Stuff happens.  The big difference for me, is that the Stardock devs talk!  They keep us informed as to what tweaks, fixes, and updates they are working on.  2k has hushed Firaxis.  And once again 2k has left the scene post sale.  Bah!  Civers don't know if the Longbows pwning Riflemen is going to be tweaked.  Or when the crashes will be resolved.  They have no clue if they are stuck with the current UI or not.  They don't know when or if they'll be able save multi-player games. etc.  Yeah Stardock puts them to shame.  If games are to be released in a non-complete state (which seems to be standard), then Stardock is the kind of developer/publisher you want to buying from!

I have no idea how many crash issues CIV 5 has had and I doubt you do either frankly, except maybe on your system.

 The fact is modern games  engines are complex and sit on top of a horrifyingly complex software absraction layer Game->DirectX->Various device drivers (which may actually respond in different ways), OS and other APIs which them selves sit on top of a huge variety of mix and match hardware. This is why almost every game has crash issues on some systems even those that use very well established engines.

Elemental has had a lot of crash issues on various systems OOM errors, etc. I agree more than the average game. But CIV 5 might as well you'd need proper stats and analysis to know if it had had more than the average game.

It's impossible to launch a PC game today that doesn't crash on any hardware/software combination that meets the required spec. I would challenge you to find one such game released in the past 5 years.

This is not to excuse elemental but just to underline the point of why releasing a rock solid title is so hard. As CIV 5 has been produced by a bigger company with a bigger QA department I certainly would expect it to have been tested on a wider variety of hardware at least.

It's also true that for some people Elemental may be more stable than CIV 5.

I don't think anyone has stats for either view point. The OP certainly did not have any proof that Civ 5's crash issues are more serious than those of Elemental. I can however back up my post with some educated guesses:

1. Stardock is much smaller than Firaxis and therefore would have less resources to do proper QA.

2. Given the half-baked state of the game at release, it wouldn't be a stretch to say that QA suffered as a result. Civ 5 at least had fully realized design goals and a concrete vision. It's a lot easier do QA on a finished game than on an unfinished one.

3. Every patch for Elemental seems to fix old bugs and bring new ones in. From what I understand this is because of Kumquat, SD's new engine. IIRC Civ 5's engine had already been used before and would therefore be less prone to cause trouble for QA.

This is why I think Civ 5 currently has less crash issues than Elemental did at release. So no, SD is not putting the big boys to shame.

I have had TONS of crashes with CIV V. Right now, far more than I have with Elemental. I had plenty of crashes with Elemental DURING BETA, but really can't think of any since release.

However, Elemental has had TONS of other problems. Overall, I think CIV V is much more polished, balanced, complete game...right now. As much as I am enjoying CIV V, I sometimes find myself wanting to play Elemental instead of work on my mod ideas...and that is a huge credit to Elemental considering that it really does have a ways to go before I would consider it 'complete.' I think I just see more potential in Elemental. CIV IV has a wonderful mod community, and I greatly look forward to someday having the Fall From Heaven and Rise of Mankind quality mods for CIV V. But, I don't think CIV V will be as deep of a game as Elemental may someday become.

I had way more crashes on CIV 5 then I did with elemental. I still can't even use directx 11.  It took me 4 hours of troubleshooting just to get it to some playable form.  I have lost about 4 games because It freezes at a certain number turn and then I got to start.  I had five or six distinct types of crashes and freezes. Some at startup, some loading game some randomly and some at a certain turn number. I'm kind of pissed when elemental lost points in reviews for crashes then this game gets a free pass.

Oh my, the double standard hurts.

It's OK to overlook Stardock's perceived (being generous here) failure, but it's not OK to overlook Firaxis's perceived failure.

I could accept that if Elemental released at $29.99.  But it didn't.  Both games were released at the same price, which means both games should be reviewed at the same standard.

The difference here?  Civ5 was reviewed at v1.0.  The review was based on out-of-the-box.

Reviewers felt so sorry for Stardock that they delayed reviews a week or more.  Not a single one actually reviewed 1.0.  Compare Civ5 1.0 and Elemental 1.0 and there's really no contest.  Civ5 is the superior product.

Troll thread fails.