Not long ago he said they were ahead of schedule.  We will see...

Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Personally I wouldn't mind if its september. August has enough warm nights to spend otherwise than playing computergames. 

I'm pretty sure at this point the release is locked and they can't delay it. To be honest I'm not worried about content as much as I am with overall polish.

This may be a personal thing, but when I look at the UI in the latest HOMM and then at the UI in King's Bounty, I'd say a lot more care went into making the King's Bounty UI good and pleasant to look at. By contrast, HOMM's is functional and that's about all you can say for it. The same is currently true with Elemental. It gets the job done, but that's as much as I can say about it.

There are other minor polish issues that add up, too. Things like if you win you still have to end your turn before it shows you that you won because the engine evaluates everything at beginning of turn, not being able to exit from city build mode by clicking outside the city, weird options (even if I uncheck "Enable Music", it still plays until I uncheck "Enable Layered Music"), not being able to load a game in the middle of one...

So my main worry now is that they'll spend most of their time on content and the remaining features, and not have any to give the game the polish it needs.

Funny you should bring up King's Bounty

But seriously, I have to agree with you about the UI. It gets the job done, but beyond that, it's nothing special. Looking at some of the old screenshots from this interview: http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/06/15/interview-stardocks-brad-wardell-gives-us-an-elemental-update/ I actually thought they were new at first because the UI seemed more polished.

Do you not remember Hortz? Actually, now that I think about it, I don't remember you being in those discussions. He was a troll who basically thought King's Bounty could do no wrong and that Elemental should be exactly like it. He also claimed that good animations are more important than anything else in a game. He got banned, but since then comes back every now and then with a new account and makes the same claims. Here are his posts: https://forums.elementalgame.com/posts/3740155 And one of his alias' posts: https://forums.elementalgame.com/380624 Read a couple, they're quite funny.

EDIT: On topic, I agree, my suggestion would be to make the UI like the old on in those screens.

Many games end up with customizable UI that are pretty darn fancy/nice.  I expect the same of Elemental once you folks put your minds to it.

Good old Hortz....