Was E:WoM ever truly finished?

No, buy the expansion this summer instead,

EWoM is a much more functional piece of software now than when first released, by which I mean it is less buggy.

It is also a better game. It is according to Frogboy the game he wanted it to be.

However it is not the game I wanted it to be. I don't think it ever will be, although I would be happy to be surprised. Simply put there isn't enough strategic depth or enough exciting fluff for it to be that game. A great game would have both, a decent game would have one or the other, but in my opinion EWoM currently still falls short in both departments.

Fallen Enchantress on the other hand I have high hopes for. It builds on the EWoM engine (which I have always been happy with) and the development is being lead by Derek Paxton who has a reputation for making a moderate amount of both exciting fluff and strategic depth in his Fall from Heaven Civ 4 mod.

Fingers crossed it could deliver on the original promise of Elemental.

The game has two big problems for me: Blandness and unbalanced. It is bland in story elements, bland in appearance, armor and weapons are pretty boring.  Tactical battles have no tactical depth, square flat battlefields, no ZOC, unlimited range on missile weapons and most spells, just too bland and simple.  Races and factions are boring, 10 nations and 6 are white humans.  Champions are boring, they are pretty much all the same, and their stats are meaningless, because gear is so much more important, that its less about who is wielding the sword, than what kind of sword it is.  All equals boring.  Gear is lord here.  Troops, heroes, it doesn't matter.  My warrior has a 20 str verses yours with a 10!  But I have a axe and you have a longsword...I'm doomed. 

Stardock games are never finished. Nor should they.

Now, with regards to War of Magic, it was always "finished".

The problem with it at release was twofold: Its underlying engine was incompatible with a significant (10% to 20%) of systems and two, it didn't provide a compelling gaming experience.  It tried to be too much and was simply overly ambitious.

A lot of people online make the mistake of assuming the most vocal people are representative of the majority. They're not. As difficult as it is for some people to believe, most people didn't have problems with v1.0 (not even talking v1.03which is the version we had on day 0).  It's just that if you even have 10% of 75,000 people having a problem, you're going to have a riot online.

How many posts would it take to give the impression that something is horribly broken? A dozen maybe? It doesn't take much.

However, at the same time, none of this absolves Stardock from its blunders.  Every game developer knows that a fail rate of >2% is a disaster.  Moreover, it doesn't absolve Stardock from the game play weaknesses.

With the benefit of many months to reevaluate the game design is boils down to this:

The game design was heavily strategic focused (building up a kingdom or empire) but the final game was much more tactically oriented (weapons, armor, etc.) which were originally supposed to be much more abstracted.

In the original concept, a lot of the gameplay focused on acquiring resources, producing resources and getting them around your kingdom. We had numerous early blogs about this.  But it was determined that this wasn't "fun" nor did go along with the "master of magic" meme very well. The problem was that the system, at the time, wasn't well suited to the tactical side of things. 

Anyway, people need to realize that something not being "fun" doesn't mean it's not finished. Some times, a given game is just not as good as it should be. I think we've all played games like that.

What makes Stardock games different is that they are labors of love for us.  So we keep improving them after release.  We can do this because we're a privately held company and we're our own publisher and distributor. Most companies can't do that.  So they'd have to just write off the game and move on.

For my .02 cents, aside from the graphics, it is an extremely different game now than it was at release.  Parts of it seem to be right were I hoped they would (city design and specialization, race and sovereign bonuses, wandering heroes) while others don't seem to have improved much at all (AI use of magic, AI tactical combat fail, water and harbors with little natural value).  Yet through it all I have seen steady improvement in a variety of areas, and an open line of communication between Stardock and everyone who is trying out the various beta builds.  I continue to play each beta to see for myself how the game is playing, and it's obvious that a lot is being attempted each time.  I don't know if EWOM will get to where I want it to be, but I am confident that the knowledge acquired from it will empower Fallen Enchantress to be an incredible game.  Since anyone who bought the game early enough gets FE for free, I see little need to complain about the current state of EWOM, Brad has issued a sufficient amount of "Mea Culpa's"  for any reasonable customer.

My take:

!. The game is more stable (v1.19h) on my machine than it was before.

2. I agree the city building, wandering heroes, etc are better now.

3. I also agree that magic needs some work.

4. The game needs more magic items to win and the ability to make them, more varied adventures (magic caves, etc),  and more player control at game start over number and difficulty of wandering creatures, as well as over frequency of special tiles (gold mines, iron, lost libraries, etc).

3. The game overall today is the type of game I enjoy and is fun - but it is not yet what it can be.

Based on Stardocks record to date I think the game will one day be very good indeed.

I'm not playing the game at the moment because of reasons already mentioned (blandness, lack of strategic depth). But I still hang around because I'm sure there will be a good Elemental game eventually. If that game is Fallen Enchantress or patch 1.3 or some mod remains to be seen.

It is very much still a work in progress imo.

I think EWOM will prove to be a great learning experience for the team and it will result in a superb FE release....here's hoping anyway!

No.

It neither provides a decent tactical combat engine, nor a compelling strategic challenge. Add a world that as it is encountered in the game is rather bland and you have the recipe for a game that doesn't even reach the glorified heights of mediocrity.

It is a crying shame, for it is the sort of game that screams that the good intentions are there, that the potential is significant, and that hard work has been done, but it has all failed to come together in delivering something that actually makes a good game.

That said, some of the most atrocious design decisions that plagued the game at release have been consigned to the abyss where they rightfully belong and the game is significantly less buggy. If you buy it now, I am pretty sure you'll get at least a week's worth of fun out of it as you investigate the game engine and if you are the sort of person who find it fun to download new patches and testing whether a game has fundamentally changed (I am), you'll have many hours of fun ahead of you. This may well be worth it to you as it is to me, in which case, go buy it. 

I just cannot recommend buying it now to anybody looking for a good game that provides an enjoyable playing experience, that's all.