And in 2011 people would complain that there should have been more in the game and that it should have been a 2012 release.

Im sure there should be more magic among other things but they will happen if Brad and co want it to happen.

Rather than asking whats been left out, is whats been left in good enough to warrent it being called a computer game?
If yes then they have achieved their goal. The fact that more will go in after release is a bonus.

(P.s. im not a fanboy, i didnt like DemiGod or Sins. Loved Galciv though)

So Far i'm enjoying it.  I also found the change in the way you build farms and mines a bit of a surprise.  But once I worked it out I think it's actually better.

Might be a few minor SPOILERS for the story below.

I'm having some weird game play issues at the moment in the campaign.  I have 5 towns, and the NPC towns haven't grown at all.  I couldn't build pioneers so no new towns at first.  after I had to build a town for the story I assumed that was design - then I designed a unit that had the pioneer pack and therefore could start settlements .  I'm wondering if i bypassed part of the game in doing it that way.

I can't do any research - i haven't met an NPC to help me get started in that area and If i open the research area it tell me I have no one studying.  Maybe i haven't got far enough into the story to be allowed - or i just missed something.

I've also got stuck in the campaign story.  A scribe sends me for a book - to translate a map - but i can't find the NPC - Town or whatever it is i'm looking for.  The yellow glow on the paper map in beta made that sort of thing more fun. (though it's not really a quest)

Lot of fun - i'm off to restart the campaign and see if it works that way again or if i have done something silly

I guess I'm just a little weary of being billed an idea and not really seeing it in the first release. There's plenty of game there, no denying that, and it all looks very fun. The reason I got into Elemental was because it promised to be big on magic. What I've seen instead is a world setting that revolves around magic, and the same generic, bland treatment of magic in game that characterizes every fantasy game made today.

So that makes it standard. And I have faith they'll get back around to magic in their due time to do something.

Just saying though. War of Magic is in the name of the game, and it's not a standout feature of gameplay at all. Just reading some people's descriptions here, I'm really disappointed on that front, more than I thought I was going to be after magic has sort of been downplayed and not really detailed. I mean...Earthball, Fireball, Waterball? Really? The names alone indicate how much of a priority it was for them. That's the kind of stuff I could have waited on a release for, and they decided they didn't need to. Committing to updates later is a great tendency of the indie dev scene, but there are times it does work against them, like right now during the initial release impression, for those that aren't familiar with Stardock. (I played GalCivII.)

About the ATI/Win 7 64 known bug. The problem there is, I have windows XP media edition, and an Nvidia 9600 GT graphic card. Edit: I also have the memory leak, but since I can't alt-tab much, I can't find out what increases memory usage easily either. (I'll try the maximize window thing next.).

@Stardock: PM me and I'll happily help with doing whatever is needed to help identify the problem.

@Rune_74: Yes, I agree completely. The game flows much better, although I did have to go sleep for a while. Now I'm back and going to log a lot more hours on this.

 Changes:

The biggest change is in many of the small details. Character creation has less oddities, more icons (for talents/weaknesses, for instance), the nations include information on what race they are (The Yithril are just 'Fallen', but the rest are a specific race.). The Yithril no longer start with an exceptional longbow, but they start with piercing weapons researched, so you can create archers from the start. BIG advantage as far as I can tell.

Interface has a few more subscreens, the Hiergamon infromation windows has more consistent links and descriptions - better organized, tabs for the spellbooks, etcetera.

One surprise - casting spells is no longer an action you can do; you need to click on 'abilities' tab and 'channeler' to cast spells. A little unintuitive, but it's still on the character, at least.

About tactical combat, bows no longer shoot at 45 degrees to the right or left of the target and still hits. Jay.
Unfortunately scrolling with ASDW or edge scrolling is not enabled, you need to zoom out and then in to do anything at range. That's a bit clunky.
I did get an all-white tactical screen (landscape and units, not interface), which was a Beta 4 bug as well. I think it's connected with the out of memory thing, but not sure. I did take a screen shot but not sure how to put them here.

More huts, more quests, more lairs, more STUFF.

An update:

Using a full not-fullscreen screen (sounds messy) helps with the alt- tab thing, and it makes it possible to monitor memory usage a bit more. It does not, however, fix the memory leak. Memory use goes up consistently and for my part, when it reaches 960 mb, things start gooooiinnggg.. sloooowwww......

I did get the impression it increased slower though. In the campaign it only got unbearable when I got to the point where I'm supposed to move north of Gilden, after picking up the soaked map.

On a side note, I'm wondering if there's an option that disables edge scrolling, because I no longer got it in the main screen either. Tooltips on the option screen options would be useful.

Also, typo on the tooltip for 'dominate'. (Which seems to be a very useful ability).