I voted Fair. Here's why:

- Essence is a huge improvement over per-turn mana upkeep and unlimited city spells

- Outpost upgrades are a great idea

- Re-arranging the build queue and saving the progress on items was sorely lacking! Thank you!

Unfortunately:

- You cannot rearrange items in the build-queue which require flipping between pages. So, if you have an item on page 2 or 3 of the queue, you cannot move it to page 1 or page 2, etc.

- Units stationed in outposts should auto-defend anything in the outposts zone of control, otherwise you have to spend way too much time building massive armies of units to protect your stuff, and you have basically no chance of protecting against high level mobs until late game

- Outposts should be able to build better defensive structures so there is some hope of defending against high level mobs in the early game

- Even with warden, some high level mobs still "accidentally" walk over your outpost and destroy it or attack your units stationed at the outpost. Oddly, if you move the units out of the outpost, this happens far less.

- High level mobs wandering around in the early game SUCK. It makes the scout trait far too overpowered as it is a HUGE advantage to not have to worry about those high level mobs while everyone else does. There is simply no way to defend against them until mid to late game and there are too many of them and they attack too frequently.

- Pioneer spam is still crazy.

- Battles still slow down making the game nearly unplayable.

- Have had several CTDs in each game.

- Magic is useless early game except for city enchantments, then overpowered late game.

- Level 5 towns can select a 1% interest on treasury balance, but it doesn't work right. It seems to act more like a 10% interest or so. This basically means that the person who first hits a level 5 city basically wins if they stop buying things until they hit 20k balance or so. I was making 700+ gildar per turn at that point.

- Money in the game comes in too slowly until you get a level 5 city, then it's suddenly way too quickly. I had 27 settlements (2 fortresses, 3 conclaves, the rest were towns). I simply couldn't save enough money to upgrade units or heroes at a reasonable pace even with that many settlements until I got my first city to level 5.

- Something is wacked with studies; I had 1 research in a city, built a study, and still had 1 research. Then I upgraded to a school, and still had 1 research. 

- Unit wages cost too much. You just can't build enough troops given the income level of cities to even reasonably defend your territory until very late game. You pretty much HAVE to get the warlord ability to cut unit costs in half to even have a chance at defending yourself.

- As others have noted, arrows still come in from the side.

- AI is still stupid. If it's attacking a regenerating unit which is fleeing, it still stupidly tries to get first attack constantly, which just lets me regen all my health and re-engage. At least it stopped chasing the most hurt unit to the exclusion of all others!

- Mana shield doesn't work at all on quick resolved battles, only tactical ones (even if you auto-play it in tactical mode).

- Adding a lumber mill to the build queue then removing it wipes out the forest and if there is no other adjacent forest, you can now never build the lumber mill again.

- It takes way too long to upgrade from leather armor to something useful so you can hold off the high level mobs wandering around.

- Auto-play tactical wastes mana and combat turns doing things like casting fire / cold resists when no units in the battle can do fire / cold damage.

- Lots of other stuff is still broken.

So, while things have definitely improved, you still have a LOT of work ahead of you before it is release ready. I would say at least another 6 months or a year of polishing if you want a good release. Probably 1.5 - 2 years if you want an excellent release. An excellent release would be one where all of the bugs which are currently known as of today are fixed; the game can be played for 72 hours or more without crashing to the desktop; the game doesn't slow to a crawl as you progress; melee and magic are balanced with respect to each other in combat; you have more spells; you address the defensibility of resources in the ZoC of the outposts; you fix income vs upgrade costs vs maintenance on units; you fix the stupid AI in battle and make the outcome of quick-resolve battle at least count the spells and things cast on the units; you make the AI in auto-play tactical not waste resources and time; etc.

Holy ***t.  I just moved things around in my queue and they retained what had been put into them so far.

That caused me to save my game, exit, come here, and vote Excellent.

That, and the killer new cloth map.  Love playin' on the cloth map.  And the city thing.

I'm loving the hell outta this game.

And, I just noticed that when I put a dude on Guard he disappears from the list on the left.  That's it, game's ready.  Roll 'er out!

Had a fairly long session yesterday. Difficulty BEGINNER, with one less opponent to have more room to maneuver (to avoid going 1000 times through the initial stages of the game). So, some more organized thoughts.

What works:

• The new cities. Finally. Back in Beta 1 or 2 we were told that changing City Management was outside the scope of the beta...but we bitched and moaned, until the devs agreed that something had to be done. The system now works. Cities are fun, AND they make sense.

• Essence. Truly nailed, this one. An original concept for the genre, fits with the game and it's loads of fun. It really adds a lot. Yes there are issues to sort (like the AI ignoring it apparently) but it's a winner 

• Maintenance System. Only units have maintenance. I was skeptic but I admit that I was wrong. It works. 

• Differentiation. Of course you can never have enough but it's a tough choice at start. So it's doing its job.

• Injuries. Another winner (yes, it was there before but the game wasn't fun enough to play). Death needs to be a possibility, though.

• Outposts. Cool, they add a lot of options and depth.

What doesn't [really] work:

• Magic. Yep, still there. Sorry, it's better than before, but no. How does it even work? Some spells seem to be scattered throughout the Magic Tree (and you literally have to hunt them down one by one amidst the other stuff!). Some other you learn by leveling and adventuring... through randomly chosen options that sometimes don't give you spells at all. NET RESULT, after 274 turns playing as PARIDEN, and focusing mainly on MAGIC RESEARCH, I still have little more than the handful of spells I had at the start. I know it's not called "War of Magic" anymore, but it's still very, VERY underwhelming. To think what you could do in MoM so far into the game...

• General Obscureness. For instance, Enchanters "unlock" the Leth Staff, we're told. What does it mean? How do I get it? Another one: the Spellbooks technology. Says it "unlocks" tomes (I don't really get this thing with locks...). Ok, what do they do? Are they the same tomes that were "unlocked" for me (as Pariden) at the start? If they are, what happens when I get the technology? No info is provided. Which brings us to...

• Hiergamenon. It's a mess, and it doesn't help any. For instance I was trying to find about city enchantments (to figure out how to dispel one)... no luck. I tried to use it 2 or 3 times for other things and had to just give up.

• Tactical battles. Kinda bland. The lame Magic thing doesn't help, of course... how many times do you want to cast slow? Also, we still miss a "no mana-wasting autoresolve button"...

What's even worrying:

• Performance. I'm at turn 274, and it seems like I'll have to play cloth-map-only or think about quitting. And the interface gets more hysterical each passing turn. I have a 3.40 Ghz quadcore processor, 64 bit operating system and 4GB Ram. Not the top of the world, but it should be enough to get me through a game. It does do so, with other games.

• Bugs and quirks. I know it's a Beta, but there are too many after 2 years. Some go way back and have already been reported countless times. So the concern becomes legitimate.. how many will be actually fixed?

I'll keep playing some more of course. I will say this, the game finally FEELS like a game, and it feels like a WHOLE. There are some many nice things that fit well and work well with each other. Unfortunately some issues and design choices that go waaaaay back still drag it down and keep it from blossoming into... what could have been. And I don't think it should even be released before it reaches an acceptable level performance-wise.  

I voted good - I am really enjoying the new cities, essence, the new spellbook, the outpost upgrades, the new animation system and the various UI and graphical improvements, all of which mesh nicely with the rest of the game to make it almost perfect.

IMHO, the Stardock team needs to cut back on further feature development and spend its time working on fixes for all those annoying bugs and UI tweaks that people are mentioning, so that we can get off that discussion. Then perhaps some more features can be added, but the game seems feature-perfect as is for a first release, and I think most people would be happy for any new features to come via expansions or DLCs.

Having played for several hours, the most annoying bugs and/or UI issues for me in order of priority are:

- the slowdown in tactical battles, which seems more frequent and more severe in Beta 4

- the lack of a "go there" button when one of your resources is destroyed

- the lack of a "moves remaining" indicator next to the unit icons on the left of the screen (similar to the "zzz" icon for cities which are idle)

- the redundant "you have found an item" dialogue when you find an item

- the wildlands bug which prevents the quest from finishing if you've saved and reloaded (not sure yet if this is in Beta 4)

- arrows still flying in from the left side (persistent issue, still present in some occasions in Beta 4)

Seriously, if the above issues were fixed and some other, smaller bugs are quashed, for my tastes the game would be close to Release Candidate stage...

ummmm... how do i delete this double post?

edit: Maybe I'll make use of it.

☻The missing leather chest piece was on an old hero with a custom "no armor" race, but shouldn't it still be in the store for champions?

☻I noticed Venom III, and probably all poisons, still applies when the enemy dodges. Wouldn't the poison not take if it didn't enter the bloodstream through a wound?

☻Enemy Ash Mage projectile came in from the left screen again, but its a lot less common. Also saw it once with ignis bow. Tactical map specific bug maybe?

☻An out of place ~7sec delay after an Air Elemental cast titan breath. We have guardian wind on.

☻Return of a strange tactical battle slowdown. 1FPS. Not my 64bit win7 2700k rigs fault.

And last, but not least,

♦ Can't enter Ancient Ruins even though I have erogs journals! I think all questing might have bugged out.

I am perfectly aware of the settings. My point is that auto-end of turn needs to be disabled in its current state, something all the beta players already does, but is simply a terrible default in the current state of the feature, so it should be turned off by default, or even better, it should be fixed.

Edge scroll can be configured to a lower delay, but it can not be configured to work sanely. It is neat they have an alternative way to scroll, but being a PC strategy game, my first expectation is that can be navigated like a PC strategy game, it is only after a lot of pain that you are forced to navigating it like an iPhone game (though it needs kinetic scroll for that to really work great as well).

Not sure what to say. The game is amazing in that it has tons of options and depth. At the same time, here is no military strategy to speak of and the RPG elements are for the very late game only. The first hours of playing I find myself defending from random monsters and clicking end turn. It's not fun.

Can we please have access to the mod tools soon? I'm beginning to realize that I will never enjoy vanilla FE.

one of the problem i see with early game that its very hard to get spells

Really? I had none of that with Beta 3, but I'm finally getting it with Beta 4. I actually think about this game in ways I never have before. Perhaps you're just a little burned out?

I wonder what kind of clever angle people think they're having when they do such remarks - using even the exact same words used by Brad in countless posts. Do you get a reward?

As a matter of fact, the CEO himself asked customers to give their opinion of Beta 4. This is feedback. Also, it's been said repeatedly that FE aims to a 90+ score reviews-wise, something that apparently (judging by the poll itself) would not happen even if all the reviews would be made by fans. So, maybe this is useful feedback after all, isn't it?

Also, he inquires about mod tools, which were also heavily advertised with Ewom. 100% legit and helpful post. 

Well, I hate to say it, but I think that I've finally realized that that this just isn't going to be the game for me. There are lots of neat ideas, but I guess I was hoping for something with a little bit more strategic depth, amongst a short list of other less important things. At this point in development, I think that it's a little bit much to hope for.

Anyway, I'll be around keeping my eyes out for mods, and I'm still interested in the possible third incarnation of the series, but I think that we should maybe take a break for a while and see other people.

It's not you, it's me.