on high (No AA and no shadows because of my graphics card but the rest were at high).

Finally, the thing that was gonna make or break the game for me... Elephants. In my first battle I immediately charged my elephants into a huge group of enemy infantry and my face lighted up with glee as the elephant charged into a group a 100+ infantry, immediately shooting 10 of them up in the air and wiping out another 30. I was dissapointed when the elephant then routed but soon the routing had stopped and another charge was set up. Oh it was sooooooo cool! Damn just posting this is making my slobber on my keyboard.