that damn earl kicked him out of the region... well, good bye fluffy ppl =(, hello new world

he got "tailed" xD (hahaha u get me? xD)

1) Pacing. Do you feel the story progresses too fast? Should more words/time be spent on developing characters and setting in favour of solving the current arc's problem?
Arc and chapter length will naturally increase as the world expands but this is more gradual; I'm asking to gauge whether the style of writing matches expectations.
Unfortunately, I can't speed up the pacing much from where it is now. Writing in a more western style is inevitably slower than the Japanese LN style.

2) Tone, atmosphere, general feel. In general, the arcs are quite light in tone and emotionally detached. I would say that this is due to viewing things through Cato's POV but in reality this is my default writing style.
Do you feel the story could do with a darker or more comedic tone? Emotional weight could also be increased but might take me a bit longer to write, lol.

3) Characterization. Do you feel that various characters are given sufficient 'screen' time? Which character would you like to see developed further? (side stories, parallel branches and so on are expected to happen as the cast expands -more than half the expected *minimum* number of characters have yet to be introduced-)
Of course, the more time spent on various characters, the slower the story pacing gets. One way to avoid this is to branch the story with a different main character. It's still too early to do this IMO, but YMMV so your opinion is appreciated.

4) Setting. Or more precisely setting development. While I have a very large portion of the background and overall structure worked out, weaving this into the story without excessively long infodumps is hard. Eg. The crysteel mini-dump was commented to me in RL that it was a bit long.
So, more detail and description comes at a cost of increased length, slower pacing and more words to get anywhere. But posting speed should stay roughly the same, writing description is very easy.

5) Plot content. A small subset of it anyway. I'm asking about the balance of action vs other things. Specifically, do you as the reader wish to see at least some amount of action (in the sense of stuff blowing up) each arc? Each chapter? (probably too much to ask) Or is an entire arc spent on political machinations resulting in a bloodless confrontation considered enough action?
This is obviously the most YMMV portion, so I'm not really going to change too much but future arc planning still has room for increasing or decreasing the... hawkishness of various antagonists / obstacles. Of course, the war itself is still pretty high on the action side, but we're about to move away from the front lines for at least a few arcs so the baseline action level will go down unless I do some replanning.
And there still is Morey's side which is the more traditional Hero's Journey stuff and so necessarily has lots of fighting action.