Concur.

I appreciate the hard work as well. I look forward to a resolution.

Can you give a bit more detail? Performance is worse than before in what way? I find the drawing speed and end turn speed much faster in v1.2.

In tactical battle, play tends to slow at random times. It will take awhile to select a unit or action, or after selecting it takes awhile for the action to complete. I had this issue in the last version but rarely in others. It is similar on the main map, there is significant lag in either selection of a unit/action/building and sometimes at the end turn. It was surprising b/c it happened early on--before turn 30. As far as the tactical issue, it happened nearly every time--especially if there were multiple units involved. I was just surprised that it happened so early. Usually i get to around turn 100 before something goes awry.

Funny, I went back to the game to double check and it's running quite smoothly. Go figure. I guess I'll keep an eye out and save/post the game next time (if it happens--hopefully not) if it reoccurs.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16468196/a1.EleSav

  If you could provide a save from a game with slow performance I'm glad to check it out.

I'm emailing it via support@stardock.com with the subject saying to forward it to you.

Thanks

Ah, I see. Ok. I'll see how things work without them. I had considered the possibility but was reluctant to give up the added flavor. Oh, well. Thanks!!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16468196/debug54.zip

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16468196/a1.EleSav

Ok, so no mods. Game went slow rather quickly on the main map at turns end then OOM.

I'm finding that the game now has imprecise cursor. I have to aim at the top half of a square or above to target or move to a square. It is actually worse in combat as its not only imprecise, but also a bit jittery. It might be due to my resolution of 1920x1080. Anyway, just thought I'd post that here.

One thing that still hasn't been fixed since the beginning (and it seems Demigod does the same) is when I load the game up, it goes to the main menu, but my hardware cursor is showing and locked to the top and left side of the screen for movement. I alt tab and that corrects it. This is likely because I have my taskbar at the top of the screen (doesn't do the same when I move the taskbar to the bottom as is standard for windows). Also, I am using object dock on the left side of the screen and those are the areas where the cursor standard windows hardware cursor gets locked to. It's not a big deal, but its very annoying and not the only stardock game that has that problem. It's like stardocks technologies aren't compatible with eachother.

Anyway, the above problem seems to be the games aren't going completely full screen like they should. I should actually try to turn off object dock completely and see if the windows taskbar at the top still pokes through. I never had problems with Demigod before I started using object dock.

Other than that, so far Elemental seems to run like it always has. I dont have time to really test it out yet, but I'll post more when I do. One thing I did notice is that all of the "starting positions" are really really close. I had all 5 opponents within a dozen squares or so of my starting locations in a nice neat circle around my city. By about the 30th turn, everyone's boarders were touching and there was almost nowhere I could move. I should point out that this is on a large size map. I've had this problem before, but never with every opponent being so close and similar distances to me and eachother.

I have the same problem with the cursor getting stuck on the lower left side of the opening screen when I have object dock on the left side. Object Dock works in any other position with Elemental, so I've moved it to a more inconvenient position because this issue hasn't been fixed yet (I've mentioned it back when the game was released). But I'd rather do that than alt out of the game every time it's loaded.

I'm going to echo many others here, I fear...

Play for any extended period of time and the game will crash with an OOM error.

The AI remains atrocious, the tactical worse than the strategic. There's nothing like attacking Lady Porcupine the mighty channeler some 300 turns into the game and take on her little empire, only to see her charge into melee and get killed by the retaliation attack when she attacks a group of soldiers instead of casting spells. And do do it three times in a row as her cities are taken one by one. Somehow or another, despite controlling multiple shrines and way more than enough time, she either hasn't learned any spells, has spent all her mana on the strategic level (doing WHAT? God and presumably the Stardock developers knows - perhaps she's casting Alchemy or any of the other worthless spells that exist as traps to drain the unwary of mana?), or the tactical AI just decides against casting spells.

Evening the odds by not using any magic oneself and making the game essentially "Elemental: War Without Magic", the AI remains incapable of putting up a fight against a warfare/civics focus for long games or against exploration[champions]/warfare[champion equipment] focus for (moderately) short games.

Something I don't know if others have mentioned (or experienced) is a bug that has been in the game since release and expected to be gone by now  - occasionally the wrong city name and stats are displayed on the strategic map. I.e. I might have a city, MyNiceCityWithAGoodName, and when panning the strategic map to its location it will display as AnAICityWithAStupidName and that city's stats in the colour of AnAI. Selecting the city will refresh the map with the correct name in my own colour and with the correct city's stats, so it is purely visual - it is just that it looks so darn stupid to see my cities occasionally mislabeled, particularly when it is one of the linguistically silly AI city names.

Example (Newly conqurered Raracar [west] stats painted on two cities):

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/4/elementalwrongcitynameb.jpg/

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I lashed out against the spells in 1.2 and I did so for a reason; Ignoring for the sake of argument how bad the AI is at using them, there are severe balance issues. Take a good hard look at the city enchantment spells and ask yourself "which ones would anybody even consider using? Which one is worth both the casting cost and the upkeep cost?". At what point in time is it correct to spend the arcane research on advancing to spell level 2, learning Invisible Workers, and then spend 16 mana and 1/turn on getting +1 material/turn? There's a certain point where the opportunity cost of casting a suboptimal spell transforms it from being an interesting option that may fit into a specialized strategy or be effective in a limited number of situations and into a trap for the unwary, preventing the player from casting any the good spells should he waste his mana on it.

The same goes for the other categories of spells, of course - I chose Alchemy as one of the most egregious examples at start - 25 mana for 25 gilders. Is it even possible to have both researched this spell and be in a situation in-game where it makes sense to transform mana to guilders one to one? Given how hard mana is to come by compared to money it seems unlikely.