interested in 1.1 patch impressions

YMMV. The game has improved dramatically since 1.0. But it has issues still. It'd say at least half of people experience little to no crashes, and half experience them pretty regularly. Right up to 1.1, I was getting a crash every few hours. And the support forum can show you people crashing at other various places.

I think it's worth a look if you've already bought the game though.

V1.1 seems really polished. The spells especially look good. Right at the time you start getting arcane knowledge and start learning spells, you see the spell icons improved. I have used raise land, lower land, teleport and fertility (been relying on Might instead of Magic on Tactical battles.. ) and the spell effects look cool. Monsters are now unable to roll over Sovereign decked in leather armor and sword + shield, and this is a welcome improvement. I wont say the game doesnt crash cause it did, but I may have a hand in it, due to my firewall complaining that Executable has changed, I had to alt + tab to allow Elemental to access the net again..

And yes the Elemental Community is fervent (I wish they allowed dissenters to dissent, not everyone can be pleased all the time, and some people's threshold for tolerance is lower), but my opinion is that gamers trying Elemental V1.1 will find their hours disappearing Magically..

This. The core mechanics have improved significantly, and this version has been very stable for me. But, there are still some balance issues that need to be worked out, magic isn't super compelling, and the game just really lacks depth (again, ymmv). But, if you buy by Dec. 31st, you'll get the first expansion for free, so it may be worth it to buy, if you're really interested...

The trajectory for this game is good to very good.

I will say that magic is in a better state than it was at 1.0. Both mechanically and in terms of content. Magic still has A WAYS to go though, to really meet expectations. They've broken up the process of researching spells so you don't get access quite as easily to all of them. The balance on spells is better, and some are more thoughtfully designed. But the spellbooks themselves feel fairly limited. Content takes time to do right and to produce enough of. It's on the right track. Expect better than 1.0, but still do not expect the sky. I've yet to use a spell that makes me go "Now that was totally awesome." Not trying to condemn Stardock or anything, just passing on my experience.

In all honesty, if you're interested in the game, I would buy now and get the expac free. But I think you should buy in realizing the game will still be growing, changing and working out problems.

The answer is no. This game is not ready for prime time.

Many game mechanics have significantly improved from being overhauled, but the game is poorly balanced and the AI exceptionally bad at playing the game the way it is currently balanced. If you want to play in a sand box where nobody will challenge you, you may well have fun with the game, but if you actually want to play it as a game competing with other AI kingdoms, it isn't there yet.

Many of the more idiotic but minor critical original shorcomings remain such as the "everything in one long list" shop and inventory management and some items only being usable by some races but not marked as such anywhere you can read it in-game.

There are fewer crash issues but some remain. Moreover, if you play for a long period of time the program may run out of memory.

Most visual bugs are gone, but the old bug where you occasionally see the name and stats of an another city displayed on one of your own cities on the map instead of its own remains. I really don't know why that one hasn't been fixed. Visual interface bugs of the most obvious sort are usually the type of bugs that are hunted down early. To be fair, Elemental was so buggy upon release that it may just have been pushed down the list of priorities, but I certainly expected that sort of minor bugs to be gone with the official 1.1 "see the new Elemental" release. Presumably they just ran out of time.

As a singleplayer game, it probably deserves a 5/10 currently, up from the 3-4/10 it merited upon release. On the positive side, much of the reason it doesn't merit more now is because of AI and balance issues, which are way easier to deal with than the fundamental issues of the release version - a poorly designed game on the strategic level with slow and boring tactical combat. (Actually, given the current AI issues tactical combat is even more boring now, but at least it is no longer slow.)

I regret to say that I cannot recommend buying the game to my friends in the state it is in and, as such, not to you either.

Biggest problem with the game now is that it is bland.  Factions all play alike, the world is empty and not that fun to explore, the champions are fairly interchangeable, the quest are few and often unrewarding.

Yep, more quests, more monsters, more tech and more content in general...

Thanks for the honest feedback.  I played at release and got a refund--it certainly wasn't worth $40 then.  Sounds like it still has a ways to go.

 I have to regretably agree 100% with Lord Xia; it's gotten so bad for me that I'd rather spend time with the "familly" I despise than play.

I'd also like to see way, way more pre-game set-up options.  More on par with GC2.

The game just needs better AI. Theres enough content there just no challenge.

Game has reached mediocre. Big step up from the bad of before, but still not to good yet, getting there though. But its playable, and can be fun if your willing to overlook a lot of stuff.

Charges of being "bland" are sort of subjective. For me the flavor of the content is sort of bland, but the world as it's laid out (with Elementerra) is fairly interesting to explore.

Unfortunately for a lot of us, we've been playing straight through since release, and we've seen the same ~10 to 15 quests about 100 times now. So that content does very little for us when we're heading out for the 100th time into the wilds to go get that Lvl 5 quest we've already done 10 times before.

I don't think the game's problem is really content right now (although it's going to be, shortly.) It's still the balance, stability, clarity and polish issues. Balance as it relates to the AI, out of those 4, is what's truly killing the game atm. Because you can easily get through a game of Elemental and have fun, your first time. It's just the second, third, fourth, fifth, ect... times each get progressively less fun, less challenging and less interesting.

No, i think the real issue is content. Every nation does the same thing, kingdom and empire may have different names for the things they do, but they are basically the same. All troops have the same feel, only difference is the amount of attack and def, no real differences in use or ability. Same with champs, they all feel the same, like slightly upgraded troops. Lots of interesting spells, but only like 5 or so are useful. Quests are all the same too.

Terrain too. There is regular ground, then ground that is 1/2 move. The third type of ground is unpassable. Anything else? Nope. Same with resources. Tones of different resources, that all turn into the same thing the moment you harvest it. Clay pits, marble, old growth forests. Interesting variety, but the only difference is number of materials.

Everything just feels the same.

Play the game through once and you have seen pretty much everything there is to see. This is the big issue that needs to be overcome. Sure, you can be do weird stuff and try and win using handicaps or whatever, but you are not seeing anything you haven't already seen before. I don't know what you call "bland" but that is pretty much my definition of it.

No, i think the real issue is content.

I don't think so. Creating content for the current game mechanics wouldn't add any spice at all. I ask myself how tactical battles could ever become fun without some rock-paper-scissors mechanics? Same goes for every other game aspect, things need to fit together and what gives you benefits here should come with weakness on the other hand. Rock-paper-scissor, well balanced out and we had a turn based strategy game with variablility. Some of the in-game load screens says "specialisation is important". Should be, but for now that just means getting some bonus to tech or arcane research.

There also should be well thought out tech trees to support different strategies and counter others. If fractions (human player or A.I. personality) are playing the isolationist, give them techs to compensate their lack of terrain and ressources to some degree. Warmongers on the other hand should be able (and somehow enforced) to concentrate on offensive techs, but maintaining strong invasion forces should eat up most of the additional ressources they conquer, so their progress in research and infrastructure would suffer.

Same goes for warfare. Imbued champions and summoned creatures versus regular troops, arcane against technological warfare. Both should be valuable options and both should work out for offensive and defensive strategies.

Elemental 1.1 for me just shows, that they got the engine stabilized and multi-threaded now - good to see, but nothing more. They tweaked a lot of stuff, but it still seems kind of clueless and I wonder if they don't have some of those nerds that sit down with pen and paper to figure out how things fit togeher overall. Probably my expectations were pitched too high, but I fear this won't turn out the game I was dreaming of.

I'm going to let you in on a dirty little secret. Gal Civ II, ultimately, is the same way. It's the kind of games Stardock makes. I'm not saying they make bland games, that's subjective. But in Gal Civ II, the races felt a little indistinct too. You hit the tech wall where the next upgrade was "just another couple of attack points/defense points". You hit the empire wall where you "didn't really need another Mining Base/Star Base/Planet/Fleet."

And honestly, the AI didn't feel all that much different in Gal Civ II. You know what's funny? The last game of Gal Civ II, I quit when I found out that the biggest AI player in the Galaxy, who I had ground down to just his home planet, was a massive world with huge pop built on....RESEARCH LABS! Sound familiar?

I guess my point is...while some of the content is off, much of it is exactly what Stardock delivers. Whether you like it or not is up to you. The quests are simple. That's their problem. There aren't enough of them. Anything is bland once you play it 30 times over.

It is up to Stardock where they can call it good. I can't say I didn't enjoy my first fling with Gal Civ II. I can't say I haven't had some good moments of 4x gaming with Elemental, despite all the problems. Once things are finally bug free, and the AI is up to snuff, Elemental will basically be exactly where Gal Civ II is now. Fun, for a while, moddable, a little generic. It's up to Stardock if that's where they want to leave off. It very well may be.

This is there. Were you around for 1.0? There was a time when you had to race every AI to as many food spawns as you could, and the minute they met you, they declared war and started marching armies toward you. It wasn't grossly hard, but it happened pretty frequently and boom, that was the end of your game.

The game supports tons of strategies. The challenges to those strategies, based on a lot of balance factors, aren't there yet or aren't balanced. But I think you're not giving the game its due if you don't even see it. Case in point: you can research a lot techs as many times as you need to, to get the benefits you need to achieve your game play goals, despite what kind of empire you've got. Yet it takes you progessively longer to get the same return on your research. And to do the research, you need to allocate A LOT of space to it.

If you compare v1.1 to v1.09 then all that can be said is that it's a massive step in the right direction and that as a whole the game is more fun.

If you're summing it up as a game though:

• There are still some pacing issues.
• Tech feels a little bland
• The AI has improved drasticly but it's still not that difficult to run circles around it.
• Magic doesn't scale very well, it's only balanced at specific points in the game and under/over powered earlier or later.
• There's no 1 more turn hook yet. It's like galciv in the respect that you know when you're going to win very early on but unlike galciv (in my opinion) you dont get the drive to see it through to the end.

Other than that it's all good... and despite all that the game is still fun for a few hundred turns per map while you build up and crush the AI's that are a credible threat.

See, I disagree. I remember the same thing from Gal Civ II. "Research to get new structure, gives Y resource an X% increase in its output." "Play two more turns to get transport to asteroid mine/star base location." "Research 2 more turns to get Improved Laser Phaser IV, 2 better than your old phaser."

I mean, didn't Gal Civ 2 have running jokes about how redundant and repetitive the tech upgrades got?

The more I think about it, Elemental is honestly in no different place with most of its mechanics. It's just the cleanliness, balance and flow of the game still feels off to many, and the gaping holes in content. After so many games of Elemental, I've got the flow down pretty well. About the thing only thing that generates tedium is the speed of movement early game, before roads, mounts or spells.

You can imagine lot's of things within Elemental 1.1, but that also wasn't a problem when I played PacMan as a RPG out of imagination back in the 80s. Saying "the game supports tons of strategies" to me means corresponding game mechanics are there and balanced (on a grand scale, I am not talking about fine tuning and tweaking here) and I cannot see that.

Stardock devs want to have fun in creating their own game (mechanics). I understand and respect that and that may be why they don't just grab the best of DnD rules for the RPG part of the game, the best of Paradox games for the diplomacy part, the best of Panzer General for tactical battles and so on. But on the other hand you cannot deny that we have 2010, people are playing computer games for decades now and meanwhile someone invented the internet. People just compare any game aspect to good implementation examples they know and Elemental 1.1 doesn't stand comparsion in most regards.

As you came back to GalCiv2. I really enjoyed Dread Lords and I still would say the original game feels just more organic than the expansions that brought a lot of checklist fetures that didn't fit in very well (espionage, race specific tech trees, ...). Sure - fantasy and sci-fi games should inspire imagination to feel full of depth and fascinating and that always was a good portion of fun beyond what the game itself could provide. On the other hand game mechanics should support that imagination and not kill immersion ( too straight forward, meaningless choices, overpowered options, imbalanced spells, anything that make you feel like been taken for an idiot). Choosing one direction sacrifies some other in well thougt out games and that is where specialisation should become a tangible experience while the game goes on.

I have to admit that you are probalby right, I didn't dig too deep into what might be possible with the current mechanics if tweaked and polished. That is because I am not impressed or inspired in the first place. Hope I am wrong and this game becomes fun.

If you see a sale it's probably worth it at sale prices now. 1.1 was definitely a very positive step. If they can put out a couple more major patches like that, we'll wind up with a pretty good game.

The issue, like I've said somewhere around here, is that you don't feel challenged by the AI. That dramatically undercuts the value of every single choice you make in game, because you're playing against a bad robot and you can't convince yourself it really knows what it's doing yet. So you're running around in a sand box with some company you can abuse as you see fit.

Even when the AI was doing mass land grabs in 1.0, it didn't feel like part of a strategy. It felt like a couple lines of code telling them to grab as much territory as possible. And you knew every AI was reading the same line of code as it played. The whole thing breaks down when the world isn't challenging you in a meaningful way. Right now, I fear monsters more than I fear factions, because the monsters are smarter and more dangerous to my bottomline than anything the AI can manage to do. So they occupy a city I didn't have a unit in. Too bad they did with a pioneer.

So yeah. I think you haven't played enough to see the depth of options the game offers you. (Honestly, no different than Gal Civ II, whatever edition, IMO.) But I think you've played long enough to correctly know that most of those options are pretty much flavor at this point and little else. You don't need Magic Swords when the AI isn't able to form armies strong enough to overcome your 3-strong unit of guys armed with wooden sticks.

As Brad puts more time into the AI, the reasons for doing what you can do in game are going to become more meaningful. For example, I have a sneaky suspicion that the change to multi-threading means the AI is no longer omniscent when it comes to resources: it has to have actually seen them and explored that area to know the resource is available for capture. I could be wrong, but it would explain a lot of AI behavior I've seen over the last few versions.

That's one example where better AI just makes everything else in game seem more important.

Whether that makes up for your first exposure to the game is another story.

well I did say "in my opinion".

But the hook for me in galciv was all the crazy powerful stuff towards the end of the tech tree like starbases that could blowup stars and the gigantic ships and all that good stuff.

In elemental we've got dragons. And they aren't that awesome... and it requires going down the diplo tree which I largely ignore.

Magic's cool and all but I still prefer populous for that sort of thing over what elemental has to offer right now or MOM if you were looking for a TBS example... it's going really cheap on GOG right now, it's worth playing.

Elemental version 1.1 is what should have been released as version 1.0 in my humble opinion.  There's still some work to be done, and I don't think anyone will argue to the contrary, however you should be able to throw down the asking price with confidence.

Bingo!!! SD was never ever going to have a real chance of creating a real spiritual successor to MOM , anyone who wants that will be disappointed even after 2 expansions I bet.

  My impression so far. I joined EWoM at version 1.09e where I got to run around feeling moderately excited as I nuked everything with magik. Even on ridiculous I was able to have a Sov do well with magik & have fun. There were a ton of stability issues, etc. But I kept on playing because I was still having fun while looking foreward to more from SD down the line.

  In 1.1 stabilty is so much better (for me at least) but now magik is useless on the hardest settings.. and the AI's continuing lack of depth makes playing on anything less than max dificulty unchallenging. Let me note as well that weapons & armor make even ridiculous ridiculously easy to beat.

 So, in closing I don't think EWoM is more fun to play now... actually I think its less fun.

 SD has a history of making there games better, so I am sure it will become much better in the future. But thats not good for the hear & now. Still you may enjoy it for what it is regardless of my opinions.. so good luck & happy hunting.