Thanks for taking the time to post your first impressions!

For those mentioning that Porcipine is OP as a ruler, she is clearly noted as the most powerful channeler of the realms, at least in the first campaign mission.

The start has a few oddities though; Porcipine's spouse was named åS}, and the nearby town was named Eroor. Which sounded a bit odd.

The tactical map works better, but it scrolls towards the cursor, and you can't move the map with ASDW like you can the main map, which feels a little counter-intuitive. Crashing on alt-tab seems consistent, so no more updates from me. (It does not crash when alt-tabi'ing out of the game, but back in.),

Well, I for one think it looks night and day compared to the beta 4.  The tactical combat is much better, the lay out of towns and how they work is also better.

And Alt tab works for me, however if you have an ATI card it will still crash.  I like the main quest so far, I just got to porcipine's city and it seems interesting so far.

Yeah, I've got... like a day for my crappy internet to complete the download. Please let us know more about whats new and different.

We thought all prior alt-tab issues were fixed, but the change to fix a graphics memory leak also caused a recurrence of that issue on some ATI cards on Win7 x64. We have one of the game's lead graphics developers on the task of fixing it.

For now, running in windowed mode (which will fill the screen if you set it to the screen resolution) may help. If not, set autosave to every turn and sit tight for a couple of days.

do you mean windowed but without see the window?, checking the windowed mode box and setting to the max resolution my screen supports?.

I have the 3 factors of the problem  but still downloading.

I agree that compared to the beta 4, its night and day. I've played for about an hour now (sandbox, not campaign) on a large map. So far I'm really liking the game. There are a few small things I'd thought would have been fixed/looked into, but I'll wait for the 0 day patch before comment on that.

One big problem though. I couldn't play much of beta 4 because of the out of memory error (I assume because I'm on win7 x64 with ATI cards). In beta 4 I would only get 30-40 turns before it would crash. Today I got about an hour into the game and it did it. I had (sadly) just lost a town an all of the sudden the game wouldn't respond anymore. I alt-tab and had a pop up saying it was out of memory. Probably for the best, as I really need to get to bed.

Also, I have not tried the modding tools tonight, but I got out of memory errors when working with the map editor during beta 4. Made me sad as I really want to re-create The Kingdom of the Isles on Midkemia from Raymond E. Feist's great books.

I really hope this out of memory error will be fixed in 0 day patch, because the game is a lot of fun to play. And I want to get to work on the map editor.

Thanks for a great game,

Nathan

 PS. sorry if this is a double posts. After I hit the button to post, some odd screen came up about lost pigeons or something??

Yes, that is what I mean. As for the map editor, it likely shared many of the issues we fixed since beta4, but if you notice any errors in the current build, please report them - preferably with links to save games and/or crash dumps!

It also helps if you can say "doing this adds 5Mb" - Task Manager can often help, set it to show the "Commit Size" column under "View" in the processes tab.

Bollocks to the f*cking ati/64bit bug. Seriously guys. Fix that shit.

What's this ATI 64bit bug thingy? I have an ATI 5770 is it going to fark up?

If you're running 64bit windows 7 you might. I don't know if it affects everyone.

If you do have the problem, someone might be along to tell you that playing in windowed mode may help. Or turning down graphics settings. Or playing only in the "cloth map" mode and staying clear of tactical battles. Which is all fine, for a beta.

I have Vista 64 as I read Win 7 still has lots of bugs and issues with older games and now I see newer ones. Vista may not be as fast as Win7 now but at least it's been stable for me and I've been running everything under the sun with it lately.

Wow this game is buggy. I've been playing for about 30 minutes and I don't know if I can continue.

I started out on the campaign and the first thing I did was to go into the menus to see if I could invert the mouse-scrolling. Didn't find it and when I got back to the game it was zoomed in to the max and I could not get it back out again. Not with the scroll wheel or the +/- buttons. Restarting the game solved this.

Next I spend some time trying to figure out how to build the city and how to build farms. I wish the tutorial would have helped me some more here but I figured it out. Seems you can't click a square if there's someone standing on it? Opening the city seemed to be bugged too. When I double clicked, it opened really quickly and then closed immediately. I managed to get around that by double clicking and keeping the button pressed for a while before releasing it.

I now notice the big spider over at the wreckage and go over there with my hero, that other guy and the militia. I kill it easily, pick up the stuff and then try to attack the much smaller spider next to it. Figure it's going to be even easier so I auto-resolve the battle, but it turns out I lose everything except my hero with 1HP. What the hell? Must've been stronger than it looked... Oh well, I reload the game, kill the big spider again, pick up the sword and try to figure out how to equip it, or at least make sure I have it on my hero. Well I can't because the description text on the hero is so long I can't see the items?

I'm now starting to get a bit annoyed at the game but I try to attack the smaller spider again. Except I can't. Nothing happens when I click attack. Why? I click next turn some 10 times and the city grows. I try to attack it again but I still can't. I try to move up to the bandits but I can't attack them either. Restarting the game doesn't help.

I'm on Win7 x64 with an ATI card as well, if that makes any difference to all this?

I have Win 7 64 bit with an ATI 5870 card. Getting the 'DX - bad call' error message after 'alt - tabbing' and clicking to go back in the game. Was keeping an eye on the Memory commit and saw it go from about 300k initially to 1.3 gigs when I looked right before it crashed.  I played about an hour in between the two 'alt - tabs'.

Fortunately, I had saved my game so no big lose or anything.

Another thing I noticed. There are no magic 'effects' when casting fireball.  The screen moves like its tracking something but you don't actually see the fireball or anything. You see the hit points being removed from the target though.

So far my favorite thing in tactical combat is when the guys go flying backwards after getting the hell knocked out of them...it just doesn't get old! LOL

Hey guys, been following beta closely, finally registered.

While I appreciate Stardock's candor and their enthusiasm, I do have one thing to say.

For a game with MAGIC in the title, Stardock clearly shoved magic on to the back burner in favor of a lot of other features. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt because they've committed to updates for a long time...but that's a pretty big failing in my book. I hope Stardock uses this release as a cautionary tale about getting too excited with your own IP, and pushing too hard toward a release.

Because I think I could have waited until 2011 for a very polished build. I'm just not sure Brad and Random could have.