Honestly I would wait until Version 1.1 comes out. Most of the memory leaks are fixed already, expect some related to Win 7 64 and ATI Graphic Cards (at least I still get them from time to time). I'm not sure thought with the free mini expansions you would still get them, when buying the game that late (it should come out end of October).

You can also read a few forum posts to get a picture of the current state of the game...

Not yet, but if you buy before the patch that is to fix the game (1.1) the second expansion is free.

It still crashes with OOM errors on large maps after few turns in late games.

And no, its neither ATI nor 64 bit nor Vista. nVidia card, Win7.

I'm still in no hurry to jump in.

I'll probably wait until the 2nd expansion comes out at this point, nothing I've noticed so far is making me itchy to play and deal with crap AI and ongoing balancing issues.

I feel the same way about Civ5 for what that's worth

Just in case you didn't figure it out yet, you can rotate/tilt the camera in any way you want if you press and hold the middle mouse button.

Since elemental is *not* MoM2 I would guess you'd be disappointed if you were expecting MoM2.

As to whether or not you would enjoy it...  Well that's harder to answer.

I think I would enjoy Elemental for about 10 hours in it's present state, and then become disgusted by it.  I'm waiting until the AI is at least improved and the mechanics are rebalanced.  One thing I've found to hate, is when i jump into a new game, only to have core mechanics start getting overhauled as I play it.  Even when necessary, it just irks me that I 'wasted' time playing the inferior version.

*shrug*  to each their own, and yes, that means I typically wait until at least the 1st expansion before getting new games these days.

Yeah its fixed. Restart impulse.

I would say it is stable enough to have a "good time" playing. It will get much better as time goes by. If you know that you will eventually buy it when it is fixed, but BEFORE a price drop, then you may as well get it now and enjoy the freebe's Stardock is handing out for the "faithful" willing to endure a little hick-up here and there until it is polished.

That's why I bought it anyway.

Great game but not fixed. Come back after Xmas.

Wait a while longer.

Despite the Herculean bailing efforts by Stardock, it's still an incredibly spartan game insofar as features.  And with the most recent patch, it's become a very tedious game to play (with insanely overpriced sovereign equipment and a potential trickle of resources even late in the game).

I'm starting to regain faith that they'll pull a rabbit out of their proverbial hat(s) and polish this into a true gem, but it's a ways off.

Granted, if you buy now you get a free micro expansion (?) when it's released, but that's also down the road a bit.

i may have bought it already, but i no longer find it fun because some of the game mechanics are just bad. i'll persist through the patching process, but i'm not paying for anything until i know that the game is heading in the right direction.

I play large maps with a lot of opponents, so its no uncommon for my games to go more than 700 turns and I get crashes all the time at that point.  Its still a lot of fun though, but I don't think I can recommend it just yet.

I knew that right away, it just rotates the map instead of the camera.  I do some filming camera work so I want to be able to rotate the camera from its current location so I can create awesome looking shots without going insane.  Like an invert x-axis option for camera and center rotation at camera position option, that way you can fly around the map more intuitively.  Dawn of Discovery had a great camera in that way.

Thanks for the tip though