The campaign map looks excellent. Lots of varied terrain, although there's some wild looking hills that will be fixed soon.

City assaults are pretty much the same. I haven't had any assaults on cities with stone walls yet, since stone walls are now at the top of the tech tree. It's always interesting, though, to attack an enemy city full of guys,a nd send some copper dragons through the front gate and push everyone out of the way. Firelancers are also EXTREMELY useful against bunched up groups of enemies in city assaults, I've had a couple Firelancer units rack up a few hundred kills.

All the factions are present.

Yes, the Monks are playable, but they are clearly not supposed to be. Most of their units are superunits that have extremely high stats and sort of unbalance things, though I suppose that's the point since they're Monks. Also, they lack many essential unit types. For instance, the Monks have no siege weapons.