I'd had enough of vanilla Civ by the third incarnation; nothing against it but had just had enough of it.  I bought the 'complete' edition of Civ 4 just for the mods, and will probably do the same with 5 a couple of years down the line.

Yeah, it's ridiculously terrible how spells work in FF 14. You can't even just tap the hotkey twice to get past it, you have to use another button like Enter (or click the target with the mouse again).

It's a PS3 game with a very bad PC port, and nothing more. The UI is terrible in every way.

I see your point, limited resources, can only buy one game.  Thankfully I dont have to make that choice, I can get both, and will.  Your situation though, I dont know how you can be truly convinced you made the right call without having played both games.

If I would have had to guess which one I would like the most, having never played either game, I would have gone with Elemental all the way.  Stardock?  Spiritual successor to MoM?  I would have paid $100 for that.

Now though?  I feel the opposite.  Its possible that after having played Civ 5 I will think Elemental is better.  I highly doubt it though.

Agree 100%

The problem with Panzer General-style combat in Civ5 is, that doesn't get very fun until you have fliers.   In Civ, the game is usually already decided by the time you build your first plane.

Whatever floats your boat.

Civ 5 is going to utterly and comletely own (upon release, not 6 months after release).  The game looks amazing.  Previews, videos, and user experiences have people gushing and this is with rough early preview builds.  Waiting these last 15 days til release is torture.

So far, Elemental is a let down.  I preordered, never really felt any hook to it during beta, played thru it several times in various patch states and ultimately the game isn't that great (on top of tons of issues).  It lacks the oomph of GalCiv2, which is a game I can still play and enjoy as much as civ.  GalCiv2 blows Elemental away completely.  Someday, hopefully Elemental will match GalCiv2's level of awesome.

If Civ5 is as broken as elemental when it comes out, I'll definitely give it a pass.  That would be a huge shame as I am big Civ fan.

"Why I chose Elemental over Civ 5"

I initially choose Elemental over Civ5 because I choose Impulse over steam (thats a whole other topic discussed in length elsewhere, so I won't get into here).  2k's handling of Civ reinforces my decision to abandon my most favored game.  Stardock as a publisher is everything that 2k is not.  From this gamers pov... 2k offers nothing while taking much.  Stardock dialogues with its costumers.  They give us timely status reports.  In my mind, the relationship between publisher and customer is one of respect.  Not so with 2k.  2k treats us as commodity.  I've had my fill of that.  Civ is a 2k title.  The king is dead (civ). Long live the King (Elemental).   

S

Sorry, but what?  I will every time go for the game that's polished and fun to play over a crappy one produced by my 'buddy'.  I don't really care if I'm treated like a commodity.  That's actually not necessarily a bad thing.  Isn't that how the market is supposed to work?

If you prefer a bad game and relationship, that's your choice.  I prefer a good game and a cold, distant business transaction.  Just my 2 cents.

I agree that Civ games get predictable, and after a while, not so much fun. For me the most fun of 4X is in the early exploring, expanding and exploiting. Beyond that, there is to much micro-management with all the cities and units, especially when flight comes into the game. So mostly, I quit Civ games before the modern era started, just to start a fresh one.

One of the major attractions of Elemental for me was when Brad Wardell told an interviewer the management of too many cities in games like Civ was tiresome to him as well. Elemental would work around this by having global pools of food and mining resources (outside of city tiles) instead of local ones. As a result, you wouldn't need that many cities. In practice, it doesn't quite work that way. I still find myself rushing to build cities to secure those precious resources on the map as early as possible and sensible, and ending up with too many cities again.

I am curious about the changes in Civ5 regarding the battle system but the core of the game will probably be the same as it always was. It's the downside of a game based on actual history as opposed to a fantasy setting. I'm not a big fan of fantasy and all their cliches of elfs, orcs, demons and the like (although Stardock has done well IMO by avoiding most of these cliches), but I will centainly keep my eyes open for new updates of Elemental because there's much more to be expected here.

I've never quite understood why games polarize so much. Why can't both titles be great? Games aren't monogamous relationships, you can guiltlessly enjoy more than one at a time!

"You have chosen poorly" - John McClaine (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom)

Yeah I don't know why there is a vs. mentality in general. I loved MoM, and I really enjoyed AoW, MOO and if everything told me I had to pick a side, I'd tell them to take a hike. AoW was great multiplayer too. On the Civ 5 vs Elemental front, well they are different games, and usually I would say you don't have to pick unless its a time or money issue, and even then if you pick one you might wind up with the other later on... But I would be very surprised if Civ released to the tune of 4 or 5's in terms of reviews and general response from teh gaming community. Sure the Civ series has bugs like other games, but I've never seen them so terrible as you couldn't actually play it version 1.0, and certainly not the UI complaints. Civ 5 should have a cleaner release and no need to tell all their customers to stick around for a year for it to get better. Plus, I found the Civ series to have a very nice and receptive fanbase. I thought that was here too but, oh wells, I've seen worse for other games too.

I am going with Civ 5, probably, I am going to wait like I did with Elemental to see how much is screwed up before I give anyone my money too. In a year from now, maybe Elemental. We'll see. There are a number of games coming up after all, always some on the horizon.