For me at least.
Been following Elemental since long before the beta started. Had a lot of hopes and wishes for the game, done a lot of belly aching and criticizing Stardock, right here.
And you know what? I'm somewhere in the middle of a good 2 day bender with the game. It's finally become fun for me! Don't get me wrong: It's still buggy. It still crashes. Stuff still doesn't always sync right. It's still got crazy pop-up window attack issues.
But damnit, it's fun! It's finally starting to meet its own potential. Maybe it's a lot of little balance issues are just finally jelling, and enough stuff is getting cleaned up that it's how it was intended to be.
Here's what's really worked for me in 1.09s:
-Monster spawns. Yeah, the higher end monsters seem a little scarce, and the monster pop is way down, probably incorrectly so. Still, having semi-large armies of monsters show up occasioanally to intelligently threaten a city or unit, that's fun. Hunting them down, getting a little loot, but not being OVERWHELMED the second you step outside your own lands. I think this is closer to how monster should have been than it's ever been.
-Population costs. I think tech and arcane T-1 research buildings are still a little too cheap. But other than that, everything else has a nice feel to the balance. I actually have run out of usable pop in this build. Once you get the concept that pop is global and not local, you can start gaming the system in a really fluid way. This is the best change that's happened to the game, and it's in the best form I've seen yet in 1.09s.
-Tech and Spell research pacing. Even with a lot of tech investment, once you hit 4 or 5, it really starts to slow down. It can be brutal and somewhat eh, if you dont have arcane temples and LLs, because you have to supplement a lot city built research. But once you have one or two nodes, the balance feels just about right.
-Combat mechanics. What I think should happen, based on the stats, is now happening far more often than it used to. That's a good sign. There's still some surprises and turn arounds.
-Tax rates. Assuming you have no gold mines, the balance feels good. How much you're getting is wildly dependent on your overhead, some cities turn into black holes of maintenance costs when they're small and aren't generating a lot of tax revenue, or have no structures backing them up. That's...that just feels right. Like forts cost money to run, right? That money has to come from somewhere. Little towns built on research don't make anything tangible, so they become a drain on your economy...unless they get big and you create an economy off them. There will be times and examples where the tax rate isn't working right, but by and large I think you guys have found the balance. As I step back and think about the flow of money and where it's coming from, and how I can screw with the system, it makes me realize the system has gotten quite deep.
-Spells. They're still not perfect. And I still haven't found a spell that just makes me go "Wow." BUT! There are many more interesting spells now! The escape spells...'scuse me...
Oh my god, thank you.
You guys are on the right track. Utility spells, spells that let us screw with the rules of the game world. Take the micro kinds of spell ideas you've had, like the difference between Teleport and Return, and start thinking about them in a gloabl sense. Contagion? That's neat. What about a GLOBAL contagion?
-Customization. I noticed when you edit info cards they update exactly to what the character has. Thanks so much. I've been wanting that forever!
-The AI. I'll just quote a vignette I posted on another forum:
So reading the power scale, the 2nd place player is Umbar. I decided I want to take him down a little, so I convince him to make war on Tarth, who is much weaker.
Turns out, he gets stronger by conquering a big fat Tarth city. And then I notice he's built a city at the mouth of a bay, right next to an Umberdoth pack....and I see his power level slowly creeping up every few seasons as he starts cranking them out.
This town also happens to cut me off from the entire rest of the world, without being in a state of war with Umbar.
To top it all off he's built a city in front of my wall o' cities, on a crystal deposit I didn't need. Still. Irritating.
So I line up a 4 part attack. One on the crystal city. One on the Tarth city he captured, one of the coastal Umberdoth city, and one for another big, but ultimately redundant, city in his main zone.
As my sovereign marches up the coast toward the Umberdoth city, I notice...an Umbar unit in the FoW....not just a unit...a small army that's been lurking at the edges of the continent, ready to pounce one exceptionally juicy city of mine. The unit proceeds to follow my sovereign, in lock-step, all the way to the Umberdoth city limits, where I then kill it and initiate the war.
And I walk away with 2 brand new cities, an umberdoth pack, and my dick literally in the face of his capital city. Then I go to the negotiating table, throw a little diplomatic capital at him, and he's like "Fine...." Considering in one stroke I chopped 25% of power out from under him, when we were neck 'n neck, he was pretty happy to negotiate on almost any terms. He wasn't begging me for peace by any means, but I'm hoping it was a subtle way of bowing out gracefully, and not just some stupid miscalculation on diplomatic capital.
Now, how's that for AI? I'm almost completely certain, prior to my act of war, he was on the verge of extorting me, and it seems like he was ready to target a very vulnerable, and highly opportune city (1 ancient temple, 1 warg pack, 2 twliight bees food resource, and a diplomatic view and field just north of the city.)
Did I mention he had a big army of Umberdoth's lurking in the FoW near the Umberdoth city, which I'm pretty sure was head to go nomnom on cities?
It could have gone differently had I not stuck it to him in the one place that was giving him a real competitive edge: the Umberdoths. Once I had that and a few punitive city stealing/razings for good measure, they're back in their place.
This is all at normal (which I've found pretty easy once you know how the building scheme works and hold out for a really good starting set up. In this case, my Arabian inspired Empire happened to land in the bread basket for the whole goddamn world, so life is good.) I could have steam rolled the AI ages ago, but I find it more fun to toy with them and see how Brad's AI is coming along. I rushed into army tech quickly, and since I'm the only player fielding 3 or more-sized squads, most stuff is piddly. Dumping a ton into magic has been helpful too, as you can still execute most piddly creatures with simple spells.)
-The AI work is really showing. The AI still tends to spew out cities rather than wait for the assured growth, but, they seem to be a lot more selective now about which nodes they prioritize. Food, of course, gets grabbed up, but not every single resource seems like it's important. It will get grabbed, eventually, but it seems like the AI actually has to find stuff now and goes "do I need another material site that bad? Nah, not right now." So well done.
-Music. I swear you guys add new music to this game constantly. I'm always hearing new tracks in the loops I don't remember hearing before. I think it's done out of house, yes? Whoever is doing it, I love their stuff.
All in all, you guys have made a fan of the game out of me again, with these last few epic series of patches. I'm getting the same kind of mindless "Oh my god can't stop playing it" sensation now as I did playing Gal Civ 2. Which I guess puts you guys ahead of schedule for how long it took a released product to eventually get that good 
If you're still reading here's a couple things that still aren't working so well:
-Items still feel pretty boring. But I'm sure you guys know that. There still doesn't feel like enough choice at the lower levels. As evidenced by the AI almost always opting for spears and other 2-handed weapons.
-The AI seems timid about building troop-sized units (3+). Only the top performers ever seem to make them. It's not that cost-prohibitive to make 3+ of lower level units.
-Level 2 and 3 goodie sites are totally out of hand. I don't know if that's been addressed yet in these builds or not, other than debugging it. I know it's a running joke. But I had no less than 20 of the things spawn with starting techs. The clustering, while intended to make sure players GET the goodies, makes for a boring world. You can safely know that not many sites will spawn out in the far edges of the world. You could do with 1/2 as many of the potion/book quests if they were good for more than 1 point a pop.
-Seems like all spells now take all your actions once you cast them in tactical? Well, you can still cast a spell with one action left. Not sure if that's intended or not, but it seems like an oversight.
-Spells are still way too effective under most circumstances, early game. With arcane arrow and spell blast, most weaker forces are trivial. Unless you guys want to play with variable spell damage again, there needs to be some other control on spell casting. I hoard mana, so I have plenty for just blasting monsters and enemy civs. There should be a little more chaos there than that.
-As I said, research still feels too easy to spam. I think an increasing cost on duplicates within a city should be in place. If nothing else, they should cost more population, so that your 3rd and 4th and 5th archivist costs more and more. Isn't that how RL research works anyways? You only get so much more benefit by throwing more people at the problem. If you want to know how bad it can get, just look at the AI's cities in 1.09s. They're choked with research to make up for the lack of it in the world, which leads them to build lots of redundant cities, whole metropolises built around crappy research.
-Resource clustering is pretty bad, and it seems like each game just declares "This is a world without X!" combined with "THIS IS A WORLD FILLED WITH Y!." Disclaimers: These are Elementerra generated maps, and I've only done a few dozen re-rolls and one really long game on 1.09s. But. This one game. Easily 12 Food spawns in my area of the world, about 1/4th of a 224 x 244 or something, and there's almost none. The AI is dying for lack of food. In the same cluster is also probably 1/2 the materials spawns, to the point there are clusters of 3 and 4. It's almost like there are unused player slots left on the map, and I had the good fortune to spawn next to them. Anyways, long story short, resource distribution still feels really off, unless food and materials are intended to be highly abundant now, and gold and metal super rare.
-The valuation of diplomatic capital still needs some more work. While the value of each point under normal circumstance seems ok (most people treat it as a 1, some put a high value on it), when I use it negotiate peace treaties to the end of wars, the value SKYROCKETS. Far higher than the value of resources they desperately need. It makes sense they'd value capital more when it's in the context of settling a war they want out of. Just not that much. For example, in the above story, (Umbar: ~75, Me: 110), his valuation of a peace treaty was, I think, 400. That cost me 4 diplomatic capital.
-Descendants are still being born freakishly strong, freakishly durable, ect...
And lastly, a couple of wishers for the future:
-It would be really nice to be able to do custom race skins, in some way, within the game and without modding. Just a simple skin tone slider, or perhaps the model generator under the Troop Designer could read the skin tone of the Soveriegn when it spits out combinations. I know that's probably more work that want to do, but with the archietecture half there from sovereign creator, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to add to one of the editors.
-I think Sovereigns should be int capped with spells, just to a lesser extent that everyone else. It's good that you have to WORK at being a spell caster, even if you're a sovereign. Int, while important to damage and performance of some spells, doesn't compare to just being able to cast teleport, or all the other dozen god-like spells. There's no other controls on spell use for a sovereign, it's just "how well does it perform?"
-Children should be innate casters, I think. The upkeep on stuff is still trivial across the board, 1, so unless there's a plan to have scaling costs to upkeep, there's no real reason ton not make children innate casters like your sovereign, is there?
-The change with seasons was nice. I think you guys need to go deeper. Divide up time even more. Seasons becomes weeks instead. 4 weeks to a month, x months to season. There are so many things you could do that play off this I won't go into them. But I think an even truer time scale would be cool. Because sometimes game don't even really heat up until 50 years after the founding.
***
So yeah, that was an epically long post. But I've done a lot of belly aching about the game and Stardock lately, and I thought I owed you guys some positive feedback. I've already done my ToD with Elemental, I've probably already put 60 hours into the game since buying it. But this is undeniably the most fun I've had with the game yet. Other than some of the still pretty rough patches that we all know about, if you guys stopped here, I think I could still safely tell people "Yes it's fun" without a **** load of qualifiers.
So great work, and keep it up. You guys have really worked your asses off these last few weeks and it's shown.
