8,6 from me and a clear potenial for 9 and 10 with the upcoming expansions. I think this game is an instant classic and already better and richer in many ways compared to simular games that have legendary status today like the Heroes of Might and Magic-series, Age of Wonders and Masters of Magic.

I would think 8 to 8.5 for me, but I think anything above a 7.5 is fair and something for Stardock to be proud of.  I know you always shoot for 90 to 100, but any game that lands in the Metacritic green is an achievement  I think.  There are some polish issues, and I think all the races could have been fleshed out with things like special units.  The tactical combat is a negative to me, it's just not well designed, and although it has been greatly improved from WoM and even earlier FE versions, it's still mediocre in design.  But FE is a Strategy game first and foremost in an RPG setting, so the tactics part of the game is tertiary.  I like the look of the game, I like the play of the game, I like options and replay-ability of the game.  I think the biggest hits to the games score would be the tactical battles and the difficulty of early monsters rampages.The tactical battles being lacking in meaningful 3D environments,  having meaningful weapon ranges, having meaningful terrain, lacking ability to arrange armies pre-battle and  a very arbitrary auto-battle hurt the game. An the monsters are probably perceived as very difficult to deal with to a new player. A new player has a sov with a shit weapon, a couple of spells and no armor.  Every thing around it looks menacing and dangerous, and is.  It's hard to see the world conquering bad ass that Sov can quickly become from that perspective, and I bet a few people have been turned off from the game because of it.

I have a feeling that Elemental will gain in popularity over time.  Some games come and make a big splash and disappear  but I bet FE will gain and gain in popularity as more and more people hear about it and try it out.  It's really too bad there is no demo.  This really smart guy, named Jon Shafer, wrote a blog once about how important a Demo is to a game, someone at Stardock should take a look at it  I expect it's really, really important to a new IP, and massively important to an IP that's trying to improve it's image after a failure like WoM.

Brad actually stated in a thread on Steam a while back that there will be a demo, just not right away.

I actually disagree about the tactical combat.  It's reminiscent of MOO2 tactical combat, although in a typical one champion plus contingent army there aren't very many special abilities flying around.  I really need to have my champions join up for some battles, even if it does mean the XP income is less, because multi-champion fights are fun.  And totally unbalanced.

What I like about it is that not every battle is a simple 'Charge till you see the whites of their eyes' massacre, there are some tough battles to be had.  Blocking with shield units works, at least until they die horribly.  Units can resist your spells even on a very unlikely roll.  They can dodge arrows.  They can be resistant to your weapons and tough as nails.  They can be immune to magic completely.  Oops.  Fighting that monster wasn't such a good idea now, was it?

I agree with many here as well.  The biggest factor for me is magic.  It still doesnt seem magicky enough.  I guess I go by MoM which is the inspiration(among others) for this game.  The spells in that game were really neat and fun.  Yes some maybe were OP(then again that didnt bother me) but it made the game very neat.  There was a spell for Death magic that allowed zombies to join you every time a unit died.  I think you lost magic per unit you got this way, but it showed if you had devoted yourself to getting enough death books that you could get extreme spells.  Like with Chaos magic...that damn Armageddon spell making flipping volcanoes everywhere haha...hated that.   IMHO, thats what is kinda lacking here in the magic system.  I was also a big Artificer in that game and enjoyed crafting items for my champs.   

Still, the game has come allllllooonnnggg way from where it started and im very pleased with it.  I have yet to try out Stormworld, but want to.  Just Dl'd the mod manager but cant figure out how to dl mods with it...though im thinking maybe I DL the mod and then use the mod manager to install it maybe haha.  Also, the fact that they are making the game very mod able makes it very appealing to me.  When i was talking to Derek and he asked me if I was using any mods and told him "No, just changed a few XML files...does that make me a cheater?"  He laughed and said "its your game, you can play it how you want."  LOL made me feel better!!

True, but this has been said post-release, and I think we all can agree this release and that *other* release are a whole different animal.

8/10 for me. Its very good, but has potential for much more in the future. 

This is my only issue with FE.

Here comes a really grumpy rating...

7.5

I don't feel the game deserves better rating due to a few things, let me list them.

Numerous Bugs, and annoying ones too, some I feel breaks the game down due to stuff like AI ignoring the rules of the game.

Poor Interface, so many buttons are too small, not all information shown throughout the big chumps or poorly sorted unit stats, and some things like traits are just hard to get a proper overview over, save the tooltips not reflect the true potential of a long line of traits, tooltips also doesn't add up the value of 3 traits of the same name, but rather just put the trait on 3 times showing 3 values with the same name.

Disconnected Items, some of the game mechanics seem disconnected, some decisions I don't take for my empire, rather I take them because this hero over here have a need for more attention, you could remedy this by either making these choices important (different armour pieces, why are they here, they are not important but rather more annoying) you could break up chainmail into 2-3 different sets that have pros and cons, making these pieces worth choosing from, or you could just give me the "equip chainmail" option as the armour for my units, that might even save memory.

Weapons and Armour, I think the weapon-armour balance and placement in the tech tree is poorly thought-out, and is easily messed up by players who know the game mechanics, some weapons are just boring due to they're special abilities who are meant to work, doesn't really work (axes and maces comes to mind).

Diplomacy, diplomacy is a half-sewn, half-baked donkey brought up by mountain goats, all I have to say.

Tech Tree, the tech tree is not as interesting or interactive as I have a need for it to be, I "need" to dip in each separate tech selection to remain competitive, this kind of setup makes me feel the choices are taken away from me, and its more down to micro-management, "do I want axes now, or in 10 turns... oh what the hell, it doesn't really matter that much".

Sometime during the Beta testing, Stardock yelled out a motto, it was "Go big, or go home". They removed all the attributes like "Stength" due to this motto, since the Strength score wasn't important, it was the modules it affected that was important. The problem is, they only really had this motto during 1 month removing stuff, then they kind of forgot about it and left it there.
Well thats my grumpy post written while in pain for more grumpyness, enjoy

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Exactly, can second that. I fully realize it when i started to play Sean's mod - the choices in hero's leveling and some upgrades to cities suddenly made me say: yea! That's a progress! My hero is getting powerful! Choices are game changing again!

For me 8 is a fair score. I am bugged mostly by bugs, if you know what i mean. Tactical battles seeing some love would be nice improvement too.

I am not going to give a numeric rating, but I will offer a few observations:

I have never played a 4X game before this one, and I was a total beginner just last month.

I have over 350 hours into this game.

@jmccrea: I think the magic system is incredibly powerful.  Anecdotally: I just got done wiping fighting Kraxis on insane after extensive buildup on his part -- he had dozens of cities and a 6 digit number of gildars while I had something like 1000-ish.  And, in terms of his character, he had much higher health than I, much higher initiative than I, and much higher attack than I along with whatever bonuses insane gave him.  And, his armies were easily 10x better than mine.  And he did not have a chance largely because I had a better selection of spells than he did but also, to be fair, because of AI weaknesses).  Magic is incredibly powerful in this game... I was taking on average one city away from him per turn plus all of his relevant mobile armies, purely because of the magic system in this game.  (I also got most of my shards and about 80% of my current mana generation ability during my war with him, and I was within a turn or two of expending all of my mana during a large part of the war.)  Anyways, I think that I have reason to believe that the magic system in this game is powerful.

Anyways, this game certainly has room for improvement, but I have been enjoying it.

P.S. despite the thread title and the question posed in the opening post, I am not associated with stardock in any way (except by being a customer).

I don't think anyone actually answered the OP's question.  The answer is that Stardock thought the game was an 8.5.  Brad had made a post somewhere that they wouldn't release it until internally they felt like they had an 8.5.  Not surprisingly, Stardock was a little over-optimistic about their own game as Metacritic has it at 76.  A lot of us fanboys love the game and we play it like it is an 85, but to an unbiased reviewer it is about a 75 because there were several mechanics that were not totally fleshed out before release.

1.  Balance -- We were still making significant balance changes up through the very last Beta release.  In fact, they are still making significant balance changes.

2.  UI -- There were several aspects left undone.  There's no pre-movement trail even though this has been done in other games for years.  There's a lot of detail missing from the mini-map (think Gal Civ 2).  It's easy to get lost in the empire tree.  There's no way to repeat event notifications in case you missed one.  There's text that gets hidden behind other objects so you can't read it.  Not everything is in the Hiergamenon.  The Kingdom ledger is a mess.  It's hard to see the Essence semi-circles.  The level-up info isn't totally accurate or missing.  And so on....

3.  Diplomacy -- The Diplomacy system is in its infancy.  It's just barely there enough to allow you to trade some stuff at prices that make no sense (i.e. 1 influence = 100 gildar, sometimes 1 gildar = 2 gildar, etc.) and to allow you to declare war on each other.  Speaking of war, either everybody is at war with you or nobody is at war with you.  It's too easy to make allies. The AI will often speak to you and you are only presented with one response to give.

4.  AI -- We're still working out the buggy (cheating AI) issues (i.e. autocomplete its production queue, free research, can raze a city in 1 turn instead of 5, etc.).  To quote Brad, the AI is generally pretty good, but specifically kind of stupid.  That means the AI plays the game pretty well overall, but you will see them do some pretty stupid stuff which is true.  They aren't casting enough strategic spells yet.  They aren't casting enough fireballs and blizzards yet.  They still attack you with soloing champions or pioneer stacks of doom.   And if you believe all the forum threads, Monster AI will attack Player before Opponent AI.

Even fixing all that stuff is still probably not enough for an 85.  They could have left in the Legacy (get married and have babies) system in.  They could have left in the minor factions.  They could have done multi-player.  They could have spiced up tactical battles (I know they didn't want to).  A few of those things and their Metacritic average could have been in the 80s.

An 8 is a fair score- if you view this as a reboot.

As a sequel, I would be harsher.

This game has a great formula, but it's incomplete with some rough spots, and it would probably need 2 sequels to reach its potential.