Are we ready for Beta 2?

Not a bad idea. I'm willing to bet we'll have a Dev Post on the matter somewhere too though.

NO.

Beta 1Z is not adequate.

Oh great, Elemental's resident troll chimes in...

Definitely not. Many CTDs + other problems have been reported already, and the list will grow...

Almost... so close...

I like a whole bunch of the changes with 1Z. In particularly city building was much more interesting, with the introduction of pioneers and mini-buildings like gardens and such that I think will diversify cities a lot more. The different skin textures were also a welcome change. Many of the new traits are interesting, in particular those that provide unique weapons (although there needs to be a heck of a lot more negative ones).

In my opinion, the game is still just too unstable for Beta 2 (although still a ton better where we were). This is particularly evident when it came to city battles.  In my own game I had a strange bug that caused the game to crash. I attacked a sovereign in his home city and he was ejected out. Attacking him again resulted in him getting spat back into the city. And I repeated which eventually crashed the game. I was a little unsure of how I was actually going to win the game with the bouncing back and forth. I guess I should upload the crash to the bug reporting system.

Getting troops in and out of cities was also fiddly. Fiddly enough where it really ought to be fixed before beta 2.

There were also graphical glitches still present from beta 1a, like the border-twisting one when you build two towns next to each other, and ruins spawned over water.

Another reason I think we should hold off from Beta 2 is game balance. I know the game isn't supposed to be balanced right now, but currently I'm finding it really difficult to make it to mid-game or late-game without the game ending as everyone declares war on me and either my weak sovereign gets trounced or my strong sovereign trounces everyone. This is only a problem right now because it's hard to test late game and mid game elements.

Luckily, in my opinion, there isn't a whole lot more to do to make the game ready for Beta 2.

Everything should be fixed before we move on. That will take some time I guess.

While I'd like to see Beta 2, I'll have to agree with Trollboy this time. I've spent 2 hours on the Beta so far, and we are definitely not ready for multiplayer. Freezes and blank maps are a few of the bugs I've experienced so far.

There is a minor update that just went up a few minutes ago that fixes a bunch of issues caused by data updates not being taken into consideration. Should make things much more stable.

I'd say that's good news since I made it nearly 250 turns before CTD with original 1Z.

Update has made the game LESS stable. I used to be able to play for quite a while before crashing. Now I continually crash within the first 12 turns.

Well, to answer that fully you have to look at what their goals are for Beta 1. To get the foundations of basic gameplay mechanics. To make sure it's stable and running on as wide a range of systems as possible, and to make sure it just plain works.

For a "Game Mechanics" perspective, with what they wanted to accomplish with Beta 1, IMO, that part is ready.

Stability though, No, that part isn't ready.

Before we can proceed with a Proper Multiplayer Beta the game needs to be stable. We can't have it locking up and freezing during someone's turn. If they are going to allow Save Games to be made in the middle of multiplayer games then the saving and loading features need to work perfectly, which for some people they don't.

So when it comes to the final decision, if any of the goals of Beta 1 have not been met, then there's no choice but to say it's not ready.

When the stability issues have all been ironed out Then I think we'll be ready to head to the next step, Beta 2, the Multiplayer Beta. 

I'm getting the same thing. There's still a lot of weirdness when entering and leaving cities.

Hello, a new beta tester and pre-orderer here! First of all I have to say that the game seems very promising indeed! But the longest I've so far played without crashing has been 15 minutes in this beta released now So definitely a lot of work to be done before moving on. Hopefully I can help!

Thoughts after crashing out of my third game:

• Lots of little tweaks, many not for the better.
• It is too easy to miss that a town completed building something unlike the old pop-up scroll. I don't like wasting turns on empty build queues because I couldn't find the notice.
• My Sov is able to get her rear handed to her by spiders and bandits , even after finding a special weapon and combat speed ugprade. Getting to level 2 is tougher, but  maybe too much so.
• What do I have to do to make spell research progress?
• Aggressive AI!!!! Do they really have to declare war before they have an army a couple turns after meeting me? How do they even know what I have in defense?
• Can't train anything but peasants, but nothing tells me why....
• Still not seeing any quests even after researching the tech. Maybe I'm just not getting far enough in-game.
• Building goes real fast, though right now every building feels like a roadblock because there is so much game functionality I can't have till I've built a building. Really I can't even train peasants without a command post? Who ever thought making a farm hand fight for his own life would be so difficult.
• Towns might have been a bit snaky sometimes before, but now it seems they're ALWAYS VERY SQUARE. I'd take sometimes snaky over always square.
• The early game seems to involve a lot more micromanagement now. I don't mind, but it should be made more fun.
• Not seeing the fun of a global economy yet. Though I'm crashing too soon for my economy to get very large.

I love our customers.  Welcome to the fold!

Definably not. Even without CTD's the game certainly still /feels/ too loose, too buggy, and in general less 'tight' than even previous releases.

Still needs some tinkering.

Head over to the beta forum and submit those crash logs!

Looks like there's ANOTHER update. Half the issues we're running into have to do with getting all the new data files properly checked in.

That's good stuff. You guys are cranking out the mini updates fast. Thanks for all the last minute work

How do we get these micro-updates? I've checked through Impulse but it is not finding any updates.

 I had an update just a minute ago...

As for whether it is ready, I would agree that it is not. I got about 4 crashes in 4 hours. I hear that is a good deal better than before, but still not what I would consider stable (around the 1 crash per 10 hours is what I usually consider stable-ish). I would give it another week or two, even if it means I have to wait longer to see the shiny new graphics engine.

Indeed. Expect another update tomorrow afternoon.

Impulse still hasn't updated Elemental since the initial (1Z) update. I've checked for updates multiple times. Is there some secret that I don't know about?

So my guess is that since we are at 1Z (kind of implies the end of beta 1) that there will be no major gameplay changes to Beta 1 and all or almost all updates will be to get stability to the point that everyone (I mean 70%+ of everyone) can support moving to Beta 2. This is my guess, any comments on it's accuracy or lack thereof?