I bought Elemental when it came out, being a fan of the GalCiv series I was very excited. I couldn't even make it through the tutorial.

So 1.1 has been a definite improvement. I've played two custom games so far and tried the campaign, mostly just learning the interface and the options and game play. I'll say 1.1 is a vast improvement. Someone had said it feels more like a game now and I can agree with that.

So here are my pet peeves.

#1 I got stuck on the campaign where you're trying to find where the villagers fled to. Not only was I unable to figure out where to go, but I was tired of trying to figure out which mountain squares I could move on.

#2 I don't think I've seen the terraforming, mobility etc spellbooks in the tech tree. I don't like that you can't heal with spells outside of battle. Usually I autoresolve the battles and it would be nice if I could preset some spells to cast. Also, I don't like that I have to leave a city with my sovereign in order to teleport him and his army.

#3 The game kind of lurches in difficulty. I was doing fine exploring the wilderness, taking damage but surviving monsters. Then a bandit group jumps up out of nowhere and kills my entire party of hired heroes. Later on, I have a nice zone of control set up with my cities but since I'm not at war at anyone, I'm spending 50+ turns flipping through Domination techs to try to get from Level 2 to Level 3 goodie huts. Then I seem to speed from level 3 to level 4. I have no problems cleaning up most of the huts until I run into this giant spider inside a hut who 1-hits each unit in my army.

#4 I hate the building space mechanic, especially without a good idea of where I can and can't build buildings once a city is established and especially if I build close to another city. I had to end my first game because I tried demolishing shanties to get enough space for slums and ended up decimating my city. I get the idea that buildings have to be continuous, but it almost encourages the idea of building towns far away from resources and letting the zones of influence expand until the resources are in range. This seems counterintuitive to civilization building.

#5 I think the weapon tech tree needs to be reworked. There needs to be more intermediary options before the slashing/piercing/etc. trees and I don't think I've seen a reason to be in more than one tree other than archery and a single melee weapon. Also, the arcane stuff should indicate that elementium isn't produced. And is there really an advantage to researching armies besides being able to one-click train and move?

#6 I hate that hired champions tend to take damage and die before trained "grunt" units in autoresolve.

#7 I have no idea what ambassadors do, besides generate diplomatic capital and even then, it appears capped at 50. Why is it a unit instead of a building?

#8 Allow trading of techs and weapons/armor/steeds. Seems the only trading options are for gold/materials/metal/crystals.

#9 Allow existing units to be upgraded with new units, preferably with a mass upgrade option.

#10 I think champions should provide some kind of bonus to their army. If not, why have a champion in an army except for his STR rating?

#11 A preview of what spells you learn if you research a spell level would be nice too. I'm at spell level 8 and wondering if there's anything else to get.

#12 Seems when I adventure, I spend half my time trying to chase down a monster or a recruitable champion or an army because both it and I move 2 spaces.

I think there is a good game here and the patch helped a lot, but there still needs to be a bit more to keep me engaged.

I've been playing it for a couple weeks, and have the following comments:

1)  The game crashes all the time.  I'm playing on a medium or large map at hard difficulty with all the other kingdoms loaded up as opponents.  This game crashes incessantly on a machine that can run other games for weeks without an error.  I use a KVM switch and accidentally left a copy of Torchlight running on this game for a week, so I know the box is stable as hell.  Elemental craps itself almost continually.

2)  This game is hugely short-sighted in its core game play model.  Make a sovereign with minimized social and magical traits and maximized combat and speed traits. Focus your first city on building up population fast, then building nothing but about ten or twelve tech research studies.  Then put all of your research in Warfare.  Focus entirely on arms and armor and mounts.  Once you have your sovereign in all heavy plate and on a mount, start roaming the countryside and kill everything.  Virtually nothing can touch you at this point, except for a couple 2nd-tier heroes that might accompany some of the other CPU-controlled sovereigns.  Romp every city you come across and build a couple heavy plate soldier units as a holding army.  Continue to tour the countryside and take every town you find.  You will suddenly be generating tons of research, so put three or four levels into arcane and get the legendary armor and weapons (waaay too easy to unlock so soon in the tree) and the start pumping research into exploration and civics.  You should be getting 1-turn discoveries at the lowest levels and about 8 to 10 turn discoveries at the highest levels.  The explosion of gilder from capturing towns should fund a complete set of legendary armor, shield, and weapon.  You are now a one-man army that can pretty much decimate the rest of the world without ever taking a point of damage.

Why is this short-sighted?  Because highly imbalancing techs are available way too soon.  Because weaponry is vastly outweighed by armor, dodging, and blocking.  Because there is no penalty for taking towns and holding them... there is no period of unrest... they are absolutely yours with full production and benefits the very turn you take them.  Because speed is king in the overland map and you will typically have heroes that move twice as fast as CPU opponents... meaning you can run around spanking their pathetic forays before they even get close to your towns.  Because linear prerequisites without cross-dependencies means that you can run all the way down and entire tech tree and have abilities or equipment that vastly outstrips any opponent who tries to take a balanced approach.

3)  The Legendary Armor set is bugged and missing a piece.  In the tech tree description the Legendary Helm appears twice and there is no set of Legendary Arms.  (Just breastplate, greaves, and helm.)

4)  The campaign mode doesn't have an auto-save?  Because the campaign is more lightweight starting out, it didn't crash for a couple hours while I was trying to follow the vague plot objectives around the map and figure out why boats act so wonky.  However, the game inevitably crashed and I only then discovered that the game doesn't do any auto-saves in campaign mode.  I'll never try that crap again.

5)  AI needs some serious work.  Why did I find the enemy with a stack of two dozen pioneers (all singles) standing in the same spot?  I can see speculative creation of one or two... but later on when there is no arable land left to build on?  The AI also doesn't seem to understand that this game's design rewards front-loaded highly optimized fighters.  

6) I had a combat where half a dozen moderately powerful enemies jumped my band of heroes where my main tank was escorting four other unarmored and damaged guys I just hired.  What is the key here?  It is to figure out where the biggest danger lies... and it is not the best idea to try to chase down the 2nd-stringers that are no threat, but to gang up on the on guy who is going to eviscerate your army one man at a time.  But, no, the AI spent several rounds chasing around my new hires while I hunted down their fighters while only having to deal with one of them at a time... too some damage, but never had the risk of having them mob up on me.  That's poorly thought out AI that is trying to speculatively snipe without actually being a threat.

7)  I've yet to see magic spells make a shred of difference in the vast chasm between poorly equipped troops and moderately well equipped troops.  (Say with light plate or better.)  Spell casting and magic research seems a lot more work for a lot less result when compared with straight up warfare arms and armor research.