It would be nice to get a tiny peek behind part of the screen. Its been awhile since a meaningful journal, expressing the current mindset of the devs, has been released.

I can see that, with the beta turning public, a lot of widespread (and sometimes conflicting) ideas are being introduced.

Therefore possibly, with a bit of (contemporary) communication, we might have a better idea of which of our ideas are useless and which are useful.

-> clearly things which are a complete change of the game are right out, but I feel that there is still a large gray area of how far we can press for change in certain areas while still being heard.

 -> If we know the sort of key words and key concepts that activate the mute button, we could perhaps trim and treat our ideas until they are fitting with what is considered 'acceptable' for this installation of Elemental.

And Example:

I think the two primary concerns with this build are 'glass cannons' and 'not enough uniqueness'

-> I think the unique-ness issue is of even greater concern than the 'glass cannon' issue, because being able to play every faction the same doesn't lead to a lot of replayability.

(examples of uniqueness. As an Empire, I have all these death spells to play with, but I might want to play a Kingdom game just to see how it feels to play with life magic instead. Kingdom/Empire is a real choice. Choosing Unending Legions is a real choice. I think we need more real choices.)

-------> While some may argue that Unending Legions is one of the best current civ traits, it (and death worship, and serpent's pact) really changes the way you play.

Death Worship and Serpents pact may add new toys later on, while Unending legion affects everything about the early game.

-> The choice between Unending Legion and Lucky is another good one I think, because you have to choose whether you want survivable soldiers or throwaway soldiers. Yes you can choose BOTH, but then you can't choose something like Enduring, Death Worship, or Serpents Pact.

There are currently some good examples of choices ... I just think we should have more of these relating to Race.

------------

Minor stat differences and Art is the only reason to choose between Quendar, Tarth, etc. Unique (functioning) races, and more choices for factions ... can lead to the wild Faction differences that we see in other games.

And I don't think we need invisible or flying units to do it either! (although stealth traits are fun )

That's creeping awfully close to 1.0. Probably a dumb question, but do you consider 1.0 a release candidate, or does that number not necessarily have any significance to release?

Or more polish awareness.

  Yes, with fixed AI, better difficulty choices, an a ton of bug fixes ... FE will be a decent game

I think the main focus right now should be to have Factions and Races more different (from an absolute mechanics perspective), to increase replayability.

More Uniqueness = (more) fun and replayability = a better game

Yeah... I hope their not planning to release it soon. While it is hands down WAY better them WoM. It's still no where near completion stage in my mind. Please don't release it until it's ready. I actually really want this one to succeed and become a classic.

Frogboy - thanks for the update - looking forward to .90

Actually even that's not for sure. If you look at minecraft the betas went up to 1.8

PLease put the quests back in!  I really miss the storytelling that comes with the quests, and right now they are all absent barring a few Deadly ones.

Mainly game balance issues.  Quick example - last beta we had stacks of doom, this beta we have spam mooks. 

There are still basic mechanisms which need work - pathing/movement for example.  Good work is being done here but we are far from finality.

Combat is far from balanced.

Faction differentiation is lacking.

Then we will need the bigger game balances - rush vs. turtling vs. something in between.  Civilisation vs. warfare vs. magic being more or less equally viable.

Also a balancing of the timing of progression across multiple interacting elements (think of HP increases, or certain techs being OPed at a given point in the game, or the potential spell effects with x number of shards; but things like growth rates or the relative speed to get to each of the victory conditions are also relevant).  We are not able to even investigate this at the moment since the early game is so unbalanced.

And a lot of 'AI' (what's intelligent about it... ) programming afterwards so that our opposition is something worthy of the name.

I've probably left out more than I've mentioned.

On the more general level I think Stardock need to be very careful with having a polished product this time around after the fiasco that was WoM.  Two high profile failures in a row is not good.  You can bet all the reviewers are going to mention WoM in the first breath too.