Did my second playthrough, on vanquisher for some achievements. My thoughts:

* I did not notice much of a difficulty difference, I imagine playing on the other maps is much more of a challenge when you have to buy resources you can't get on your own
   * Had a run of smallpox before I unlocked a healer, and it killed about 50 people, but I had a ton of spare labourers at that point, so doesn't impact me really
   * Hard to say if raids are harder, I was also going for the achievement of getting 500 pops without walls, so that involved a lot of micro, but it wasn't impacting my economy. The last camp though, clearing that with tier 1s takes a ton of time
   * Bears ok, can be annoying, and my hunters seem to be dumb enough to die most of the time unless I fence everything off
* Combat is fun enough, but really tedious
   * It's time consuming to toggle on/off a ton of guard towers
   * There should be a button to tell a unit to get equipment, there were cases when I was being raided while my hunters had like 3 arrows on them, and I found the best course was to remove that person, and get someone else to take their job
   * The company's name doesn't appear when you hover over the banners at the bottom. I named mine North, West, and East Guards, so I just remembered their banner flag
   * Can't rotate your troops, why
   * It can be quite difficult to see your unit's healthbar while in combat, and so I'd usually have the fort screen up to monitor their health, that's not ideal since there's no hotkeys or UI icons to bring that up.
   * You can accidently disband a soldier trying to select him in the fort screen, no confirmation screen
   * Your soldiers dying of old age should notify you in some way since they don't get auto replaced
* Research takes way too long at the end, I'm waiting 2 years between points praying a merchant will come with a book of knowledge to buy.
* There's a lot of managing with the market as well, I'd like to be able to set thresholds above which to sell my stock if it's selling above price.
* It'd be nice to have the ability to staff a building only when there's a minimum number of inputs
* I had a farm next to 2 herds of deer, and god damn, those things have no chill. The second the gate is destroyed by some raiders, they all just bum rush my fields from a mile away and eat everything.
* I think farms should be much bigger, they feel too small in relation to your town size. Especially when the one screen has a walled town surrounded by a vast field of golden wheat
* A paint feature would be really nice to fill in non square areas between your roads and buildings. It's quite annoying when you're not building on grid to cobblestone in some plazas
* I don't think there's a way to see how much of your population is educated/not a working adult
* I don't like paying gold per month on the rat catcher if he's not doing anything, and I didn't bother toggling on/off it for this run, I just started mining gold earlier so I could ignore the drain
* I think the land's fertility should make a difference beyond just the starting value, maybe a maximum. I just plopped my farms near me, and with enough fertilizer and cloves, it's 100%. 
* A pop up that can be disabled for foragers would be nice to remind me to switch their areas
* I'm not quite sure what poor animal health does, is there a chance it kills them or lowers their birth rate?
* The happiness thing seems to be a bit unclear. You can look at the one screen, and you see it's all smiles because every need is met, but the UI icon shows a neutral face because the food rationing policy is on.
* I think the desirability radius on buildings should be much bigger.  
* I quite like the whole temporary shelter thing for mining outposts
* To be honest, I usually just ignore any issues of crop disease rot, and just assume my rotation will eventually take care of it.
* Seeing the goods actually on display in the market is awesome

Thoughts after doing Vanquisher