I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for from the public beta, so I have just played it like a normal game, just with the expectations of bugs and crashes. I never played Elemental: WoM. I was excited when I first read about it. I loved MoM, and I thought a Stardock spiritual successor could be really fun, but after reading generally negative things on it after release, I skipped it (I skipped Civ 5 as well). I have tons of experience with Civ2, SMAC, Civ3, Galciv2, Civ4, Fall from Heaven, and various other strategy games, as well as ample RPG experience as well. Until I started playing FE, I was playing Skyrim and ME3 (and although 90% of ME3 was great, the ending killed all single player replayability for me). Although FE isn't perfect, it did cause me to put down ME3 multiplayer for a few weeks now.

I am playing on a low end HP desktop I bought for super cheap on black Friday. It has Windows 7 64 bit, an AMD E-300APU with Radeon HD Graphics 1.30 GHz, 3 GB Ram, and a 500 GB hdd. That being said, the game runs pretty well on my computer. I had to cut the AA down from 4x to 2x to be able to keep the game from running too sluggishly, but it runs pretty smoothly. One thing is that loading a saved game seems like it takes 3-5 minutes though. FE save games seem like they take longer than any other game I've ever played on PC to load a save. I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if it is by design, or if as the beta goes on the saves will load faster. I would recommend checking into this.

Beta 2 didn't catch my attention, and I didn't play a single game for more than like 30 turns. However, for me Beta 3 clicked, and I have played 1 .91 game to completion, 2 .92 games to completion, and 4-6 games through the early stages of the game. I play medium maps, with 5-6 opponents on average. I have tried a variety of map types, and a variety of monster/magic layouts. The first game I completed was on normal (i won), the second was on ridiculous (i lost), and the last was on hard (i won). I haven't played .93 yet, but I will provide more feedback when I do.

Ok enough back ground. 

In my first completed game (.91) I was Magnar of the Gilden on normal, with normal magic, normal resources, normal monsters, balanced/medium map. I decided to keep my taxes as low as possible, and to just expand like crazy. I built pioneers non stop, and didn't really worry about much else. I like to focus on my champions, and they were my main method of expansion. I built the occasional garrison unit, but my small band of champions went rampaging across the world.  Fairly early in the game I found mana blast, (at this point I didn't realize it came from a quest, I thought I researched it), and after that I was unstoppable. The AI's were fairly passive, and they didn't give me much of a problem. Late game I only had one AI opponent left, but he had a fairly large section of land to himself. A small bottleneck with a dragon separated us, and that is what kept him safe from me until the latter part of the game. I finally killed the dragon, and then went on a rampage. I just simply mana blasted his army out of existence (i had like 7k mana). I came across the Ice titan with a group of 3-4 of my second string heroes, and two mana blasts later he was dead. However, even after killing him, and everything in ice land, the wild land stayed wild. I think it was a bug. In that same game there was another wild lands filled with caves. After I had cleared out all of the caves, it ceased to be a wild lands, and I was free to settle it. There were a few AIs hiding on the frontiers of my empire, still technically at war with me, but they had no cities, or armies and weren't a threat. I built a couple of golems to patrol my kingdom, and I finished the games by building the towers and casting the spell.

Next game (.92) I played a custom trogg leader on ridiculous, with sparse magic, sparse resources, dense monsters, ravaged/medium. My customer leader was more geared to combat than Magnar, and I decided more on building up my main city instead of expanding. I recruited a few combat oriented heros, and I was doing ok. I captured a enemy city that had expanded to close to my eastern border. However, I could not capture the close by capital of New Perridan(sp?). Despite being early in the game, the AI had a huge defensive army, bested me. I managed to kill two powerful demons early on, by blinding them (and each time I gained 87 hit points), but I still wasn't able to conquer New Perridan. Playing as empire, I wasn't able to get any healers, and steal life is far inferior. Although I hung around for a while, the AI armies kept on getting larger, and finally, they just wore me down. I couldn't recruit a large enough hero army to defeat them, my trained soldiers were simply inferior, and I was boxed in to a 2 city position, with hardly any mana, no horses, or wargs, no gold, and I was eventually overwhelmed.

My last game (.92) I played as a combat oriented custom Altar leader on hard, with sparse magic, sparse resources, dense monsters, mountainous/medium. I decided to expand, but try to build my capital. I has cruel as my negative trait, and at first I was only able to recruit two administrator heroes. They both died a few times. However, I was able to quickly over run many of the AI's. I basically "won" the game fairly early on. However, I dragged it out, killing every monster on the map, doing every quest, researching every technology, and I finally killed Waerlogga the Dragonlord. Shortly before killing the Dragonlord I cleared out the fire wildlands, and had an extremely anticlimatic battle with the fire titan (pyre of man or something). I saw I was battling his army, but since he started in the first row with the other fire elementals, I couldn't even tell he was the elemental lord. I'm not even sure he was in the battle. Second game of killing everything in a wild land and nothing happening. My epic army of heros battling Waerlogga was fun, but it still wasn't that challenging.

For me .92 was far more stable than .91. I only had two instances where the game locked up (it didn't crash, it simply wouldn't go to the next turn), whereas I had several crashes with .91. The biggest thing I encountered with the game was a ton of UI issues. The health bars were often wrong in tactical battles, some of the icons were missing, sometimes from the strategic map, half of the UI stuff was missing.

The quests are good so far (not RPG quality yet but great for a 4x game).One problem for me though, is that there seems to be a very limited number of quests. Very few of them have interesting choices in them, so after a couple of games, it's starting to become redundant. One memorable quest was for a bottle of restoration. I gave the bottle to the butcherman, thinking he'd restore into a hero. Instead I had a useless butchman follower, but it was pretty cool. My favorite quests so far have been the multipart quests. The dragon eyes, the trail of the gammon(sp?), and I also loved the arena quest. I think the quest with the riddle was also quite inventive. I hope before the game ships, more quests get added to the game. Really, the quests and heroes are the best part of the game so far. While unit design is good, the battles themselves are a bit lackluster. Managing all of your cities is a pain right now, and since trained units haven't been truly necessary, it allows you to skip that section if you want. I would kill for a smart city govenor!!! I love the wild lands concept, but think it is bugged in execution.

One thing that I think is missing is the struggle to expand. In civ4, there was a struggle with the barbarians to expand. You push out, and they push back. FE would be perfect for this. I think the guardian monsters should be stronger, and they should spawn monsters far more often. For example, have a drake with a deadly army strength and every 4-8 turns he'd spawn a medium wandering monster, and like every 16-40 turns he'd spawn a strong wandering monster. All guardians should be at least strong or higher. Strong guardians would spawn weak and medium wandering monsters, deadly guardians would spawn medium and strong wandering monsters, and epic guadians would spawn strong and deadly wandering armies. It'd also be cool if they had a 2-3 ZoC, similar to an outpost or even a miniture wildlands, in order to prevent guardian popping/freeing like in .93. I think I should be battling with the monsters as much as the AI's. I also really think that outposts and cities besides the capital should have some kind of upkeep. I also liked Brad's idea to have outposts be upgradable with guards, expanded ZoC, etc.

I think that Heroes with admin abilities should automatically get 1 XP when stationed in a city, and it would be awesome if loremaster/merchant abilities added to the city's gildar/research when stationed in a city. In order to improve tactical battle, I think the maps should be bigger, there should be a time limit on the battle (24 turns? 30 turns?) so some fights could be stale mates, terrain should matter, and ranged weapons/spells, shouldn't be able to hit anywhere on the map for the most part.

Well that's all for now.