[happygeek]

If I understand correctly, the talk was now having an exceptionally poor workaround for avoiding sovereign death: if defending, the sovereign automatically retreats to the nearest friendly city, instead of dying. That seems to me to be a particulary poor way of removing penalties for risky use of a sovereign.
Even though I would much prefer to have the game end (or some very serious penaly) if my sovereign "dies" -- perhaps he goes to some MMORPG-type of purgatory from which he must return -- I would be satisfied if this were an option I could turn on without having to mod. I believe it would increase the RPG-type of feeling.

That said, I am greatly disappointed with the little bit I have been able to see in Beta so far. It looks like the combat -- and hence the entire mechanism behind military victories, behind constructing units and research military power -- is vastly undercomplex; it looks even less promising that the combat system of GalCiv2. Or maybe I am misunderstanding everything.