Congrats man That's Awesome!!! Way to go. Remind me if I'm ever up that way though to have my wife Not drink the water...LoL.

You guys rock, I've really enjoyed watching this game come together over the years.  I'm on a tight college budget, but I had to make room for the collectors set when I saw that months ago (hoping that shows up soon...).  So far I've really enjoyed the game, finally figured out how to optimize the setting for my computer (reducing the resolution to smallest and playing in window was a huge speed boost).  Wish I had more time to play, but homework still takes priority.  One thing I thought was interesting, but kind of odd, was that killing an enemy sovereign destroys everything they had, cities, troops, etc.  I can understand if a player loses his or her sovereign they are out of the game, but for the remaining players, from the point of view of the game... where do the cities and such go?  Right now I'm imagining cities blowing up as I take the finishing blow upon my foe.  Maybe when the sovereign dies, the cities become neutral maintaining only a small army, maybe even slowly becoming a ghost town as the population goes down (-5 prestige w/ no sovereign, for example).  When the pop reaches zero the town can auto demolish itself, maybe leaving a goodie tile.  There's a lot of possibilities, but I think it would be more realistic to have the dwindling remains of destroyed empires up for capture.  It's too easy just being able to go in and build where cities used to be, should have something to slow that up I think.  Anyway, just some thoughts, thanks for the game!!!

Well I dont mind as long as those people dont get the game >.< that website should be shut down how many games they have pirated so far is enough money to buy Europe and America >.< and not only games they pirate programs,pic,porn ,Operating systems ect

While it's true 1.05 has polished things here and there, I'm sorry but I believe it can't be denied that this game feels unfinished. Badly. 

Let's ignore the instability and perfomance bugs, the biggest leaks since the Watergate and so on: these are bugs, they will be squashed in time, and they are nowadays a common occurrence for many games. The game itself is surprisingly... empty. It lacks depth, it lacks variety ("Elemental ensures that every game is a completely new experience." Oh really? It doesn't seem so to me, quite the opposite), it lacks even some of the most basic functions. Some features are intriguing, there are good ideas around, but they are either underdeveloped and/or they lack cohesion with the rest of the game. 

Some examples?

- The slight randomness of the tech tree is a neat idea. I would have been even a LOT more strict on that department, anyway tech trees are streamlined, simple, and in the end it's randomness doesn't have any real effect apart making you waste 5-6 turns once in a while. 

- The factions are all just about the same. Same tech trees, same units, same spells, even the looks are barely different. A couple of different bonuses between them doesn't help feeling each faction plays exactly the same way. 

- Map interactivity is at the bare minimum. With spells I can terraform it a bit, but things as simple as chopping down forests? Rivers (they are in the map maker though)? The world is so static no matter what you do, that it feels more like a board game rather than a 4x strategy one. 

- Several parts of the game are just there but hardly worked upon. Few quests, awfully linear, few items (and effectively hardly any difference between unit types you can create based on that equip), few diplomacy options (not even an exchange world map info? Just NAPs, trade and tech treaties and alliances? C'mon!), few and scarse sounds (most monsters have the very same 2-3 sound files), and ridiculous flavour messages (Oh, hello Mr. Wolf, I'm sorry to hear you think bad of me and that I'm not prepared to scout the wastes, you know, when I began wandering around I did not think the devs forgot to give the gift of word only to sentient species...). A bunch of generic spells, as well as a bunch of generic creature units, few and often uninteresting. No drops, no really special things about 'em, no real reason to actually feel excited when scouting the wastes.

- Clunky interface and clunkier controls. With a manual hardly helping, with few informations, often completely wrong and clearly based on versions different from what was finally in the final cut.

The list could go on. A fair lot, I'm sorry to say. 

Several of these issues, at least those concerning the alarming lack of content,  can and will be addressed by modders in time (if the game survives long enough on people HDs to actually let some MAJOR mod projects to shape well... which isn't that granted I fear), most other things I've no doubt will be further polished in the coming months. Still, one hardly spends 40 bucks for a container for future mods, one would spend 40 bucks for a game complete in itself; then with the bonus of having high modding hopes.

In 6 months Elemental will be a much better game than it is now, up to the point of feeling kinda "complete"? I'm sure of it. It's also true, however, that in 6 months time, it will also be sold at a much lower price. 
I'm a fan of Stardock games. The two Galciv were amazing games, and some of the few games ever I felt completely deserved every penny I spent on them. They had their downsides, maybe, but never felt unfinished or poorly wrapped up not even in the very beginning. Elemental does. It's undeniable IMO. Right now, and it will be so for a while at least, CIV IV modded with Fall From Heaven is a much (and free if you already have CIV IV, or anyway at budget price if you buy it now that V is coming out) better alternative, that does practically everything Elemental tries to do, just better, and more, with 10 times the variety and lifespan (hundreds of flavour units, dozens of DIFFERENT factions, religions, heroes, spells, quests, items...). When a free fan mod (no matter how well made and how much worked upon) made for a game that didn't even include almost any "rpg" elements beats so badly a standalone game made with that very objective in mind, it means something has gone horribly wrong for the latter. Horribly. 

Reviews will give low rates to Elemental, it's inevitable, just as GalvicII was on the opposite rated as a masterpiece just a bit everywhere. Because it deserves it, now at least, no matter the passion and the good ideas that were behind it, and no matter if there might be potential for the future. The reviews are being done now after all and should review what the people might consider of paying for now.

Well the only way to have the patch is to buy the game. So they must buy the game and then repackage the patch from the new files and just have a copy and paste job. Pretty hard to defend against a pirate that buys the game that then seeds it off to other people.

Anyway any news on the limited edition? Hope I get it soon.

@Kadath:  While I agree with many of the improvements you say could be made, I don't think they're evidence that the game is "unfinished", at least not in the sense that it keeps being used on this issue, "completeness".  Room for improvement doesn't mean it's not a complete game.

Now, if you mean it's unfinished because you expect those features to be worked on by the dev team, I can accept that.  But I wouldn't say it's a reason for huffiness when pointing them out.  It's awesome when a game comes out that does everything just right but it's also really rare.  It's also pretty rare these days for a game to see long-term support and improvement of the things they decide were wrong with the game at release.  So while they missed the first "rarely", hopefully they'll be able to pull off that second one.

But really, calling a game unfinished or incomplete means there are major features missing.  I think one could legitimately raise the issue of multiplayer as an example of incompleteness.  I understand the reasons why it's not enabled yet, but even if the feature is technically in the game, if players can't actually use it I'd argue that doesn't count.  It's just that a complaint like "there should be more spells" doesn't indicate a missing feature, it's an argument for improving an existing feature.

And hey, while I'm butting in and making a too-long post, thoughts on Stardock's development process:

- Aim for feature-complete testing earlier.  Traditionally (as opposed to what game developers have turned it into), alpha testing is when your program runs but you're still adding features, then beta is when you consider the program feature-complete and want to test for bugs and how features work together.  It's a useful model, even if strict adherence to it would be nigh-impossible for complex game development.  Once you're in beta and think of new features, add them to the queue for the next version.  That way you'll have a better idea of when the initial version will be stable and golden, and hopefully find it easier to meet retail deadlines.

- Last-minute changes are risky.  Example:  Moving the improvements from the settlement building screen to the improvment tile itself.  It was done because some people found improvement building confusing (because they didn't realize that particular item had to be built on a particular tile).  But when you moved the build button to the improvement tile, the number of questions in the forums indicates that you just swapped one confusion for a different one.  Some time for testing might have caught that, but instead the change was made in the short time between the end of testing and the game's release.  More testing time for the feature might have helped you determine an implementation or tutorial notification that would eliminate most questions about it.

- Just give the pre-release folks the GM version next time.  I appreciate the crash effort to get an improved version out for us beta/pre-order folks, but I can't help but suspect that work on the zero-day patch might have been a little smoother (if not less stressful) if the pre-release patch goal hadn't been added into the mix in response to the retailers selling boxes early.  We'll set aside the fact that the GM version should have been something you'd have more confidence in for now.

I'm pretty sure in the same position I would have pushed for the same action you took, trying to do right for the customers.  But the zero-day patch was a bigger boon for players than the pre-release patch.  In hindsight, it seems like the better approach would have been releasing the GM version and posting the list of known problems so players are forewarned, and know fixes were in the works.

- Do you have folks in-house still working on Object Desktop and the other UI customization stuff?  If so, can you draft them into occasional game testing?  They'd be perfect subjects if they aren't normally gamers themselves.  The questions they'd ask would be similar to what other new players would ask, and they'd be well-qualified to suggest UI improvements as well.  Just a thought.  I find the most effective way to write a tutorial is to figure out what questions people ask or might ask, then make sure you answer them before they can be asked.

- I think part of what might have hurt you on the UI and tutorial front is all the communication with the community and the beta testers.  Not that those are bad things, but if you're talking about the features for a long time, and introducing new ones incrementally to the beta testers, then they're only learning the game in pieces instead of the whole game all at once.  I'm not sure what a good compromise is, but my suspicion is that you got used to being able to assume basics like "the player will know how to move the map around" because you'd explained it with the first beta release, so didn't occur to you to include a mention of that control in-game for the folks who hadn't been following the development blogs.

Note, the suggestions are offered with all due fanboyness.  You guys at Stardock are fantastic.  But also human.

Greetings the mighty Froglord of the Froglodytes. I hope this is the right spot to post this, if not I will happily move it to the right location.

An AI issue I have encountered is in the auto-battle. If you have a mix of melee, ranged and casters, the AI will first attack with the melee, then shoot with the ranged. (I'm not entirely sure when he does spell casting). This is a bit weird, since the logically he should decide to if to cast a spell, then shoot, then melee attack with a recheck for spell in between. The current auto-battle kills units because he rush and hit the enemy instead of letting the ranged do the work first (talking versus pure melee enemies).

I have done the sandbox on "Hard" difficulty and have yet to try it on the hardest, but this quiet broke the game: I start with the archery tech and a caster sovereign (15 wisdom, 15 intelligence and full books) and play normally (building the first city and such). Pretty early in the game I get the tech that allows me to create a team, and create a group of Longbowmen (with no gear besides it so they are cheap), while every champion I recruit I imbue and turn into a channeler as well. The end result is, pretty early I have a group of 24 attack that strikes 8 times before the melee enemy get a first hit (I cast haste with a 12int channeler) as well as an artillery of channelers.

An... issue? (not sure if it's the right term) I have encountered is the huge RNG with the units. How is the damage calculated? I have had my Longbowmen shoot things and missing lots, but then hitting for 9+. Will a to hit% and damage range will be added?

If I'm here, this is a bug report- in some cases, my sovereign is unable to teleport to anywhere in my land, while other times he has no problems. Usually he is unable when I try to teleport from inside my territory to another location in it. My other champions with mana are unable to summon creatures and cast teleport, everything seems normal besides the land icon not turning green. The aging system (playing on epic I think) is weird, my sovereign has a 20years old kid when he is 27... and he married when he was 21. The child was born after they married.

All in all the elemental looks like a good game!

Bimble, the point is that most of those missing or lacking features were either advertised or they actually are in the game, just at the bare minimum though.

There is a tech tree with a random factor thrown in: but it's small and linear, and the randomness idea goes to waste being underdeveloped. Galciv 2 had no randomness in its tech trees, yet they were huge and did offer the player a lot of choices on paths to follow (weapon wise, for instance, specializing on a certain weapon/defense class, or the good/evil/neutral alignment subtrees), paths that had quite the influence on how you then had to play the game.

There are 10 factions... in name, they could very well just have put in 2, there would be no real difference gameplay wise. In Galciv 2 too there weren't enormous differences between races, yet some of 'em had some very game changing "talents", and their units were flavoured with different looks/components. 

There are features on the maps. There even are rivers, just not implemented in game. But you can't really interact with most of these features, what nowadays you usually can do one way or another in most games of this kind. And I'm telling this from a turtle player standpoint, one who hates most "terrain changing" functions 'cause I tend to spend hours to design stable maps for a sieging kind of games that are often destroyed by terraforming and that sort of things (what I hated in the otherwise still wonderful AOW Shadow Magic, or why I never use the Illians in CIV IV - FFH because their expanding snow ).

Also everything else I mentioned: it's there, showing the idea and the intention of working on that part of gameplay was there, yet it was not brought up to full fruitfulness.
There are wandering mobs: but of few types. There are quests: very few and very simple (entere here, go there, return here. Not even yes-no situations except for the master quest... how would that have looked better if, even if into the actual game things were left as they are, there actually were some old school text-based "adventures" like it was done for Space Rangers? Nothing new to script into the engine, just a guy having fun writing some text quests, with a bunch of paths and maybe some puzzle thrown in here and there: zero issues, zero headaches for programmers, just plain and simple fun content, that would really go well with the old school stile the game is presented into).
There are items: few and pretty much all the same. Events? Now that I'm thinking of it, apart from some spawning of mobs because of a random event, nothing else; Galciv had several interesting universe-wide events once in a while, some so serious to be even annoying (turtle player here, part 2 ).
Tactical battles are there, but they are the most streamlined I ever seen. Even the not memorable Lords of Magic's (from which AOWII SM took a lot) tactical battles were less rudimentary: they actually were tactical. What's the point of putting in the engine for tactical battles when you just have to move a couple tiles and spamcast skills/spells which actually are all more or less the same, with few, very few, status effects? There are not even elemental resistances in a game called Elemental...
These much older games had skills and spells meant for a reason, city sieges and land features that actually made a huge difference on the battlefield (for starter, they did appear in the battlefield since they were on the world map, ahem... ): for what has been done 'till now in Elemental's tactical battles, they could very well either keep a CIV like battle system, or a GalcivII one where battles where pretty much just some cinematic fun for viewers. At least one would not have to feel cheated by such an underdeveloped feature, that frustrates you by showing you that the potential was there, the idea was there... it was just left... there.

This is the very epitome of what one would define "unfinished". Unfinished because it was began and clearly not finished to a satisfying state (at least for several of us, when personal tastes come into play all the debate goes into smoke... that's also why I'm not mentioning the - for me - unimpressing graphics). There's a bare minimum one would today expect from this kind of 4x games, because of standards set up by previous cult games (which I don't believe Elemental reaches right now), plus there's what you feel is lacking because the game lets you sample it, taste it, but not really eat it, since there's not enough meat.

GalcivII, for instance (and to keep confronting Elemental with another Stardock game, that for a good reason hadn't to face this all but warm welcome both from reviewers and many players), had no RPG elements at all (apart from experience for units, and the early game oddity hunt to gather bonuses). Yet noone felt they were missing, because the game felt complete, self sufficient in what it aimed to accomplish. Elemental aimed to accomplish much more, and elements of this goal are under the eyes of everyone while playing: but that's what they are, elements, ideas, drafts; maybe they aimed at a too big of a goal, maybe they were a bit overexcited when advertising all the feature this game was meant to have (raising our expectations and making us drool just to feel twice the disappointment), and maybe they rushed it a bit too much when another month or so of polishing could have done wonders in transmuting a "this feels an unfinished and poorly wrapped up game" welcome into a "nice game... there could have been much more in, but that's what modders are for" one.

I didn't even think of multiplayer since I seldom play online especially this kind of long spanning games. You are probably quite right in pointing that too as a fault, but I don't really feel multiplayer implementation is an actual "part" of the game itself. It's relevant, and good multiplayer support deserves a nice plus when rating a game, of course, but the game itself is... well, the game itself  
And anyway, it would have been impossible, viewing the state of Elemental, to release it with multiplayer already active: many people are crashing constantly, plus there's that nasty memory leak, I tremble at thinking what curses experiencing all these issues multiplied by the multiplayer environment would have stirred up

Mind me, I still love Stardock (not everything always turns out as it should, it's life, and I know that when you develop your own creature, being it a software or a work of art, sometimes you lose perspective and are not always right at judging it ready for the public), and I'm sure I will soon love Elemental too. I have no troubles at saying I (like pretty much everyone nowadays, let's be honest) play a lot of games yet I buy very few, let's leave it at that. Stardock games are usually some of those very few. For all the reason we know we have to praise and respect this software house, that deserves our money. Yet when criticism (constructive of course) is deserved, that very same respect binds us to express it. 

@Kadath:  Heh, we're basically just arguing semantics, I suppose.  To you the lack of variety in some features means it feels unfinished, to me it means it feels rushed.  Doesn't really change the criticism, just the nature of the criticism.

I will kind of point out though that comparing Elemental to the current version of GalCiv2 isn't entirely fair to them.  For the initial release of Elemental I would think they were going for the same sort of thing they did at GalCiv2's release - make the game fun, get the basic features in there, and then improve as time goes on.  GalCiv2 didn't get the varied tech trees for races until the last expansion, for example.

So there's plenty of room for improvement, and things I agree could absolutely have been better in the release version, I just didn't expect a Twilight of the Arnor for Elemental's initial release.

I'll be honest, Elemental has had kind of a similar feel to the first Civilization game for me.  Not because of the gameplay necessarily, but because when I first jumped into Civ I hadn't thumbed through the wonderfully thick manual, so I missed a lot of the depth for a while.  I feel like there's depth I'm missing in Elemental too.  Unfortunately there's no big thick manual with lots of detail that I can thumb through for Elemental, so I still feel like I'm winging it.  This game could have used a nice thick manual like Dominions 3.  Now there's a manual, by golly.

For example, what you mentioned about the talents and their impact on the game.  Experimenting with some sovereign talents, I have found that some have influenced at least the early game a good deal.  Meditation is a big one - being able to research and cast Nature's Bounty right away means that I don't have to build my first city next to fertile land if I find a better spot with more features nearby.  Dungeonmaster makes early monsters less of a threat to my threadbare monarch, since the extra damage often lets him one-shot them.  I could see other talents having more long-term effects, like the extra gold from Thief, for certain playstyles.  They don't all stand out as gamestyle changers, but I'm finding uses for some that do influence how I play.

The faction talents though...well, okay, not so much.  They do affect the game, but many of them don't feel like they have as obvious an influence as the sovereign talents.

As the game goes on, particularly on a large map, I also find that colony placement and specialization adds an interesting element to gameplay.  This spot has good resources but a lot of wandering monsters I can't clear out yet.  That spot has one resource I want, but nothing else.  And darnit, no metal mines yet, time to research exploration or try trading with another empire.

And while spells aren't as varied as they could be, and do lack things like element-specific resistances (given the shards system, a definite oversight), they aren't entirely pointless.  Differences in extra effects or mana cost are considerations.  So are some specific effects - particularly the spell that prevents enemies from counterattacking a unit on its next turn.  So I do think the spells are a good beginning - could be improved, sure, but they don't feel incomplete to me either.

So I think there are some distinctive elements to the game, and like you, I hope they get improved with time.  Random events a la Civ IV or GalCiv2's colonization choices would certainly be nice.  Or heck, even short multiple-choice events - Space Rangers text adventures would be pushing it for multiplayer, but events and quests with a few paragraphs of story behind them would be great for flavor.  More stylistic differences between factions is always nifty.  And absolutely, more variety everywhere.

Heck, I just figure they've got something here because I'm actually spending time considering what could be improved or could have more of an influence on strategy when I should be working and oh-nuts-is-that-the-time why did I feel compelled to reply...

Oh, before I finish, to dispel any doubt that I'm a fanboy:  My limited edition box arrived today.  Hooray!  The canvas map is an excellent feelie, but it could definitely have used some crinkles and frayed edges for character.