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[Heavenfall]

A week should be just enough time to find some elusive elementium!

[Davion]

This part kind of annoys me.

They might as well not even have multiplayer at this rate. "Sometime next week" anyone that picked this game up on a whim will have thrown it in the garbage.

[alway]

Well, since 0 day patch I haven't crashed even once. So that seems to be sorted out.

One of the big things I notice is how dependant on the mapgen the player is. One of my games had me with 2 cities, one of which had 2 old libraries. I absolutely FLEW through the tech tree, taking no more than two turns for pretty much anything. That area also had something of a food shortage, and so my spell research went extremely slowly. My current map is a bit more balanced, but I have yet to see many magic shards, and not a scent of elementium. Another thing which bugs me are captured cities. Be sure to capture as many cities of the opposite faction as possible (empire or kingdoms), since they will keep their type of buildings, but still let you build your own. This means 2 spell research buildings, 2 markets, 2 tech research, ect. This of course leads to really powerful cities, especially since from my experience spell research is rather slow normally.

[Tilla]

The forums at Stardock are insane - people claiming outright that anyone who says they have a crash is a troll and a liar. Hilarious really, if it weren't so depressing.

[GaelicVigil]

The forums at Stardock are insane - people claiming outright that anyone who says they have a crash is a troll and a liar. Hilarious really, if it weren't so depressing.

Yeah, it's unbelievable how bad the fanboys are over there, slobbering all over themselves to heap praise on Wardell and his "masterpiece".

I've been refreshing the general discussion forum every 5 minutes for the past 6 hours or so.  It's funny, half the time you will see a new post go up that is titled with something to the effect of, "I paid money for a beta copy?", "Why was this so rushed?", or, "This game has serious issues".  When I refresh again, the post is gone *poof* like magic!

I also love how they downplay the PC Gamer reviewer as just a vocal minority idiot.  Hah!  Just wait until the rest of the reviews start coming in, I doubt they will be much more positive.

[SeaBee]

To be fair, the fanbois probably don't know better. Randomly, it seems, well-written opinions posted in new threads that could be called "negative" in some way are dealt with by deletion (and sometimes an insta-ban). They claim it's to keep the signal to noise ratio low so that players can find information easier.

I was reading a very interesting thread last night, one asking for a refund -- but it had great points in it. For two pages it had multiple people agreeing, most offering the opinion that they wanted to like the game, but that it didn't run / there was no multiplayer as promised / it wasn't finished / constantly crashes etc. Just when it started to get really good, and mostl hopeful, it vanished underneath me (while clicking to go to page 3).

I thought the ol' Gamer's Bill of Rights gave customers the right to demand things, including refunds. Maybe just not in public where it might hurt sales.

Edit: and now they're deleting nearly as fast as I can click to read! Amazing customer support, that.

[Fikes]

Not only did I have a crash last night, but I had a BLUE SCREEN (Win XP)!

Over the past two years, I have maintained a pretty good job with pretty good income. I decided I was now an adult and could buy games and that I no longer supported the "full free demo" model. Capitalism, ho! I am now considering revisiting that purchase model…

This game is a pretty big letdown. It even runs slowly. What could possibly be eating resources when the map looks like shit (it is supposed to be barren, not look so shitty) and the game is TURN BASED. Nothing happens until you select "end turn".

The starting location thing is something almost all 4x games fall into. In MOO2 I had games where it took 2 fuel techs to find a habitable planet, in other games I was next door to an awesome world.

The description of using food to build houses and prestige to build people was pretty hilarious, but Civ has a similar system. Food adds up every turn and when it reaches a point your city grows. I agree that the game does a shit job of explaining things though.

I am trying to figure out what my plan is for the game at this point. The game runs really badly, even with the “0-day” patch, which came out at 12:05am on day 2 (this morning). Do I keep pressing on and suck as much fun out of it as I can or do I stop and give the developers a month?

Were frame rate not an issue I would probably enjoy it. Right now I can’t decide if it is fun or not.

[Tilla]

Most irritating oversight for me right now trying to play: Marriage. If your spouse dies before you have offspring, that's it, the end of your entire Dynasty. No option to remarry.

[nenjin]

I've had performance degradation over time (mostly noticeable when you hit end turn and units "skip" across the map) but overall my performance has been fine. And I'm even in that bracket of Win 7 64-bit, ATi users that supposedly have the most issues. So go figure.

The fanbois are ridiculous. I actually had one saying he couldn't believe my review of Elemental because it "has too much depth to fully cover in just two days."

It's amazing. It's like they have holocaust deniers syndrome, or something. Elemental isn't fucking rocket science. It isn't even a super deep game. I'm flabbergasted at how entrenched in denial their hardcore fans are.

[Granite26]

Is it just me, or is the tactical combat map SMALLER than the one in MoM?

[alway]

Most irritating oversight for me right now trying to play: Marriage. If your spouse dies before you have offspring, that's it, the end of your entire Dynasty. No option to remarry.

True, but it would seem the original progenitors of your dynasty are effectively immortal. Mine started and have remained 28 years; for comparison, their oldest daughter is about 25 years old. So while ya, there isn't a lineage to be had, you don't need to worry about dieing of old age as far as I can tell.

Also, it seems my above statement is now false; the game crashed on me after a tactical battle ended. Not too bad, considering I have played for about 6 hours today. Bug issues aside, I am enjoying it quite a bit; more than I enjoy most TBS games at least.

[GaelicVigil]

What I don't get is that for everyone who actually likes the game, they seem unable to explain why that is, in a logical way.  They say stuff like, "I played it for 3 hours last night and I had fun", but I haven't seen anyone actually convince me of how it is fun.

See it's not so much the bugs that are bothering me with this game.  Most games ship with bugs, some with more, some with less.  Some of the greatest games ever were incredibly buggy at release.  Daggerfall comes to mind, for example, but Daggerfall had some revolutionary, incredible features included that still make it fun today.  You felt like, "well once these bugs are fixed, this will be a really great game".  I don't see that with Elemental.

The problem is that even without the bugs, there is an enormous lack of coherent game design.  Some of the mechanics just don't seem to make sense and they don't work together well at all.  This is the kind of stuff that can't really be fixed with patches, because the problem is within the core foundation.  It seems like it was just thrown together as fast as possible with no real design direction and all just feels wrong somehow.

[Soulwynd]

I think I should quote myself from the old Elemental thread when I said I hated stardock and people were all like rabblerabblewhy.

Stardock happens to make games which get me excited about them, then utterly bored and disappointed a couple game plays later.

I was sort of hoping Elemental would turn that tide, but... After reading the last few pages...

[janekk]

Hmm... just when I though economic system after all is logical I think I found flaw. You need food output to support housing and the problem is food is "consumed" no matter if houses are occupied or vacant. Conclusion? Houses are the ones omnomnoming food.

[forsaken1111]

No, you are setting aside that food for the people who will live in the houses.