I do hope the special units are added soon to each faction, to give at least a little varierty to playing certain factions. Also, not sure how is left to improve the sandbox mode, but I also think there should some sort of submission feature or something, after you've wiped a certain faction, that their cities are far less prone to rebelling, or even after a certain period of time under your rule, they eventually can become allies or something, so at least you can take advantage of the better units.

Admittedly the sandbox mode has been a bit neglected while we try to iron out the new scenarios but I do hope to get those special units in soon. Unfortunately I don't know about playing with the rebellion at this point but I'll keep it in mind.

When your talking about the significance of these actions ...

I'm mostly just talking about improving the writing and cutscenes to show why these things mattered. Check out here if you want to know more about the real events. Scripting large battles is unfortunately very difficult given the freedom the player has to approach the target but I am keeping your comments in mind and there might be room for tweaks to the objective gameplay.

Also hard to believe that you guys are almost done with the Gold Expansion, and then we'll be talking about the sequel soon enough, hehe.

Yeah, we actually meant to wrap up gold earlier but decided to squeeze in a few extras that were actually meant for the full sequel. We haven't really started any work on the sequel since our efforts our focused on gold right not but there is a plan and we'll let you guys in on it as soon as we can.

popup window when hovering mercenaries unit does not show upkeep cost, it alwayes 0

Thanks, it's been fixed and will be in the next update.

It will be nice to write on mines how meny gold is generating when in map view.
Sometimes it difficult find which mine is not connected by market line.

Done, the tooltip now shows income as well as the number of guys. You can also find this info in your current version using the asset list which can be sorted by mine, occupants and income.

I started a game in Casual mode, the savegames state that it is a Normal mode save.

Thanks for pointing this out, this was a bug with the scenario selector and has been fixed for the next update. You can still change the difficulty back to casual in the options screen after you've started a game and it should stick.

Also the max. size of a town differs in the discription and popup info.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this one. I assume by description you mean the information at the bottom of the screen when the city is selected and the popup is the tooltip in the bottom-right when the mouse is over the city. The max population isn't in the city tooltip and neither is the max recruits (although it probably should be).