Okay, watching the video. The game does look prettier but it seems a bit more 'brown' than Warband. Not a huge deal but still noticeable.
I hope that character customization is a thing you can do mid-game, minus changing gender (gender matters quite a bit in Calradia). In Warband you could change your face whenever you wanted after character creation.
I'm noticing that swing speed and thrust speed for weapons are now separate statistics, and weapons have a lot more statistics in general now. Not to mention the whole crafting thing making it possible for many unique looking weapons. It'd be cool if you found some swords on your fallen enemies, and they're all the same type of sword but have different features (pommel, crossguard, etc.) to make things less samey. There is even an inspect screen so you can look at your shiny gear. It'd be better if they included something for scale in that screen.
There is now a fast forward button directly on the overworld.
When you start a battle the default tactic for your troops isn't "charge at enemy until dead" anymore.
The enemy AI knows when they're outnumbered and need to hold high ground, and when they're on the defensive they will make you come to them.
Ordering your troops now shows flags showing the approximate location your troops will occupy, which is pretty great.
The battle continues even after you die get knocked out by an axe to your skull.
You can get an idea of how a battle is going via a 'score screen' of sorts.
You can now actually compare equipment so you can see if what you're about to equip is better than what is already equipped.
This is only what's coming from the dev's mouth, haven't seen it in the video, but apparently units will 'push' at each other passively. I'm not 100% sure what this means for gameplay unless I see it in action. If it is what I think it is then it's a pretty neat feature. I always figured that people should have a 'personal space' in which they allow friendlies to move through freely but prevent hostiles from moving through so that moving around feels better, especially in tighter spaces. Essentially a collision box specifically for friendlies that is a bit smaller than normal yet a bit bigger for enemies.
Apparently defeating enemy lords actually serves a purpose aside from bringing them down to 0 troops for a while. Now they actually have to use the game's dynamic economy to raise troops and funds. An economy which you can screw with and make things even harder for them, even.
So, at the moment, I really wish they used the weapon crafting for more than weapons. Personalized armor would be pretty great, especially if you could make armor that's better against slashing, piercing, or blunt weapons depending on if you knew an opponent uses a lot of a certain weapon type. Aside from that everything looks good so far.