Having played the game for about six hours I thought it was time to put pen to paper and share my thoughts about the game.

First Impressions

The main issue I've encountered since playing is the lack of documentation and a comprehensive manual to explain what I am meant to be doing. My first couple of games were like stumbling in the dark! I won't linger on this though since there are loads of threads already detailing these issues.

I've also been suffering from crashes at the end of turns and whenever I alt-tab while playing the game. This isn't that surprising though considering I had the same issues with Gal Civ 2.

I think the main thing that distracts from the game's epic feel is the quality of the music and the sound which is solely lacking. While graphics are important they are nothing without good sound design and this game falls short in that area. I've detailed this further later in this post. Without this I feel it very difficult to become immersed in the game. Sins of a Solar Empire and Age of Wonders 2 are great examples of how good quality music supports a game.

The Good

1. The game world is interesting and looks fantastic especially when you restore life to areas over time.
2. I personally love the graphical style and the dynamic zoom is a good feature.
3. The generated maps are well designed.
4. The difficulty of the AI has been exactly what I expected on each difficulty level.
5. Modding tools are well designed and easy to use (from my limited use of them)
6. Cloth map is an awesome addition and I love the style.
7. The UI on the whole is very graceful and should get points for being minimalistic.
   

The Bad

1. The doesn't appear to be enough seperating the races from each other. They all seem to play and act the same way.
   
2. The music is uninspiring, not varied enough and sounds remarkably like it was lifted from Galactic Civilisations 2. It is no where near the quality of music from Age of Wonders 2 for example. I find myself turning off the in game music and playing the AoW2 soundtrack in the background instead.
   
3. Same goes for the sounds. All the units sound the same, die the same and have the same attack sounds. Not including more sounds is a massive oversight I feel and leaves the world lacking depth.
4. Campaign is not really a campaign and more a tutorial. I was quite excited to jump into the world and the lore but it seems that is not an option.
5. Magic system is currently underwhelming and spell books seem pointless other than to avoid having to research them later on. I was hoping more for a sphere system of magic instead where I could specialise in one style. At the moment there appears to be no way to specalise in a sphere other than to be fortunate enough to control a shard. There are also no mutually exlusive spheres like fire and water. The lack of depth in the magic system, and the lack of spells, damages the games replayability I feel.
6. Spell animations on my system do not fire consistantly and most of the time are invisible. Also the damage they deal seems to be completely random in some cases.
   
7. Spells effects are also duplicated in the spellbook (why does chain lightning work like blizzard? Lightning cloud might be a better phase) I assume because of shard control.
   

The Ugly (Bugs and things that don't make sense)

1. Text has a habit of either overflowing or being truntated on various screens and dialogs. Good example is the Fortifications technology. There should be a way I can get at the full text.
2. Faction editor is broken currently. Colour chooser seems to do nothing, can't change the colour of my people's clothes, tech trees broken - etc.
3. Unable to edit avatars once created forcing me to remake people everytime I want to tweak them.
4. Battles will not autoresolve unless you watch them on the stragatic map. Many times the turn will fail to advance because I have chosen to auto resolve a battle, the game jumps to another unit and the battling unit stays there in a state of limbo until I go to watch it smack the other guy down. No dialogs appear or anything when this happens so you just need to go through all your units to find the unit blocking the turn from ending.

Does anyone else feel the same way? I'll be especially interested in opinions about the music and sound.