I haven't had too much time to play the beta, but the time I have spent with it has been a lot of fun. I'm really looking forward to the retail release. That said, I do have some suggestions and two fairly big problems with the game I'd like to discuss.

First, the problems.

1. In dragon mode, the targeting reticule doubles as the "heat" bar for dragon breath attacks. It's pretty basic functionally--a white bar fills up as you use breath attacks, and when it fills up all the way it turns red and you have to wait for it to go back to zero. Great. Problem is, while using breath attacks odds are that reticule is directly on top the center of an explosion... which is ALSO white, effectively making the reticule invisible. I would suggest either recoloring it to green, or giving it a slight black outline to make it more visible.

2. Second, the camera. The mouse wheel doesn't seem to function properly. It should ONLY zoom the camera in or out. When I played, however, after zooming in to a degree, the mouse wheel would start scrolling the camera up. This is makes zooming in to a specific location needlessly difficult and annoying.

Now, the suggestions.

1. Since the Beta is multiplayer only, this may or may not be incorporated into the single-player aspect already, but I would very much like/hope to see the ability to pause the game (and still move the camera) as well as an option to increase (fast-forward) the in-game time. I feel this is a bit of a necessity considering how slow the average movement speed is for units.

2. In Dragon Mode, it was cool that I had all those different abilities to play with... but I couldn't tell what any of them were. It would be nice if, while in Dragon Mode, we could still use our mouse cursors. The Witcher did something pretty neat where you could press shift to "shift" between mouse-movement and mouse-cursor (to access menus, different spells/styles, etc.) and I think something similar would benefit here. We could simply hold down shift to switch from controlling the dragon to controlling the cursor, and mouse-over the skill icons to see what they do. This would also benefit the RTS controls as it would give a more direct method of controlling the units than blunt keyboard shortcuts.

Was the camera pointed at an angle as you were zooming?

You can pause the game in single player, but according to the manual, this is done by opening the main menu.

You can change the game speed dynamically in RTS combat using the numpad + and - keys.

this also reminds me of a bug I keep forgetting to report/ask about, I'm sure it's been seen or something, but when you use your fireballs enough and it turns red, waiting for a cooldown, you can just press 1 or whatever to enable the dragons special elemental fireball thing, acid, penetrating whatever, and it nulls the cooldown, allowing you to start shooting right away again. However when the buff fades you still have the cooldown shared with the buffed fireball still. Something tells me it should either be shared ultimately, or not at all. :P

Dang, someone should really make a reference sheet with all the updated controlls.
Or point me to an existing one

-I think it's better to integrate game speed changing into the UI, so you can clearly see if you're going at "normal" speed or fast or slow or whatever. Still, it's good to know that will be implemented.

-That only serves one function--to let the player go AFK if necessary. Ideally, you should still be able to move the camera and issue orders while the game is paused. This is a really nice feature to have in an RTS battle where there are a lot of different things going on at the same time.

-Yes, the camera was at an angle. The camera is always at an angle. And the camera should ALWAYS work properly no matter which way it's pointing.

You can set the camera pretty close to vertical... but I see what you mean now (I don't usually have the camera at either extreme zoom level, and apparently never zoomed fast enough to overshoot what I wanted enough to notice that). Presumably the movement is to allow the camera to get past cliffs, etc, to keep zooming in if you keep telling it to zoom.

I don't really understand what you mean about it helping get past cliffs. Most RTS games lock the camera level to the elevation, so when you scroll over higher terrain the camera raises--so that zoom level corresponds from distance-from-the-ground, not an arbitrary level--like sea level or something.

Rather than being something intentional, it seems to me it's more likely the result of a developer with no experience making 3D strategy games making a 3D strategy game. Which is to be expected.

If you zoomed in to a cliff edge in earlier betas, the camera would move forward if you kept zooming, and when it cleared the edge zoom closer to the water/ground below the cliff. That was just zooming, not panning the camera. That behaviour (whether intentional or not) was changed so zooming in or out does not move the camera forward or back at the extreme limit, if you keep trying to zoom.

The camera always did automatically move up if you panned close to a mountain, etc.