The overworld now has a proper road network. Roads follow the lie of the land: they stick to plains and valleys, wind around mountains and marshes, and merge into shared trunk routes with natural junctions
Roads meet towns properly instead of skirting past them, and bridges now appear where roads cross rivers
Merchant caravans follow the roads, and travel faster on them than cross-country
Caravans no longer freeze in place at random. If you spotted a merchant standing in a field staring into the distance, that is fixed
Towns
Speciality towns now look the part. A smithy town keeps swords on its shelves, a logging town keeps timber in stock, and visiting a producer means you can actually buy what it makes
Industries hold back a working reserve of their materials instead of selling the lot to the first passing caravan. The Production tab shows the town granary and what each industry is holding
Food prices are smarter: a town swimming in grain and meat no longer pays silly prices for fish, it just wants a bit of variety
Winter is survivable. Towns lay in much deeper food stores, hunting shifts with the seasons, and far fewer settlements starve through to spring
Some settlement titles are cleaner: Stonecutter Town, Logging Town, Brewing Town and friends
Settlement speciality icons now show in overworld tooltips and in the rumours screen, and town names in rumours are clickable to jump the camera straight there
Quests
Quests can be tracked and untracked with a star in the journal, and the overworld summary shows only what you are tracking
Town Quests tabs show a gold "!" when there is work waiting for you
Battles
Auto deploy no longer places units in rivers or the sea on coastal and river maps
The READY button glows gold once every unit is placed
Settings
New Screen Shake slider. Charging with 100 cavalry was a bit nausea inducing.