well, the optimal time is now, since the game is out. You can hint at the possibility of a vastly improved game in the future, but if a game is presenting itself on a shelf and in an online shop, game reviewers have to review it to let potential customers know about the current stage.

When is a good time to review a game in general?  The second they ask for money and offer the game to play.

When is a good time to review Elemental?  Who knows, but one thing is for sure, if it's going to be reviewed now it won't fair that well. 

This.

In some cases it takes a few days for reviewers to truly give a game some time, depending on when they get copies to review, and in some genres reviews are held back til extensive gameplay occurs (like with MMOs, for ex, since it takes days/weeks to get a feel for an MMO unless, like most, it's obvious dookie).

You know as much as I like SD and I do  see EWOM`s potential, I am bit surprised by all the Brad worship. Had this been Blizzard, Firaxis, Valve or even Bioware and had they released a game in this condition, their day one reviews would have been very bad, vicious even,  but less tentative. It seems that the is a bit of a `Poor wittddle Bwad`s game faww down - puir thing.. lets give the widdle guy more time, okies. Seriously if SC2 had been this glitchy everyone and their`brothers dog would be savaging Blizzard (ie recall the NO-LAN decision).  I have also seen other indie devs get scathing reviews for glitchy games both online and in the rags. In contrast, SD is getting serious kid gloves treatment.

RAT

It's especially interesting because during beta 3 & 4, Brad basically did his best to silence any concern about the release date on the forum. He got downright snippy about it at times, saying that it was fine and people who were saying it wouldn't be didn't know anything about making games.

All things considered, he's gotten off easy.

Optimal time for game reviewers to review Elemental?

Hmmm 11am to 1pm should be fine.

Until they get the crash and memory leak bugs and performance issues (IE the MAJOR issues) all ironed out this game will get very poor reviews.

I think the underlying game play is good otherwise. I'm sure its not perfectly balanced, but it does give you that 'just one more turn' style yearn to keep playing. Assuming there were no technical problems with the game, i'd say it would be in the realm of 8.5. The technical bugs would probably lower this two or three points. Frequent game crashes in the form of memory leaks for ATi cards is a very major bug that would have been seen very easily before release. It isn't an uncommon hardware configuration at all. 

But I haven't answered the OPs question. Reviews should be up at a game's release. Reviewers should have the gold copy before a release date and the reviews should be published when the game came out. Whenever there aren't reviews up with a game's release (especially major ones) it tends to be a bad sign. The best games i've ever played out of the box on release day had stellar reviews before the game was even out. There are some exceptions, but they are usually indie games or games from Blizzard.

Stardock might earn brownie points from the people who have seen their history with improving their games, but that shouldn't significantly impact a review's score imo. I'm from the days where Computer Gaming World magazine was popular, and their review policy was that they reviewed games as is out of the box - no patches. I believe in that, even today.

If Stardock wanted an optimal score, that would very obviously be after all the big issues are patched up.

There are plenty out there, you can get links in reviews thread: https://forums.elementalgame.com/391186

> 1up gave them 60 or something, which is a fail in my book but aparently thats passing in the US schools these days.

Reviewer there didn't even play the game it seems. "Robust multiplayer", heh.

A year from release when the AI is perfected and all bugs are crushed.  That is with most SD made games (GalCiv2 & Elemental).  Sad but true.