After the release, I took a bit of time away from the game to see how the faults were resolved.  While many of the bugs are gone, the gameplay faults remain, and some ones have popped up as well.

First, resources.  As a player, you can't live without certain resources.  Namely food, knowledge points, and gildars.  Arcane points also get really important once you start dabbling in magic.  Right now you can only create little 1 point buildings for these items, and the rest have to be found in resources.  However, since you can't live without these essentials, it has gotten to the point where in order to have balance, the developers are having to put sources of each next to every player, and make them extremely available as resources on the ground.  This is the wrong answer.  There shouldn't be that many "lost libraries."  Actually, there should only be a couple.  Finding one should be a big deal.  Same thing with gold mines.  A lot of these resources should be finds that are very important because they flood you with a certain type of resource, therefore turning that into a gameplay strength (finding two gold mines finances your expansion much like it did for Dacia in the Roman era and the Hapsburgs in the 16th Century), not merely giving you what you need to survive.  The solution is to have single, one time buildings for certain things.  You have an "Imperial Center" that is only located in one city that generates a few research points and magnifies the research point generation of your thinkers.  Something similar for your arcane knowledge generation.  Gildar production can now be very much tied to trade and population, with trade being a bit more weighted than population.  A gold mine is a big (but rare) find, and helps your financial situation out a great deal, but your bread and butter should be the taxes that you take from your people and trade.  Caravans generate food, gildars, and bonuses of whatever goods the cities they are trading with produce.  That should, with focus, make small trading nations viable.  My point is, resources on the map should be good, some very common ones (like food and materials) should be essential, but the bulk of the resources physically located on the map should be gameplay enhancing to have, not gameplay breaking to not have.

Second, gameplay.  Boring, gameplay.  This game has so much potential, but there really needs to be a living world.  I've been saying this since very early in the beta process, and I will say it again.... and I will continue saying it until it happens.  The characters need more life to them.  They need to be important.  They need to be doing things on their own.  As a ruler of a kingdom you need to be one part of the world, with lots of events going on around you that you have no control over.  Adventurers, merchants, mercenaries, bandit lords and knightly/priestly orders all need to be present and INTERACTING and DEVELOPING with you (and your AI neighbors, and each other) and in your absence as well!  Complex interactions with NPC's and minor factions that are not cities (like an adventurer band, or a rich merchant) are extremely important to making a living world, which is extremely important to having a fun game!  This is what seemed like was originally planned based on the early developer diaries, and it got lost along the way.  I really want elemental to succeed, but right now it is extremely boring to play.  To be fun, you need to be immersed in the game, and to do that there needs to be a living world that you as the player feel a part of.  This is not an option!  This is not the first time (or the second, or the third) I've said this, and I am going to keep hammering this home.  Gameplay has to be interesting and immersive, and the promise early on in the design process was to do that via a living world.  This world is nowhere close to living right now.  It's just there.  A "living" world is one of the reasons why Fall From Heaven was such a popular mod for Civ 4.  This needs to be brought to elemental.  Since it has been said that each NPC character has its own AI I know this CAN happen, it really, really needs to.  This game desperately needs soul.

And finally, third, tactical battles.  I'm not going to talk about magic right now, since magic is undergoing an overhaul that we haven't seen yet.  I don't know how that will play out.  But tactical battles need serious love.  right now they are pointless.  In Total War, you seek to break the enemy army.  It is good gameplay, it is fun, it usually means something.  In  Dominions 3, it is the same thing, except you don't have control over the battle once you unleash your armies.  Still, tactical battles are a lot of fun to plan, and the magic integration into them is fantastic.  And once again, the object is to break and kill the enemy army, which is something you orient your magic and troop positioning for.  The combat model is deep.  In X-Com you have a very detailed, interesting small unit type of battle.  Once again, a very deep model for tactical combat, albiet very different than the previous ones I've mentioned.  But you have attachment to each of your soldiers, especially as they gradually improve their experience and stats.  Losing a good soldier hurts, especially if you've put a lot of expensive weaponry on them.  Elemental has no deep tactical model.  It is like it took aspects of them, and never really tied them all together or made any of them meaningful to the outcome.  The morale system is tacked on and unimportant.  The combat system simply doesn't give me a feel for any of the combat.  There is no obvious consequences for where I place my troops or how I manuever my units.  It is a tech game.  Whomever goes in with the best equipment and spells wins.  Very simple.  Way too simple.  So simple that there is no point to bothering with it.  There needs to be much, much more sophistication to the combat model.  It needs to be meaningful.  I've read developers say things to the effect of "we wanted a simple combat model, we didn't want anything complex."  Wrong answer.  You can have a KISS combat model, but it needs to be meaningful.  If it is too simple, where it is at right now, it doesn't matter what you the player does, and you have no attachment to anything that is going on.  Worrying about having your soldiers break and run before that flank attack hits the enemy is what makes tactical battles fun.  Getting upset that the squad leader you've been developing for the past three hours got wacked by a massive monster is what make games like that fun.  There is no such suspense, no worry, no feeling that any of the creatures or people fighting are alive.  Once again, immersion and soul are missing.

I have not gone into detail with this post as much as I usually do.  That is because everything I've said along the exact same lines as this in the past (from early beta till now) has been largely ignored or unincorporated.  That is fine, I am not a developer, and they are not obligated to take any of my advice.  That being said, I want this game to succeed.  These are things it HAS to change in order to succeed and be fun.  I'm going to continue to keep an eye on it, but it is getting put away again until some progress starts to be made, or extensive modifications to the core game start becoming possible.  Because right now it is not fun.