I really hadn't been following Elemental too closely at all because I just didn't think I'd be interested in a magic based strategy game. I'd say the tutorial movies that were posted helped to convinced me to keep an eye on it. But some how after playing a few time with Civilization IV something clicked and I finally began to see the fun in building up cities and tech. I'm playing and enjoying GalCivII now also because I think I finally "get it"

The tutorial of Civ IV is good and it would be worth considering copying that model for games such as Elemental and GalCivII.

(One bad thing about the Civ IV tutorial is that it is VERY long and you can't save it for later and you can't start and skip over the things you have already learned.)

just please dear god nothing like Space Empires V for tutorials... I STILL haven't gotten all the way through that thing...

Yeah, word of mouth is awesome. I want to get a really largegame going and save it so I can show it off to people, but my computer is a little iffy right now, so its gonna have to wait. At which point the game will be so well improved through patches it'll be even easier for me

I suggested it to a friend of mine and he has logged more hours than I have.  I wonder if that says something about being in beta and following the release drama vs. buying the game and just playing.  I'm waiting for updates.  He keeps telling me thanks and how much fun he is having.

I think word of mouth works pretty well, unfortunately most people I know who would be into a game like this would probably have difficulty with the learning curve.  If the interface was a little more decent, or we had a better tutorial I could see a lot more people loving this game.

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but is Janusk the same person each and every time you start a new sandbox game?  Forgive me if I'm wrong, but this sort of seems a little contrived to me especially since it is supposed to be a "sandbox".  Can this be changed to randomly spawn a different person each time a game is started.  It would be nice to get a female or some other character with a random name instead each time.

Sadly, word of mouth can be overshadowed by bad experience. Tuesday, I tried to show how cool the game is to a few fellow students at SPSU in the brand new gaming lab. Installed and updated to 1.07. When I went to 'demo' it to my classmates everything went wrong.

 I created a sovereign fine, but after saving the card I wanted to show that you could create you own factions too instead of only using prebuilt. I backed out, show the mod tools, and went to make another new game. The sovereign I created was gone! What, never had that happen... I quickly made a new sovereign and started up a game. I showed off the cloth map mode and how much control you have over the camera (I've never actually angled down to ground level at the start, so seeing FoW like that was cool.)

I went to build the first city and crash. I lost one person right there, he just walked away I loaded it up for another try and crash at city build again (though both custom sovereigns were there this time.) Weird, this time i'll skip building the first city and just show exploring. New game, I walk around a bit showing goodie huts and explaining some details of resources when I find an opposing faction. I had done a fighter setup starting with a spear, so killing this wimpy enemy sovereign would be easy. He was standing next to his city (he could build without crashing why couldn't I?) that was guarded only by his wife.

Maybe I could steal his city and be able to show how they work! I set tactical combat rating threshold to 0 to make sure I could show off battles. I then proceeded to attack the city. Instead of the usual popup asking if I wanted to autoresolve, it crashed. That's about the point that everyone lost interest, and I was too embarrassed to attempt to show anything else (we never even saw monsters). There was also quite a few strange visual errors to go with the crashes. All I could say was "This doesn't happen to me at home." (I have xp, game lab is win7)

None of this happens to me on my own pc. It was like I was playing (or trying to) a different game with the same look. The only issues I've had are with OOM crashes and the gameplay bugs that everyone has. I now have a better understanding of how others feel with the state the game is in. I tried to sell the game with more than just word of mouth and it backfired completely. Again this was v1.07 installed and patched two days ago on new high quality gaming machines put in for the Computer Game Design & Development majors to play and test on. I don't have the specs on hand, but they are mid-high end rigs with the purpose of playing modern games.