Civ 5 doing well is not going to kill this game.  In fact, it may buy time.  Then again, If Civ 5 falls flat, it's an opporunity.

The key is worry about what you can control though, not what you can't, like other games.

Yeah im a big fan of TBS games, I love the fantasy genre and particularly like the 4x style of gameplay. I have been quite disappointed with Elemental so far, and I bought it based on my previous excellent opinion of Stardock from their fine work on Galciv 1 and 2. I am sure many patches will be released over the next several months to polish the game up, but im mainly concerned that some of the flaws in the game seem so fundamental, that they might be beyond the scope of work normally put into game patches.

Btw, props for mentioning Spiderweb Software. I first got into their games with Avernum 3, and Spiderweb have provided me hundreds of hours of RPG fun.

I think over time the trivial pocket change I spent on Elemental will prove a good investment.  I was disappointed by the lack of a useful manual (more background story than game mechanics) and a tutorial campaign that wasn't much of a tutorial.  But the patch is addressing some of this.  I thin eventually this game will shine.  And I think Stardock deserves praise for the long term customer service it provides for its games even more than it deserves criticism for releasing the game when it was still for the most part in beta.

Wrong attitude.  Stardock needs to know they fudged and for their own good.  When people like you keep shouting "hooray, hooray, hooray!" it's hurting Stardock more than helping. 

The reason that the forums may have seemed to be filled with a lot of 'yes men' was because any thread that claimed the game was being rushed out the door was locked. It was basically a taboo subject. Personally, I half believed the game was going to be finished based on Brad's remarks that the development build was lightyears ahead of beta 4. Although, the fact that they were locking these kind of threads came across as suspicious and insecure.

This kind of attitude isn't uncommon and it's a bane to the creative process.  I think it's ultimately rooted in humankind's remarkable and resilient ability to believe whatever-the-hell-they-want in the face of overwhelming evidence. 

In the creative process, when you've worked on something day in and day out, you need really thick skin to face the facts that your work is severely flawed.  I know the feeling my self, and I can think of a moment where I felt just like Frog probably did.  I've written a few novels and spent untold hours doing so.  In one instance, I had spent over 100 hours on a 5 page prologue and began handing it to get some opinions.  Now, the problem with giving your creative work to people who like you is that they feel obliged to give you a positive perception on it regardless of how they really feel about it (such is the case with a lot of people on these forums.)  Unfortunately, this doesn't help your work.  So I got a lot of non-specific "oh, how interesting!" or "Mmm, yeah, that was really good."  Though they were just trying to give me confidence, it was extremely counter productive because, as it would turn out, my work really was severely flawed. 

So then I thought it was ready to give to some beta readers on a professional writer's forum.  Guess what happened?  It got panned.  Why?  Because it read like a lecture and not a novel.  What did I do?  I assumed that the beta readers were just: jealous/spiteful/amateurs/biased/over-critical/uneducated/gingers.  All 15 of them.  Deep down inside though, I knew they were right, but just couldn't admit it.  When I finally did, it stung really, really badly.  But...  when I finally fessed up to myself, I realized that the prologue really was misfitting and in some ways, even just bad.  So I wrote a much, much more appopriate one that the critics liked.  The old prologue didn't even go to waste.  I chopped up the prior one, ditched some parts and sprinkled the rest of the relevent aspects around the rest of the novel at appropriate places.  And when I finally did get it right after my self-confession, I felt damned good.      

How about you shut up? That might be nice. Don't tell me wrong attitude, are you my mother? I didn't say hooray hooray anywhere actually. You obviously can't understand what I am trying to say. There are issues with the game but coming in here and whining without offering any kind of constructive criticism or how to make the game better is only showing yourself to be a troll. That goes for the rest of you that do the same thing. If, like Arstal, you are trying to offer suggestions, ideas, etc to better the game than your posts have a place here regardless of if they are good ideas or not. Unlike you, I am in the chat room everyday talking to the devs and other players, coming up with ideas, not to mention I am constantly modding the game. I bet half of the people complaining didn't even buy the game. We had one person come into chat and he was complaining about the problems with the games and how much he knew and it turned out he didn't even buy the game. So unless you are offering something other than negative complaining, just don't post. The state of the game, as it is now, happened, so yes I would say get over it because no matter how much complaining you do, it wont change anything. SD is looking for ideas, for answers to their problems, not more bi###### from you.

Hi Astral,

I've been working int he videogame industry for about 5 years now. And I have to say that everytime I read a post of this flavour I now have to fight back the chuckling. Be it for people claiming they should have waited to release the game for more tweaking or those who say they should do a "zero bug release".

Fixing bugs isn't as easy as everyone seems to think it is, the more variables a game/problem has the harder it gets to fixing it without affecting anything related. At some point you have to weight the costs of attempting to fix something, if it has the potential of breaking down something else. Having worked with small to large publishers, the rule of thumb is that THERE WILL BE BUGS in ANY released game. That being said, obviously the severity of these issues will vary, but there is no such thing as a "bug free" game. Well, to be fair, complexity does factor in.

It's very easy to sit back and look at Elemental and 'fantasize' about how you would have done things or what changes you would have made, but it's a little out of touch with reality since we aren't privy to commercial arrangements, obligations, deadlines, and what not. Also, I don't want to say that SD is a small dev/publisher, but in any case, they don't have infinite amounts of money to throw around, I'm sure of that. So at some point a line needs to be drawn in the sand, and they have to stick with it. They most likely have little leisure as to when to specifically release the game, numerous factors, invisible to consumers, are the driving force behind a game's release. Some of which are out of SD's control in some instances.

The face of the gaming industry is rapidly changing, what happened to the movie industry is translating to games as well. Publishers / investors are all about the money, and don't want to finance 'risky' projects, they want more first person shooters or sequels of successful games in order to qualm any investor worries. So Strategy games and ESPECIALLY TBS games (Almost a "dying genre"), will not be receiving the largest amounts of support and money. So I'm more grateful than anything that a game of this magnitude was even released.

Now, yes... there are some pretty glaring issues that we've all noticed. That being said, it's something that was to be expected. Not to make excuses but whoever found this game's release contained too many bugs... Go have a look at Hearts of Iron 3 release. That was beyond catastrophic, and it's patching recently got it to a ok state. (1+ year after release). This ties in a bit to what I just said in the previous paragraph. True TBS fans hunger grows, as it's to be expected, so we want this epic TBS game with loads of features and witty mechanics, but we have to be realistic with the ramifications of such an undertaking.

 From what I mostly read in posts, broken features, balancing / AI tweaks are pretty much the main things that need to be looked at. And from reading the Dev Journals, I am very confident that most of the major exploits, lack of AI, etc.. will be fixed very shortly. In an ideal world, the game would have been released in a better state, but in my book, it's almost a miracle it was even released. So I try to rejoice myself in that aspect.

Gimme the MP severs!

Regards,

V.

Okay, here we go.  First off, you probably understand that growling at someone to shut up begs them to say the same thing back.  Very mature.  Second, you tell people to "not go crazy" then use intentionally inflamatory words to goad them.  Nice.  Accusing people of whining is an ironically juvenille way of discrediting their comments on the grounds that they are... juvenille.  Clever.  Granted, I normally don't accuse people of having wrong attitudes (which I appologize for), but people who use the term "whine" set me off very quickly because it's a very uncreative and childish way to write off someone's criticisms which may be very valuable.  And yes, even though you claim that positive ciriticism is the only good criticism, negative criticism is important if it is constructive.  If you never get negative criticism, you will make the same mistakes over and over and over again.  Bad negative criticism is the kind that is non-descript... the kind of negative criticism you give people, for instance.  "You are a whiner."  "You should just shut up."  "You are a complainer."

To the contrary of your accusations, my remarks are to help Elemental, not to tear it down.  What you are doing is essentially making excuses for Elemental and Stardock, which will neither help the game nor SD's commercial viability.  I am also an experienced modder.  I've already begun to mod the game and I've already volunteered on larger modding projects.  I also have a reasonable amount of karma... which means I've been on these boards since the project began offering feedback and watching developments.  

EDIT: Okay Rainz, I don't want us to derail this thread.  I'm sorry for saying that you had the "wrong attitude."  Let's just move on.

Are you simply mistaken or making up things to try to make some point?  The threads that were being locked were the ones that evolved into full fledged flame fests.  Like this one, which desperately needs a lock as well.

Seriously, there have only been a handful of threads locked.  Plenty of critical posts remain open.  Look around, you'll find them easily enough.

In Charon's mind:

"You MUST like EVERY indie film that I like, any deviation from my opinions makes you an uncultured Michael Bay fan"

What elitists like you fail to understand is that it's perfectly possible and reasonable to like both art house indie films AND popcorn flicks. Everything that you are saying on these forums makes you appear pretentious, not cultured. 

Hah, first off, telling someone what their attitude should or should not be, is juvenile, which you apologized for but you negated your apology by starting off being a hypocrite with the first comment in your reply. The reason why I said "shutup" was to bring to the light the fact that you were goading me, an intent which you picked up on but failed to realize. Exaggerating a situation and putting words in my mouth is also juvenile as I never once said "hooray, hooray, hooray" Saying someone is whining, however, is not an uncreative and childish way to write off someone's criticism. Did you even read what I was commenting to? Or did you just see "whine" and go into a rage? The comment I was commenting about was nothing more than the same nonsense I have seen in other threads which does nothing to help the situation, it only adds on to the negativity already present which is not needed. Saying something is wrong and they should have done it "this way" as an idea is something useful. Saying "This game had a good release" "This game had no problems at launch" and on and on, offers nothing to the conversation that we do not already know. If you can't comprehend this than I do not know what else to say to you. If you would like to come into the chat room we can discuss it further. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder which I have noticed in other threads. I haven't read all the threads you have posted in obviously but the ones I have read you have basically offered nothing to the conversations, just complaints with no relevant information. Perhaps you enjoy feeding on negativity but I would think most people do not.

it's not really an hooray hooray attitude... it's just a...

i said in another topic that maybe the game is just a skeleton on we and developer can build a lot in future... it is so moddable and less hardcoded that maybe the bug spreaded too much... but if it's like i think it's solvable...

I'm not going to read this reply.  I don't believe in engaging in a flame war to gratify myself, and hopefully you don't either.  I editted my prior post while you were typing a reply.  Please scroll back, read it, and hopefully we can just move on. 

Alright alright, I am sorry too, I just woke up so i'm grouchy. Seriously though, I just want to make the game better and I just hope people will help in that, rather than complaining about how another game was released better or how they are so angry because they feel cheated. If you are angry, it is understandable, but than just get a refund or if you want to help make the game better so you don't feel cheated than do that.