Seriously now, anyone can like or dislike the concept behind each game, but what you are doing here is nothing more than self-deception either out of obstinate loyalty or ridiculous bias. Elemental would have been so lucky to receive top ratings if it had been released with a clear direction in design and not in the broken state it still is at the moment.

To suggest that Civ 5 only got the better reviews by both critics AND users simply because it's from Firaxis Games and because Elemental is from a smaller developer is obscene as it can get and diminishes every single admirable comment uttered by Brad himself acknowledging their fault. Civ 5 got its fair share of criticism concerning the most pressing issues, as you have pointed out yourself.

You see what I did there?

No, it's an awesome and amazing game right now, day 1 after launch. Its polished, its beautiful, the gameplay is amazing and deep.
Dont judge all gamers to be blind idiots who cant judge a game for what it is.
I'm absolutely in love with civ5, because of what a gem of a game it is, i couldnt care less what name is on the box, if a dev called "Shit Industries" released it, i'd still love it. Dont insult us just because we dont share your opinions.

Both games are awesome, I bought both and have played TONS of each.

Civ5 has its positives and negatives, as does Elemental.

I honestly cant say what game I enjoy more.. they are about tied for me..both addicting and well made imo!

Civ5 is easyier to get into(Better UI), has more explanation and has better music. Elemental has better custimization (editors) and more depth imo.

Its wierd though, both games have Ai issues and late game slowdown though (:

Also Civ5 wasnt released with editors like they said it was going to.. reviews complain about Elemental not having Multiplayer on release day.. but then Civ5 didnt have any editors on release day either, so that evens out for me.

Civ5 was released in better shape then Elemental, but since Elemental is at 1.08 B now its alot better from when it was released.

In the end? I would reccomend Civ5 to more of my friends, as its more user friendly and more casual... while I will reccomend Elemental to my friends who I think have hte patience and open mind for Elemental.

For me though? Two amazing strategy games that I am completely addicted to (:

Both offer some great things (:

Up until that last line, I honestly wasn't sure if you were talking about Elemental or Civ 5.

You guys sure are bitter.

Been playing Civ V lately. Yeah, both games need work. The difference is, with Civ it's like getting a gourmet steak dinner and saying "It will do better with some more salt and pepper". Elemental is like getting the cut of beef at the butchers. The amount of work that needs doing is orders of magnitude different. Complaining about how the unit supply cost details aren't broken down by era is a lot more specific than saying the entire magic system needs to be overhauled. In a fantasy game.

All complex games need tweaks after they are released and people will express that. But it's tweaks to existing mechanics. With Civ V, everything is in place, it's balanced and plays well. Elemental doesn't fit together and requires an overhaul of all its mechanics as has been discussed at length on these forums. By the time Elemental has the quality of gameplay that Civ V has, at least 6 months from now, it will be virtually a different game.

I find it hard to believe that you seriously can't see the difference in scale here. Most Civ players haven't played Elemental. They aren't comparing Civ V to Elemental, they are comparing it to Civ IV. That's the root of the complaints - whether the individual gameplay changes are better or worse. Elemental didn't have a legacy to live up to... it just needed to deliver solid gameplay out of the box. But it didn't. I'm sorry, but if you think the gameplay and mechanics were ok out of the box, then your judgement is flawed. And believing that everyone is scared of Sid Meier and want to walk all over Stardock just reinforces that.

Yeah, I think your view is spot on. I have bought both games and have played hundreds of turns in each. Civ 5 is FAR more polished and can be played out of the box right now. I have seen some balance issues but the game play is 100% intact and fun. Elemental has the promise of greatness for the future and is a fun game but it is not there now. It gets frustrating as I have had to restart games with new patches due to making your previously saved games not work. it has happened twice now. THAT I don't like and have shelved Elemental in anticipation of a few more patches. I will come back to it and it is fun but it is not even close to being in the same place as CIV 5.

I love how all the Civ5 fans are saying how the game was released with clear design goals, polish and deep gameplay. I honest don't think you guys have actually played the game. It would certainly explain why you are still here, on the Elemental forums, after Civ V has been released. What, didn't you guys get the memo? It's been out for weeks.

Before I go further on that, let me describe my last Civ V game in a bit more detail...

... From my previous game of Civ V, I learnt that a conquest strategy was wholely unfun late game, when army management became a serious chore. So this time I would aim for a more diplomatic/cultural path, figuring that this was how the game was "suppose" to be played. Thinking, sure, I'll give it a shot and try to actually finish a game.

I started as Rome, in a decent position. I build up early game pretty normally, scouted for wonders/ruins, and focused on building a few small cities. My original aim was 5 cities. I kept a smaller army than normal, I decided to try using "diplomacy" to set up relations. Wow, was that the wrong thing to do. Apparently, they are using a warpath AI (if not in a war, attack whoever closest, has resource they want, and has a sufficiently lower military), and nothing else matters.

As such, a bit after my 4th city was built, nearby Greece decided to break all treaties out of the blue and attack me (and I had a bunch - my message log that turn was overflowing with treaties being broken). As it was a sneak attack, and I wasn't properly prepared to counter him, he took my 4th city and demanded my 2nd, along with pretty much all my gold/income/res for peace. Yeah right, like I was going to accept that. Some 30 turns later, my ballistas was rolling past conquered Athens (his capitol) onto Sparta, having already demolished his armies of swordsmen and hoplites and retook my 4th city. He pleaded for peace, giving me two crappy cities nearby (that I promptly razed) all his res and income for 30 turns. The combat AI was absolutely pathetic, but this is well documented, so I won't bother going further than this.

I noticed a really big problem while I was fighting Greece though, nearby Germany who was behind both of us exploded in power while we fought. After going over the situation again, I realize why. The city build queue that is always flaunted as forcing you to make a decision between units/improvements became a serious bottleneck for both myself and Greece in time of war (since we were building units, we couldn't build up our cities). After the war ended, I began dumping gold on two nearby militaristic city states, thus assuring my military dominance for the rest of the game (I never had to build another unit after that war). After that I ended turn a lot... (is this the fun gameplay they had in mind? I don't know, but that's all that happened.)

Eventually the game came down to 5 civs (ironic?): Germany, Greece, and myself (Rome) on the main continent, Russia and France on the other. France went overboard killing city states and got itself in a war against all city states, so nearby weaker Russia was saved. Germany and Greece killed city states too until eventually Germany grew powerful enough to declare war on Greece. When this happened, I saw an opportunity to do a surgical strike to free Genoa, so I declared on Greece and peace 3 turns later (after freeing Genoa). While Germany had been neck and neck with me technologically, once the war started I broke away from him so badly that I was almost to Future Era by the time he got into Modern. After this I'm convinced that Elemental did the right thing by separating the unit and building queues.

Anyways, with a clear technological edge, I built the UN, dump gold on the remaining cities states (that's why I freed Genoa), voted for myself the victory. Having won, I can say for absolutely certainty that I am deeply disappointed with Civ V. The last 100 or so turns was just me hitting end turn over and over, and waiting the 20+ seconds while the turn generates (and I'm on a high end rig - I pity those with lesser comps). At least Elemental had the decency to crash on me so that I can get on with my life. But noo... Civ was stable the whole 400+ turns, only afterward I felt like it was just time I lost doing something meaningless. Oh, and I wasn't even close on cultural victory (a bit more than halfway done), I don't even know how that's possible, I thought I was doing pretty well culturally *shrugs*.

In review, here's my beef with Civ V:

The game is built around a new combat system for more strategy, this should be a good thing, except:

1) The AI using it is pathetic, meaning it's not nearly as strategic(or fun) as it could be.

2) Unit build time is horrible. In a game, where you are trying to focus on smaller armies, you should be able to replenish lost units quickly so as to keep fighting. Not so in Civ V, it takes forever and a half to build a good modern unit. As a result, if your front line is ever broken, your empire falls. A HUGE problem for the AI who can't use their units effectively, not to mention don't know how to protect their units.

3) The system is nearly unmanageable lategame. The resource limit just doesn't work when your empire gets larger, it's too easy to get resources through trade, selective conquest, and cities states. Plus, there are many units that don't use resources. So if you focus your economy on gold, and can afford the maintenance, you can still field massive armies. The only problem is finding the space for them. Oh, and moving 20-30 units around one at a time, and unable to stack is just mind-bogglingly frustrating.

4) The game seriously discourages warfare. As mentioned earlier in my gameplay description. The build queue bottleneck means if you're in a serious war, you will quickly fall behind someone who sits by developing an empire. So you're best not ever fighting. Which leads to the question, why the heck did you redesign the combat system in the first place?

... and that's just on combat. Don't even get me started on Diplomacy, the whole thing is a sham (No, city state don't count as "diplomacy", that's a "gold sink"). If you look at those points I mentioned, many are fundamental design flaws. Can it be fixed? Perhaps #2 and #3 could through a mod, though I doubt Firaxis will change their views on this. For problem #1, I just don't know. Since the more strategical the system, the harder it is to make a good AI, the best we can hope is that it'll be decent by the time when Civ VI comes out. Problem #4 is completely core.

So again, is this the deep and clear design goals they had in mind for Civ 5? Because I seriously fail to see it.

PS: I'm not trying to compare Civ V and Elemental (which I think also needs work).

Can we stop it with the name-calling? This isn't a 360 vs. PS3 thread. 

If by this you mean on release day, then yes, I don't think anyone will argue that Elemental was great at v1.00 (due to serious technical issues). But if you're looking at Elemental currently, vs Civ 5, then no, I don't think there is such a "WORLD of difference" between the two games. Both games has their share of problems, and some are very serious. Elemental's problems just happen to be in a much more "in your face" manner, like UI problems or some aspects which are broken, and admittedly that makes it "looks" bad. Perhaps worse than it actually is even, because to be honest, a lot of them are perfectly ignorable (with the exception of the empire destruction on sovereign death thing). The only real difference in my mind is that Brad and SD has admitted to these problems and said they are working on fixing it... and while I don't agree with everything they have proposed, at least they are trying.

Overall, as I have stated before, aside from being turn base, the two games are very different, so it's very hard to say that one is "better" than another. In the end, I really think it's just a matter of taste on which game you like better, and here there's no right or wrong answer. But having said that, we are on the Elemental forums, so I don't think you should be surprise if people are defending "their" game.

Guys, please don't use our forums to bash our friends' game okay? Firaxis is different from other companies in our industry. They're our kind of people. We're not competitive with them. It's not an us vs. them thing.

Most of you guys don't know the game industry well enough to understand what makes Elemental different than typical games anyway.

Elemental, at release, was, unfortunately, a buggy mess. And ANY serious developer can explain how that sort of thing happens. Think "works on my machine" X 100 and you have a good idea.

What makes Elemental special is that Stardock is both the developer and the publisher. We can listen to feedback and make pretty significant changes to the game for free.

Civilization V has had a bit of a tough start too (but got great reviews at least which softens things -- 91 meta critic average compared to Elemental's 54).  But it'll keep getting better too.  

Specifically, one thing to bear in mind about Elemental our development team on Elemental is 100% as many people as who were on it in say April. That means we're in full development mode.  The team hasn't been switched between a maint. mode and an expansion team yet. They're all still on Elemental and even when they get switched into the traditional expansion mode, people who bougth Elemental get the expansion for free.

In the long run, Elemental will be fine.  People talk about GalCiv as if it was wonderful. But they talk about GalCiv II.  GalCiv I sucked. We just didn't have the scrutiny back then.  It's hard to make a modern new AAA game with a tiny budget.  There's lots of ideas that work and lots of ideas that don't and one bad idea and wreck the whole thing.

When people say they love GalCiv, they're talking about GalCiv II.  Similarly, when people in the future talk about how great Elemental is, they mostly won't even know about Elemental: War of Magic but rather it'll be the expanded version or a later version or something.  That's the way it is in our industry.  

Most people who loved Master of Magic never played the original release in 1994. I am obviously a big MOM fan (few people would spend millions on a game that is a spiritual successor to a 15 year old game that was a commercial disaster). People forget why there wasn't a MOM2. MOM bombed. It became a great game,a  classic, AFTER its release and much of it by community modding. Luckily there wasn't a Metacritic system in 1994.

It certainly wasn't my intention for Elemental to follow MOM's footsteps in that arena. But unlike Simtex, we're our own publisher. So we can stick on it and keep improving as long as you guys want us to work on it.