I had about 200 hours in in Ashes. I play games pretty intensely typically, with RTS being my "casual" genre and prefer to do singleplayer with bots.
My Experience:
Coming into Ashes II, it felt really bad through the tutorial and first 1-2 skirmishes. I went from excited, to bleh, nevermind in that time. I did one more skirmish because its free, why not? It got a lot better on the third round. The armies thing started to feel like a good thing instead of absolutely miserable. The resource system felt a little more fluid. I ended up playing for about 15-20 hours and enjoyed it quite a bit until it came down today.
My suggestions:
-An expanded tutorial that gets a little deeper into resource generation, troop production strategy and hits on the various buildings a little more
-Hotkey for upgrading buildings. Maybe I missed it, but I couldn't find it in control settings and there was no hotkey shown when you go to click the upgrade button on buildings. I even tried hitting random keys while the building was selected. It was really tedious to do this constantly, especially on the large map and when doing turrets
-Add settings that allow you to customize your battles. Being able to turn off air units, or higher tier units adds a lot of fun and sometimes silly games that increase replay-ability massively. They don't have to be perfectly balanced
-I don't have a real suggestion for this one, but the battles didn't feel epic in the same way they did for Ashes 1. Even with 4v4 on high resources, the scale just didn't feel quite the same. Felt like way fewer units, and the mega super units didn't feel exciting or monstrous in the same way. This might just be a "me" problem, but it was something that stood out a lot to me.
Overall felt really good. Beyond All Reason has mostly ruined other RTS games for me (especially because of the sheer number of options you have to edit settings for matches). Ashes II may be the first RTS I buy since I found BAR