Beautiful spread with the image header in that review, very nicely done by them.

I dunno, I still wished they had given better loving to the other classes.  I have a hard time justifying why I should pick anything other than Warrior and Mage.  I feel like he was spot on saying the Assassin class was, sadly, dull; and I feel the same way about Defender and Commander as well.  If I am wrong, then what traits do they have that are better than Mage/Warrior? 

I want to preface this post with the fact that I think this is the best strategy game I have ever played.

You are not wrong. It is just the way of looking at things, that mage is too fun so we should bring it down to boring like other classes may seem in comparison, instead of making those classes more fun, seems like the wrong way to go about it.

Balance to me isn't the issue at all, make monsters harder if that is the issue, but the real issue is the fact the AI doesn't use heroes/sovereigns effectively at all. The AI picks classes and traits apparently at random, which is why if you ever capture a sovereign it will look like they wanted to fill each (vertical) row of the trees before moving deeper. This haphazard leveling leads to the AI champions being as good as their melee, instead of the strategic scapel they are in the hands of the human.