Most important thing is balance at the moment

I disagree. Magic is very strong early game, but becomes almost worthless in the mid game compared to general unit strength.

Magic needs an overhaul, and is the only part of Elemental thats kinda dissapointed me so far (besides a few niggling other things, but thats another post). Magic should scale better in power so that a magic using strategy is viable in the mid-late game. As it stands, I only need chain lightning (for dealing with little hordes of baddies I sometimes come up against), 3 town enchant spells (usually brilliance, natures bounty, and Grim Determination) and the teleport spells (to get where I need to go asap) and I dont bother with magic otherwise, as it adds nothing to my experience.

So in other words, no. The game isnt balanced, but its unbalanced in the opposite way you think it is. Magic is currently UNDERpowered (and more importantly, underflavored).

The solution to magic would be stronger mid/late game spells.  Maybe from spell books to force a tech tradeoff.

This game is going to be a royal pain to balance out though.

balance to me is the 2nd priority behind performance, but I think seperate people will be working on each, so both can be done at once.

Technical/stability issues are the most important...some people still can't play the game well.  Followed by a reasonable degree of bug smashing so that at least the things that work, work like they're supposed to.  Then balance, A.I, system expansion and overhaul.  Luckily Stardock is able to work on more than one thing at a time.

I agree overall the game is poorly balanced.

Right now for me melee weapons are OP,  I just wait for the enemy to walk up to me and whack them to death before they get a chance.

Whether or not spells are OP, summons are definitely OP and stacks too.  The game plays completely differently early (when your champ is wanderign around with one or two OP summons) from late (a decent recruitable stack destroys anything else, including summons and your sov, regardless of what level he is).

I dunno, with the way the equipment system works (infinite rings of infinitness) by late game my soveriegn and other champions I've spent gold on pimping out simply walk through enemy stacks like they are nothing. Is it cost effective compared to just buying stacks of my own? No, but its TIME effective. I can get the equipment IMMEDIATELY, whether than waiting dozens of turns to field a decent army. Summons, well, again, I dont bother really. Its more time effective to simply equip my soveriegn and champions.

I think performance, then balance, then AI is the correct priority list.

A suggestion for balance: Let stacks be formed after the recruitment stage, so you can add your champions and sovereigns to stacks of normal units and also to allow you to integrate older recruited units into your forces. This will allow older, before you got the tech for groups/armies units to be effective (single units that are unupgradeable are really NOT effective when stacks start coming out, cept maybe to draw fire) AND it will also allow further choices of where to put the champion, etc. Use the lowest of the stacked units combat speed rating for the units combat speed.

A suggestion for flavor: As you level, instead of just having ability increases, also have a talent tree for your hero you can buy a list of different abilities and traits that effect gameplay. Be that a leadership trait that allows them to lead bigger stacks, or maybe an Inspirational trait which gives an attack bonus to any unit stack they are in, or something interesting like that. I think it'd add a lot of options to character and champion customization. Perhaps even make 'strategic' talents as well, such as ignoring difficult terrain (can move through forests as if they were normal terrain) and maybe a 'Scary' trait that makes monsters less likely to attack their army, etc. Sky's the limit. In fact, now that I think about this, I'll put this suggestion in another post. Its a good idea.

So it sounds like another issue is that unit power (attack and defense) scales too quickly.

I disagree - I think it is far more critical that the AI be fixed so that there is some challenge.

The only way that the AI can provide challenge is abusing the same tactics that players do. No amount of artificial smarts can beat  an 'I win' button.

 MoM wasn't balanced, Dominions 3 isn't balanced, and both games are better for it.

While balance is a major concern, I disagree about it being the top priority. For me the priorities are:

1) Performance

2) AI (strategic / tactical)

3) Balance

I have some issues in Performance (not critical), have spotted some AI's bugs, but Balance is very bad really.

Am I the only person who gets "Out-of-memory" every 2 hrs?

I got to restart my comp to continue play every 2 hrs....well it's good cos I sometimes forgets how long I play...lol

Most important = Memory problems, because even if you have the best game in the world, at some point, it becomes unplayable, because you have an abominable delay in the game.

So that's priority for me.