Problem is, people tend to be VERY critical when playing a BRAND new game. Not only that, because of the lack of instructions (I personally have no problem with that), people post issues, which aren't really issues. They just don't know how to play the game. On bad AI...well, I think it can get better, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Like another post noted, there are a couple spots to change the difficulty. If you do it right, you will have a challenge. Giving a game a chance (ESPECIALLY any SD strat game) requires more than 20 minutes invested into it to truly "get" the game. People have been way quick to judge. "Oh I dont want to spend $50 on a game thats not finished". Those kind of quotes annoy me. People making those statements are probably people who've never bought a game on release day. EVERY game has its problems on release day, and with a small indie company like SD it's WAY harder to deal with. But you know what? They do it better than any other game company I have ever seen, and I've been playing games since Lode Runner on my old 8088.

Personally I love the game, from 1.01 and now into 1.05. Yes, the UI has a lot of room for improvement. Yes I have minor stability issues. (I occasionally have to alt-tab out and alt-tab back in to clear up little graphical oddities). Yes, the strategic spells could be more epic. But the bottom line is that I love the game as is. Fixing the things I mentioned will make it better, but its worth it right now IMHO.

  I find the AI to be pretty competent at the 'challenging' difficulty level, which makes the diplomacy very fun,
 which is a strong point for me.  AI can often suck in these kinds of games.

   I love the economic stuff, resources, etc, basically I love they way they have implemented all the usual 4x stuff. I really like the tactical battles to, strikes a good balance between complexity/depth and ease-of-play IMHO. Sure, the tactical battles could be more hard-core, but I don't want to spend an hour every time I have a battle. Good balance here IMHO.

** My biggest request for a UI enhancement would be a more robust 'foreign relations' screen. Where it shows the other players, I'd like too see my alliances and treaties and whatnot at a glance, instead of having to drill into each one to see that info. Also to see how each player is relating to the other, like in civ 4.

Overall I'm enjoying Elemental 1.05  more than civ 4, which is not something I would say lightly since I love me some civ.

My two cents is that you should not buy it now, no.  And before anyone else starts complaining, I own it myself.

The AI still sucks, even after a patch that fixed it quite a bit.  For example, the game I was playing this morning, an AI player declared war on me for no reason whatsoever (hadn't had any contact since the initial one), and then proceeded to do nothing.  No attacks, nothing.

Tactical battles are not well-implemented.  I was expecting the level of strategy you'd see in like Final Fantasy Tactics or something like that; that's certainly how it was presented.  Definitely not that level of depth.  There're still some UI issues as well, et. al.  Most of the "here's what's missing" posts in this thread are accurate to my experience.

It crashes for me on alt-tab ... and I have an nVidia card, so it's not limited to ATI contrary to what other people have been saying.

Stardock does have a good reputation for improving games, though, so I absolutely think it's worth checking back.

My initial impressions are here:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/392545

I say buy and play

Wait 2 months, come back here and then ask this question.

If I had it to do over again, I'd wait at least a month longer.  I'm coming from the non-beta tester crowd & tend to agree with stoicfaux's comments/research.

Super potential + Great company backing it = Great buy...in a little bit.

It's *going* to be an amazing game.  It isn't right now, for technical and gameplay flaws that degrade an incredibly promising core game. It was forced into release early, and there's no getting around that.  However, as someone familiar with Stardock's slavish dedication to improving and refining their games, and listening to community feedback, you couldn't pry this game out of my hands right now. It's still got tons to offer, and I know my feedback will be listened to and considered as the game improves over the following weeks. 

Would I recommend people without that degree of patience, or who aren't as familiar with Stardock's track record, buy the game out of the box right now?  No.  But check back in a month. 

Ironically I was alt+tabbing out to tell a friend about how things were a lot more stable when I got the alt+tab crash bug. C'est la vie. There's a known issue with ATI hardware there. But when I didn't alt+tab I had no problems anymore, so it is definitely improved since before the last patch.

I know I already posted, but the last game I just played had some neat stuff I think. I founded a city, went out to recruit some guys, got ambushed and nearly killed by a wandering thief.. imbued one of the guys I recruited to make him a caster (my sovereign is melee focused and has poor casting abilities).

Then I went to the item shop in my outpost and bought a stick. Went out and killed some stuff and did some quests while building up my town. Came back when it ranked up and the store had new and better pointy things. Bought myself a weapon upgrade, and went forth to lay waste to those damn bandits.

Also bought myself some boots to walk faster, and I have an ability that makes any unit my sovereign is with move at the sovereign's speed, so I can stack stuff into an army without getting slowed down. Found an enemy AI, and then I had the alt+tab thing.

So if what I was doing before the crash sounds fun, you'll probably enjoy yourself.

It seems like the only reason to buy the game now is if you really need to have it at this moment rather then later. If waiting is a reasonable option and your patient enough to do it, then it's pretty much a no brainer.

Based on the reviews we see on this site, the game may be fun to play right now, although not everyone is in agreement. However there is universal agreement that the game will be much more fun to play in a few months when it's had it's issues worked out. So given the choice between playing it now when it may be sort of fun, and playing it in the future when it will definitely be more fun, I know which option I'm going to pick.

Is the game worth buying now? It depends on you.

Do you scoff at artificial "intelligence" and prefer only to crush real humans? Yeah, multiplayer's not implemented yet, come back in a week at the soonest.

Do the words "learning curve" make you cringe and go back to playing Tetris? Yeah, you'd better wait another patch or two - Stardock is rapidly addressing the lack of tutorial/documentation/noob help, but it's not quite there yet.

Do you expect polished, balanced gameplay enough to make Blizzard jealous, or a challenging AI that would send GalCiv2's AI running and screaming for mommy? Oh man, you'd better wait a while. Don't get me wrong, they're working hard on it and it'll get there in time, but the game definitely needs quite a bit more polishing - come back in a month or two.

If you answered "no" to all of the above, it is a playable and very fun game, highly recommended to TBS veterans looking for something new and innovative, who don't insist on it being polished or intuitive just yet. But as good as the game is, it's only getting better with every patch, and we all have faith in Stardock to perfect it in time - so if you're at all unsure, just check back after a few more patches.

Or the complainers are always louder....I even wonder how many on here bashing it have the pirated version that they can't patch.

My 2 cents on ANY game I'm on the fence for: Wait for a demo.

$50 is a lot of money and if you're not sure about something, wait for a demo.