I'm thinking that for every, like, X amount of cities you hold you should get an extra move. Would help to speed things up a little. And like a 'snap move' function where you can just skip the little 'move' over the hexes and the explosion from the battle so movement itself is faster.
I must say, one of my favourite features about Nerdook games is the colourful way they describe stuff "ass hats" for instance.
Makes the games more fun when your ass hats win a battle for you.
Maybe, to fix the attrocious unbalance in reguards to gold, you could "recycle" cards, instead of discarding them, and cards that are "recycled" give you gold back?
That would fix it a bit, IMO, and it would also help fight back for when the enemy decided to pull an army out of who-knows-where.
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