This is on an i5/6850 with 8 gigs of ram in W7-64.

Played a small map with 3 AI. By the time I reached midgame, I had to play on the cloth map, otherwise responsiveness was just too sluggish to be playable. FPS was completely terrible.

This is also on a completely different computer than the one I played Elemental on.

Anyway, other than a few crashes and oddball glitches, the experience was mostly clean. Finished with an easy conquest victory on normal difficulty. Unlike Elemental at this point, the AI does seem to be functional, so presumably raising the difficulty should actually, well, raise the difficulty I'm not concerned about fine balance points at this stage, just if the game is in full working order as far as gameplay systems go - which it mostly seems to be.

I'll bump up the difficulty and experiment with other aspects of the game, but I'm reluctant to try a large/hard game experiment due to performance - playing on the cloth map only is not enjoyable.

I'm not at all thrilled about the UI. The abundant informative tooltips and clean writing are a welcome sight after the first game, but interface irritations abound, many of which I wrote up in exhaustive detail a full year and half ago - and they're still floating around. The game still feels really cludgy to play, which isn't fun in the least (see: https://forums.elementalgame.com/393693 - a lot of that is no longer directly relevant, and the images are long dead, but some of the major points are still the same problems, and that's not cool).

The core gameplay mechanics are solid, but running into the same performance issues with a more powerful machine on the same engine, beta or no, is not exactly appealing, neither is running into the same UI annoyances that plagued the first game.

Your response to beta feedback, suggestions, and criticism was very poor last time around, I'm waiting to see how you handle this beta (ie, is it purely a technical beta to shake out major systems bugs and crashes, or are you actually going to polish the game before releasing it).