The only thing I don't like is how the units are now represented in tiny armies of pixelguys you can barely see when on low health, how healthbars are now 30x10 wobbly pixel banners that are even harder to see than the brown pixelguys on the brown ground and how they removed all the cool shit like freezing your entire domain so you can walk over water, removal of terraforming units and generally making "ultimate units" boring as fuck (in shadow magic, the humans had a huge blimp as their ultimate unit. In aow3, it's a knight and you have to spend like 50 turns unlocking him. Whoop dee doo) and a complete lack of interesting races. Seriously, I can get the holy champion ability which deals bonus damage vs undead and there isn't even the freaking undead race in this game.

It also seems they have even removed racial perks so your draconians won't research faster, your goblins won't get that huge boost of population growth and the not-even-in-the-game tigrans woudn't even get their bonus gold.

The removal of teleporters just leads to you turtling more and exploring less and binding casting spells to your main leader means you will cast a whole lot less spells in battle because you either attack with your leader and as soon as he attacks -oops- there goes your ability to cast spells or the leader isn't in your army which doubles the spell cost so good luck casting that big 70 mana spell that would turn the tides of battle.
All your all-powerful warlock self ends up doing is casting buffs on your cities which raise stat X to X+1, cast domain buffs which raise stat Y to Y+1 research, summon units if you even have anything worth summoning and shoot guys in the face with your not overpowered in any way at all musket+bow.

So basically, they gave shadow magic the system shock 2 -> bioshock treatment and streamlined the hell out of it, for the better and the worse.