Voted for "like it, and recommend it", here. My game hasn't crashed once while playing (it has crashed once in the map editor when I was zoomed out spamming with a giant brush like a madman).
The last game I played (on challenging difficulty, with all the AI's set to challenigng) was just that. I had an AI blocked so he went to war with me. About 8 or so turns later, a huge stack forced a double teleport to grab a ton of units to defend was the only way to save my main city. Afterwards, when I showed up with my own stack, I again had to contend with a stack larger than my own. I eventually won this war, but the battles were pretty intense, and I lost about 2/3 of my units taking his 3 cities. This was an early game war. With both had size-4 units with maces at most.
Later on, when I got to the point where magic wasn't really cutting it, I finally got into a war with my other neighbor (I had roughly 15 or so units with attack in the 100's seperated into 2 stacks to fight this time, led by a soveriegn and a hero I gave some essence to). According to the graph, his power was about double mine. My non-soverign stack met his sovereign (and accompanying stack with similarly powerful units), and 3 of my units survived the fight by retreating. My sovereign's stack killed the rest of his guys the following turn, and took his city. I then killed his sovereign again and ended it.
I eventually quit playing this particular game (The lategame of 4x games has never been enjoyable to me. I finished 2 or 3 games of civ4 over the course of 5 years? Same with GalCiv2), but found the empire building really enjoyable. I found out alittle late that the adventuring tech tree can spawn more resource points, which I'll try to take advantage of next game. Battles could use some simultaneous attacking, and late-game-magic (and champions) could use a boost, but I enjoyed the game, and I'm going to sit down tonight and try it again with a bump in difficulty level.
I play this game on a 3 year old computer that wasn't even designed for gaming by the standards of the day back then, in 1600xwhatever resolution and most of the setting turned up to reasonable levels, on 32-bit windows vista, and the game is crash-free, and I haven't noticed an unreasonable # of bugs.
Just my opinion. I look forward to seeing where stardocks team and the modding community will take this game. Its fun already, and loaded with so much potential to be a classic for the ages. 3 good buddies of mine are off to get a copy today (from my recommendation) so that we can play some multi-player coop next week.