And that's pretty much where I stopped reading.  If you have to front-load your argument by claiming that anybody who disagrees with you is delusional then your argument isn't worth considering.

I agree with this. Now that I've had a few playthroughs and the newness has worn off I also think the game design, mechanics, balance and AI are all really bad. The game just isn't very much fun for me in its current state. There no challenge and most of the mechanics are pretty dull and unexciting.

I also have concluded that they made a mistake launching last week. To be fair, hindsight is 20/20 and I recognize that they had to make the call back in July to either launch or postpone 6 months. They may have genuinely thought they could get it to a reasonable state in time. They were wrong. I'm not going to beat them up for it, human beings make mistakes. But I do think I'm going to shelve the game for a few months and come back when it's more interesting.

And I am quite sure it will be a lot better by the end of the year. I can clearly see the potential here. In fact, I'd say the quality of the different aspects of the game are quite reflective of the amount of work put into it:

-The engine is amazing. Really they deserve top marks here. Very impressive engine they put together, I can see it having a long and fruitful life.

-The assets are good. Lots of quality models, textures, animations etc. Just a little bugginess to mar the experience, but no big deal. Lots of content for the modders in particular to appreciate here.

-The systems are fine. Nothing really mind blowing here that I can think of, but everything about as you'd expect for systems for this kind of game.

-The game itself is quite bad. No balance. Little AI. The design just isn't very compelling. Clearly the area they spent the least amount of time on and it shows.

The good news is that the problems with the game design are the easiest for the developers to fix. I'm expecting a pretty substantial overhaul of basically the whole thing over the next 6 months. If, on the other hand, the game engine itself was fundamentally flawed, then we'd have a real problem on our hands.

QFT.

WARNING - LOTS OF TEXT

I think a lot of the reasoning behind the "hate" in the forums is actually due to a select group of fanboys from the other side of the coin.

Those that have read my (very few) posts will know that I am unhappy with the game.  I am unhappy on many different levels: 

• Unhappy because I do not feel it currently lives up to its promised potential (this may change - it will get better - but I spent the last year or so hearing about how this would be the "spiritual successor to MoM" and now read that isn't supposed to be the case)
• Unhappy because I have an i7 PC with 9 gigs of Ram and the game turns into a slideshow every game I play after about 2 hours
• Unhappy because the game crashes - both randomly, as well as "Out of Memory" several times during a play session
• Unhappy because functions of the game that are required for a game of this sort to be smooth, and "fun" do not work as intended (Diplomacy, the entire tactical battle system, the AI, Magic, Shards)
• Unhappy because of balance issues - Heroes feeling worthless after turn 15 unless you imbue them and make them batteries for summons, and more
• Unhappy because of the botched release + gamer bill of rights + snarky CEO comments made me, as a consumer, feel betrayed

I could go on, with more little nitpicks about the game (I have expressed some in other posts where they were more on topic).

... but what REALLY infuriates me, is when I'm in a thread reading about legitimate complaints (usually in the ones about framerate slowdowns on PCs like my own - I'm there trying to find out if its being addressed, and/or if anyone has any temporary fixes) - and rabid fanboys rush in, usually the same 4-6 names - it is sad I can recognize them after a few days, isn't it? - and start shouting about how the game is perfect, there are no problems, people with problems are just stupid/not 4x game fans/extra stupid/liars/"haters"/etc.

There is a large community for this game, and I'm sure Stardock wants to keep growing that community - more customers makes them happy.  A good portion of that community is unhappy with the game (the one poll was close to a 50/50 split of disappointment and "like", although I felt the poll was flawed as those are not mutually exclusive - honestly, the people/things we LIKE are the people/things that can disappoint us easiest), and Stardock, for not only my short list above but countless of their own reasons due to Elemental and the release of the game.

The problem seems to arise because whenever a legitimate thread appears discussing game problems, a crack group (or group on crack?) of fanboys rushes in and starts wailing on the beehive of upset customers with a stick.  This draws in the true "haters", and the threads devolve into shouting matches and insults that only fuel the 10% crazy/a-hole people on either side of the equation.

Meanwhile, people like myself .. who wanted to like the game .. and want to read about good ideas to fix it, and especially want to read about fixes and patches and balanced issues (all my "I'm unhappy" from above) is going to be fixed ... we see others with our concerns getting punched in the face and screamed at by a group of insane people who either have low standards for a good game and what makes a 4x game "fun" or got a different game from their digital download that actually works and have functioning features.

I'll express my own inner workings on this and imagine yourself in my shoes:

I looked forward to this game.  I was excited by the advertisements in gaming magazines.  I told my friends who like MoM & Civ about the games.  I have sense gone back and told each of those friends to not purchase this game, as it is not what I was lead to believe it would be and is not "done" to the point where any of us would be happy with it.  Friends who purchased it (all dislike it as much, and a couple more so, than I do), I felt the need to apologize to, because they had the same complaints I did ... and I while I may personally feel stupid wasting $50 on a game that is not up to my standards, my standards are high and carry weight amongst my friends.  Suggesting Elemental was a mistake, I should have waited a few months ... I got caught up in the hype.

I am not a rabid Stardock fan - in fact, since I do not care for "space" based tactical games, I knew very little about Stardock before Elemental came out.  I therefore had no opinion on them before this, other than I have some friends that liked the "Sins" game so they knew who Stardock was.

I go through a lot of games looking for "the good ones" and play those on-and-off for years.  I played Elemental more than many people have since release (I spent the last week off from any outside commitments and figured I'd give the game I was excited to get a solid playing over, and I wanted to try and get a complete feel for the features and come give my thoughts/suggestions on the forum to fix issues). I do not find it "fun" in its current state - it "fills time" for me ... I do not feel "one more turn" ... I click it while watching television, or chatting to friends - I do not feel the game has depth at all after the initial "oh this is new" wears off - and I know admitting that makes me at odds with the company CEO himself and an army of crazed people here in the forum.

I have pretty much shelved Elemental, and while I know I'll drag it back out later and hope it "got better" it has already done enough damage to my opinion that I don't think I'll buy another Stardock product, and I definitely won't suggest one to others (quite the opposite actually - they're joining the list in my mind with Cryptic to avoid) unless they can wow me with something really groundbreaking and actually fun down the line.

I plan to stick around the forums, reading and leaving comments in the hopes that a patch reworks the entire game in a way that it becomes as enjoyable to me as other 4x games.  I actually borrowed Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic from a friend to try it out and am having a hundred times more fun with it just in the tutorial (wow an actual tutorial!) than I did in the 4 days of 8+hours of having Elemental run on my PC (when it wasn't crashing).

Sinful, I agree with you completely on point 1 about modding. I hate being told if I don't like it I should mod it too. Mods are great and all but I have no skills there myself and no interest in learning. If people make good mods for this game I'll eventually check them out, but I also expect a polished and fun base game from Stardock. You may be right with point 2 as well, I certainly hope the game is much much better by christmas, however the more I play the more I get the feeling making this a great game is going to take considerably longer than that. We shall see I guess.

Charon, Who are you to go around telling people their opinions are wrong?

I don't care much about bugs, I know those will be fixed and I haven't complained about any of them other than to report some in the tech support forum. What I care about is the fundamental game design and gameplay experience and I currently think in my opinion that it's pretty bad.

The tech trees are shallow, there aren't enough techs, they don't force you to make any meaningful choices, the likelyhood of being researchable mechanic isn't really adding to gameplay, and get a few lost libraries and some multiplier buildings and you have all the techs in no time.

The champion system is shallow, there are no meaninful choices, almost no interesting character abilities, all your heroes end up with the same high level armour and weapons with nothing to differentiate them. The only real choice is whether to imbue a few of them and make them casters or not.

The City building is decent. My only complaints here is there is a lot of micro once you get 10+ cities. Why is there no city overview screen where I can order units and buildings for all my cities at once? It's a pretty standard feature for this kind of game. Also the way population doesn't matter and it's all about multiplying resource nodes is odd. Taxing high pop cities and having other reasons to grow your population would be more interesting and make food the crucial resource it's supposed to be (it's not right now, it's really easy to get more than enough food). Also why is there no pop morale and revolt mechanic? This would seem crucial in particular for slowing down the momentum of warmongers who get all the benefits of capturing a city without any penalties to slow them down and force some consolidation.

The tactical battles are okay, but more intersting unit abilities would be nice to give the player more choices. Right now its just cast spells and shoot arrows from range and if the enemy gets close enough to engage in melee just have your units whack on them until its over. In most cases I'd rather just auto-resolve because the tactical battles feel like they are just a time sink and aren't very engaging.

The magic system feels dull. More interesting spells needed. Most are just different versions of exactly the same spell, e.g. the elemental damage spells. Also I think the biggest problem is that everyone can get exactly the same spells, no hard choices to make, there's even a tech that gives you three new spell books at once (why this isn't 3 techs I have no idea), with the minor exception of some minor differences between the life and death books. More mutually exclusive picks like this would be good I think, what the magic system needs is real differentiation between the books and to make it so you can't get everything, e.g if you take fire you can't take water and make the two books play significantly differently so it becomes an interesting choice.

Last but not least, the AI is bad. Really really bad. This for me is the biggest problem of all. I can forgive or ignore a lot of things to do with balance and game mechanics as long as I'm having fun, but with this AI providing no challenge whatsoever it's hard to stay interested. I've been playing my last few games with 9 ridiculous AIs and beating them is a cakewalk. Just one change alone that would do wonders in the short term to improve things (even though the AI would still be stupid) is to get rid of the soverign death = empire death mechanic since it's so easy to exploit. Not to mention I routinely see AI sovereigns suicide themselves solo against my cities. Then I just build some pioneers, grab their resources, and look for the next AI foolish enough to declare war on me. Really quite boring.

This whole situation reminds me a lot of the end of "The Dark Knight" And Brad Wardell = Harvey Dent.

Brad is the last 'White Knight' in all of Gotham (the gaming world) and I don't want to believe that he could have fallen like the rest.

If this game was put out by blizzard or bioware in such a state, I would likely be ripping into them much worse. But the fact is, I like Brad and his vision. When I read his dev journal about how hard it was to change a release date (almost impossible) after it had been set, I read between the lines and figured something like this might be coming. Still wasn't expecting it to be in this state though.

Despite all that, I remain a fan of Stardock and what they stand for. Everyone makes mistakes; let's just hope they aren't repeated.

Well said wall of text Sinful01, and I agree 100%, especially with the bit you quoted.  Frankly, I am not a member of this community, although I recognize a few people from other forums ( Hi Rune! ), but I came here because I was having trouble with the game.  And I am not talking minor problems, but the game is simply unplayable on both machines I have installed it on, including a beefy i7 like yours.  I am not quibling, or one of those ITS NOT 40 FPS!!! complainer types, the game literally is running at < 1 fps frame rates.  In the campaign, for example, when you meet the first NPC on the map, his bow animation takes about 6 seconds to complete.  This, simply put, is broken.

So I come to the forum looking to see if anyone has figured out a work around, perhaps a driver work around, or a setting that can be disabled.  I was dismayed to find the state of the community here.  You have a certain subset of people that are completely dismissive of all problems and frankly, these are the friendly ones.  Maybe I picked a bad time to come around, but this community is toxic enough that I highly doubt I will return.

I have a ton of hope for this game and have faith that Stardock will get it right in the end, but as it stands now both they ( Stardock ) and their fans have done a very bad job.

This is all reminding me of the first few weeks of Daggerfall, and we all know what happened to the company that created The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall. But even so, I can't help but feel somewhat distraught. I am not so naive as to expect a PC release from a (relatively) small developer to be devoid of bugs, but the breadth, wait and the money spent is wrenching at the moment for someone without much time or money. The fortunate thing is that I have experienced buggy products that have turned out claiming much of my time in the past, so I have patience tempered by the fact that THIS SH!T HAPPENS (To quote another post).

This is my first comment on any Stardock forum. (Long time lurker, first time poster)

Ghosting around reading a few posts in this forum and this just tickled my fancy. After playing through the campaign and the hardest difficulty(map and "AI") single player, on multiple map sizes and beating them without challenge in multiple ways. I must say I fail to see how a game that cannot challenge me regardless of bugs/balance issues does not utterly fail. Would love to hear from you how the game itself is not somehow "wrong" please tell me how I should be playing it if not to win/be challenged. Because I honest to god love games like this and I really want to have fun at it. So if some spell or tech path is amusing please tell me and I will listen.

I think people need to learn to research before purchasing a videogame. I learned this 15 years ago. Nothing is as advertised at launch unless your Blizzard. (lets not forget how bad WoW was at launch though.) It amazes me how many people blind buy games without even checking out the website, previews, forums, or early impressions. Then cry foul because its not what they expected. Doing these simple things will save you alot of grief and alot of money.

That is true.  However "I told you so" is a very justified attitude for a lot of people on this forum.  Elemental promised a lot of things that it failed to deliver, basic premises of game design.  Some examples.

A "living" world.  This implies a deep world, with a life of its own.  This point was reinforced with specific examples (independent group of adventurers going into a dungeon and coming out pursued by a dragon or somesuch) as well as an overarching theme provided by developer diaries and comments on the forum.  It had so much promise.  It may eventually live up to its promise.  Completely fails at this upon release.  The world is static, and almost entirely player driven.  This is not due to a lack of suggestions about how to make the world living (I've seen plenty and voiced a number myself), nor is it due to a lack of concern on the part of the beta testers (once again, I've seen plenty, and voiced plenty myself).  This is an entirely Stardock failure to actually make this a focus.

A finished game.  Stardock doesn't need the money.  There is no hurry to release.  If the game isn't done we won't put it out.  These were all things said on a regular basis by the developers.  Clearly that is not the case, as it is nowhere near a finished game.  Normally patches refine a game.  Sadly, patches must complete this game.  I purchase a lot of paradox interactive games and have come to expect it from them.  Not a problem, because no one offers more strategic depth than their Europa Universalis and HOI/Vicky series, and they never really claim to produce finished games, but normally by the first/second expansion they are very good.  I love the two galcivs and Sins (although I know Sins wasn't a "Stardock" game entirely)  But, that being said, they promised on numerous occasions to not do what they did, which was deliver an unfinished product.  If you fail at something promised numerous times, you need to expect a lot of backlash.  Hopefully proper lessons are derived about this for next time.  Better a delayed release date than one founded on unrealistic expectations with what is essentially a gameplay beta.  There were a lot, probably a majority, of posters who voiced concerns about the state of the game prior to the release.  I did not, as I was willing to give Stardock the benefit of the doubt when they asked for it (in oftentimes very dismissive terms, as shown in quotes above).  Given that those concerns were completely warranted, and my trust in Stardock a bit misplaced, I'd say a little bit of humility on their part is in order.

A deep game.  Spiritual successor to MoM.  People say that others were wrong to expect this.  That is a load of crap.  This is a comparison that Stardock itself promoted.  See my point immediately above about broken promises.  This wasn't a promise on Stardocks behalf, but it was an expectation that they did their best to raise.  Nobody should be surprised if people are disappointed.  Tactical combat, magic system, world depth, design processes, city building... none of this lived up to expectations generated by Stardock itself.  Tactical combat was supposed to be X-Com meets Total War.  City building was supposed to be meaningful and limits on city spam reduce the "blobbing" habit of most games.  A Dynasty system that was implied would create new paths to victory and add layers to diplomacy.  Players were supposed to make meaningful choices when it came to all of these things.  All of this was stated numerous times as design premises.  They all held a lot of promise.  None were implemented effectively. 

Now.  With all that being said.  I spent as much time as I could (given that I've been deployed) over the last year making suggestions that I felt would improve the game, most of them, incidently, revolving around where the game is most lacking (depth).  There are a lot of things that can be relatively easily added to create depth in addition to the necessary polish, much of which has already gone into improvement and idea threads (the ones I'm referring to were all discussed at length in the community prior to release).  A number of mods will be created once basic gameplay improves and things are a bit more opened up to significant modding, that will probably show new limits of mods that become games of themselves (a la Fall From Heaven).  I AM willing to wait and continue to offer suggestions for improving that depth, and once the game becomes more workable to do a little bit of modding myself.  That is a testiment to the quality of the company that Stardock is and has shown themselves to be... I have a lot of faith that they will try and do the right thing and fix the game that they released. 

This should be a painful lesson for Stardock.  The best lessons usually are painful.  Good organizations (of which I very much count Stardock), roll with the painful lessons, learn as much as they can from them, and then drive on.  People who jump down others' throats to defend Stardock from any criticism, as I have seen quite frequently lately, are not doing anyone any favors.  Not the community (as you alienate a lot of potentially good contributors and poison the atmosphere of the forums), not the company (who often will feel inclined to use that unquestioning support as validation of their extremely flawed product), and not the game (since a lot of these people are making thoughtful critiques of what they find wrong with the game and overall this gives a good idea of the conceptual ideas that many players want fixed... shutting them out is not helping anyone fix the game).  Thus far, on this thread at least, pretty much all of the criticism I have read has been thoughtful and justified complaints and concerns... not vicious.  There has been a few unpleasant "screw you" style of responses to that criticism though.  As someone who has done their best to be a contributing member to the development of this game for quite a while and who wishes to see this game succeed, that really needs to stop.  Some people commenting unfavorably are idiots.  Most are people who had their expectations raised and then dashed.  That is always unpleasant.  They need to be listened to, not talked down to.