If you had read the article you linked to, you'd see those drivers stopped the fan controls from working correctly and nerfed the cooling capabilities.  

Yeah, a recall can hardly be described as "working properly". (It's kind of sad that Nvidia's driver quality has been lousy for so long. Just bought my first ATI powered video card in nearly a decade.)

On a more serious note - at what point can we go back to talking about the release date? The last thread on the subject said you aimed to have the game "completed" by July 16 to make an August 4 "gold" date. But since this build doesn't have tactical battles, we're not going to see those until... July 15? At the earliest? One day before the "complete" date?

That schedule doesn't sound at all realistic.

You make a very good point.

Best regards,
Steven. 

I've thought about that quite a bit too, my friend. I figure it could go one of a few ways.

A ) It will be Awesome so we probably won't have anything to worry about or nothing that can't be changed through Modding.

Or.. (I feel I should mention the next example is the decidedly Less Likely of the two)

B ) They are doing that on purpose so we won't get a chance to complain about things that need changing..LoL. Then again we already know there will be a launch day patch and some things are going to get tweaked and changed anyway between the "Gold Date" and the Actual "Launch Date".

Honestly, what I'd like to know is how close will our final beta version be to the version that is sent to make the Gold date? The way I see it we've all already paid for the game, so what's the logic behind not giving us access to the Gold version when it's ready? Call me Mr. Impatient but I want to dig in and start some Serious Modding. I have much to do and precious little time to do it in.

This is the thing I don't like about distributors and digital download systems. Some bad developers like EA or smaller indie companies that routinely put out sub-par games can rely on these services to let them "Patch" or fix bugs at any time automatically. This means they can purposefully rush the release of a game that most other Devs and Players alike would say is "Un-Finished". EA can do that full well knowing they can drastically alter the "Gold Date" version of the game between the time it goes Gold and Actually Ships/Launches. I can't think of an example of a game that's done this lately but I'm sure we can all think of some games and companies that have done it in the past. Of course I Don't think Stardock would do something like that. If I thought they would I wouldn't have spent my hard earned money buying their games and software. They have a good track record for putting out quality products on the first run through. Also there's a Big Difference between having a Launch Day Patch that Actually Fixes  Bugs and one that Completes The Game Because of Rushed Development.

Once again: For those of you new to Stardock betas, what we provide to the public beta testers is not necessarily what we have internally. We have been doing this for over 15 years.  Thank you for your concern.

In addition, July 16 is our feature lock date. Not our gold date.  After July 16th, it's all bug fixes and polish.

If you're certain the game just won't be ready, you are free to hold off on playing it. 

I think that the release date is set in stone. Just take a look at this reply by Froggie. This is the key sentence: "As of July 1st, the game is running approximately 55 engineering hours ahead of development schedule."

*EDIT*

Ooops, somehow I've missed Froggie's latest reply, which was posted right before my reply.

I just wanted to point out that even a problematic driver can cause overheating problems [..even if your GFX card & fan(s) are operating perfectly].

frogboy, perhaps one idea for the pioneer issue might be for the exploring units to plant a marker post next to a resource as they find it  and have the pioneer go to the nearest marker outside the minimum distance from an existing outpost/town/city to build the outpost, this would help to simplify the pioneer system, but at the expense of another function in the explore function.

harpo

No worries chief, if you say it's done I'll be ready and willing to play  . I'm challenging you to a game of multi-player

Haha, count me in as well!  Btw I am not worried about this release date stuff, because even if we gonna have some bugs in the retail version, those will be fixed in the first patch...not to mention that we can start to work on mods in August instead of 2011!

I'm curious how far ahead of the public beta your internal build is. Do you have tactical battles working? The improved UI? The full tech trees and all the buildings/units/creatures implemented?

Well all I'm gonna say is I hope the Empires in Beta 3a have the ability to increase their spell points & mana, so they can use the higher-tier spells, because playing the Empire factions in Beta 3 is just painful.

So assuming we get tactical battles July 15, the earliest the modding beta could be is a week after that... and that's assuming things go smoothly. That'd leave a couple of weeks before your "gold" date of August 4.

I hope to be proven wrong. I really do. But a week of beta for tactical battles and every other victory condition, then 2 weeks for modding isn't exactly confidence inspiring.

(As for not playing it... I intend to play it as soon as I've got a build where I don't wind up wandering around for 20 minutes at the start of the game in order to find any resource that isn't an Ice Shard. So hopefully tomorrow. )

We've had tactical battles working for months. We've had screenshots of them for a long time. The main change is we switched from RTS to turn based which was a pretty dramatic change which required a lot more polish time and ditching the preliminary AI.

Other things, such as improving UI, all fall under polish.

The problem (And a growing frustration of mine to be honest)  having no idea what is hard to do and what is easy to do. 

The ONLY feature you guys should be worrying about is the computer AI. 

I think you mean "The only feature I should be worrying about is the computer AI" We aren't writing it, you are. If bugging the shit out of you to make it better helps though, just say so

well then im only happy since i dont care of ai and prefer playing against humans

well imo thats completely arguable

its not like i dont trust frogboy but this is  a software not a house

its not like you can say "we miss 55 bricks to the ceiling" or "we miss 2 floors" and you can calculate exactly

a software is much more unpredictable, you can end up working N hours on a problem you couldnt predict, also since a game is also creativity you cant really predict how much creativity work is needed to "complete" the game

I guess a large part of our confusion comes from the fact that you guys can apparently do some things much easier than other developers and you put a lot more time and effort into other things. Suggest adding a feature like spell levels to another developer 2 months before launch and they'll have a heart attack on the spot.

I'm always worried about everything. You might as well advise me to stop breathing.

you shouldnt be so harsh since many of us already bought the game and i think we deserve respect

16th july as feature lock looks scary to many of us since the beta we saw doesnt really look complete

i can understand our beta is behind your beta but still then there will be not much test on core features teh game miss, like magic system, diplomacy, combats and basically all the game

you should understand most ppl here is not complaining cause they are jerks but cause we all want to improve this game and see it out the best he can, while sometimes you react to criticism like we are trying to sabotage the game

its not fair

my 2 cents

To be fair, "This game isn't going to be ready!!" isn't actually helping to improve the game. If you want to improve it, keep posting ideas and suggestions.

No, but it is posted by people who care. A much worse situation would be everybody shrugging and not caring about things being ready in time because the plan is to play Civ 5 anyway.

Of the two, an occasionally annoying but concerned playerbase is the better one.

Sure, but it also doesn't do anything. The date is set. It can't be changed. I've got things I'm worried about too, but there's nothing anyone can do about the date.

I'm worried this game is holding up any further Sins content.

Seems to me, from what testing I've done, that the AI is causing a large load on overall game play. Last testing interation I went through, I had a drake on the map that simply kept walking around the map outside of turn based clicks. Once killed, lightened up the cpu load conciderably and smoothed out game play. Speaking of which, I noticed that your video only showed very little end of turn movement. This is where I had most of my difficulties, some with scrolling in and out but little there. Is this what you are fixing with 3A?

and why not?

in their opinion the game ISNT actually going to be ready

so what they are trying to help is sharing their thought

OFC they can be wrong

i hope they are wrong

we all hope they are

but in their opinion they arent wrong, they think the game need more time, and giving the game more time would actualyl help the game, IF they are right