Hey people, as I think Stardock deserves some praise and I want to share my experience so far with the Beta here is a short writeup. And possibly for all the people waiting for their invite lurking the forums.

Setup

I've played a game on the largest map available (large I guess) with my custom faction against all the 10 remaining factions. Difficulty all set to normal to get accustomed to Fallen Enchantress.

Gameplay

Fallen Enchantress caught me right from the beginning. The start, building time wise, is a bit slow which is fine as it gives my Sovereign the time to got and explore the wilderness and protect my city. I love those nice little videos explaining basic concepts of the game, I believe they will show beginners how everything works and they gave me a good overview of what's new in FE.

Going on I played this play a lot like an RPG and I had a boat load of fun doing this! So basically the army stayed home protecting my city whereas my 2 heroes were wandering the wild lands, killing monsters to keep my cities safe, doing fun quests, gathering a lot of loot and a lot of XP. I kept doing this until the late game. I had 2 hero parties that basically just wandered the lands searching for more heroes, killing of enemy heroes and leveling up.

Also expanding was fun. I liked the city building although there could be a bit more to it. I like the new level up bonusses (buildings you have to build).

The good

A short overview of things that struck my as the coolest

• The RPG-style in which I can play, I love tactical RPG battles and leveling up and equipping my heroes - although I was first worried about the new hero system but it's awesome. Also I liked the quests so far, I'm just scared that they will repeat themselves to soon.
• Outposts are simply awesome. I usually am a city spammer - I spammed them like hell. Normally I'd have 4 cities pretty quickly. In FE I made large chunks of the game with just 4 cities. One of my cities had about 6 outposts belonging to it - that was awesome. This way my cities feel really important and I care about each single one of them.
• I love the new system where faction prestige is shared among all cities for their growth - that makes that a lot more visible and gives me a good overview of when I can should expand
• The overall Elemental feeling - I'm a Sovereign and I build up my nation destroying everybody else - or trading with them.
• Performance. Didn't expect to see this up here did you? More in the section about performance but for an early Beta and my hardware I was pleasantly surprised.
• The Hiergamon or whatever that thing is called. It's got a ton of information.

The bad

Things that were suboptimal and many of them are already adressed in the upcoming patch. Keep in mind that this is a very early Beta. Also that balancing was a main target of this Beta.

• AI. I gotta say it, I overrun my first enemy after 57 turns without any problems. Perhaps I had too high hopes after all the first posts I read - I can remember one where it was said "AI at normal should survive at least 100 turns against me" and I believed it. After the new patch I will start a game on challenging and see how that goes. However I'm confident that this will steadily get better.
• The hero overpowerdness - lots has been said about this already although I probably didn't think of it as bad as others. However my heroes got way too strong and killed dragons etc. without them even touching my heroes. From what I see in the patch notes this has already been adressed, let's see how it goes.
• The UI is a bit far from what I want it to be - i still gotta open the suggestions but I'm kind of busy but will definitely do so. There is a lot to do, simple things that I believe can be implemented in a short time but that will make my gaming experience so much better.
• Some bugs - as expected there are bugs such as quest rewards  not given etc. but that's what Betas are there for - aren't they?

Performance

So I was pleasently surprised with this, I'm running FE on the following system (which I purchased mainly for programming/work/university):

• intel i5 2410M 2.3 GHZ
• 8GB RAM
• no dedicated graphics card (be however aware that the integrated graphics card of the second generation i cores have gotten pretty good (Starcraft 2? no problem )
• from an external HD (E-SATA)
• Widnows 7 64 bit

Of course I'm not running this thing with Anti Aliasing, a totally high resolution or anything. I'm still using my native desktop resolution (1366 x 768) - however stylized lightning is still enabled since that is simply the Elemental look. I can't give you fps (how can is see this?) but for me it feels fluent and pretty much playable even in late game - which surprised me kind of. Also I didn't have many crashes.

However there were still memory leaks but some are already fixed in the patch. And yeah it uses up to a 4GB working set on 64 bit systems (I've nearly been there once ).

Overall

After the big disappointment of Elemental: War of Magic (I played the most recent just before Christmas) Fallen Enchantress got me right from the start and to me feels like a lot more fun than War of Magic. I've been skeptical about quite a few changes: Heroes, tech trees, resources... but they all play out well. Keeping in mind that this is an early Beta and Brad said, that the release is still months away I'm very optimistic and eager to help with suggestions/bug reports. That said, Kudos to the Stardock team: Ally my 10 bug tickets in their tracker system have already been closed. The 0.76 changelog looks very promising and I will definitely my fun with it over the weekend for some time I guess. Keep it going and keep the suggestions/bug reports flowing. We can help Stardock make this game simply awesome!

Oh you came for the screen shots?

I really made most of my screen shots for bug reporting, but well some can not hurt, here you go: