We all know that Stardock does excellent after-release support, with (sometimes very) rapid patching and fixes that make everyones life better in general. Truely, I believe that if you do not like their games, don't buy them. lol. As for Elemental, after finaly getting my hands on the 1.05 hotfix patch, I've had a total of one crashes, and that was for that 'Out of Memory' deal. Which, for me, is understable, sense I was also watching anime at the same time on my computer. XD Even with 4GBs of DDR3 memory, it was still a massive draw. Haha.
Another thing: I'm a big fan of turn-based strategy games, and on that end Elemental is fairly decent as it stands now. There are things that need fixing, but what game doesn't have a dozen+ things that could be fixed or made better? As for the massive ambitions of Brad and the entire Elemental team, I believe they can still make it work the way they invisioned. Even for Stardock, this undertaking was massive and often time frustrating, but now that the release is done and over with, they can become the company we all know and love again.
The one stickler I do have, is the map generation. As its been stated, the AI handles it about half-assed, often bunching up all sorts of resources close to one another, making everything crowded while messing with teh rest of the map. I really really really hope this is an issue that will be gotten to very fast. That being said, I still haven't even touched the campaign.
Note: I've gotten my characters essense all the way up to over 99, and the mana regen is only like 3 per turn out of battle. ><'' Shittttttty.