On my iPad, the wide sweeping scenes are a bit choppy (looks like 15-20 fps?) but the in-game is quite smooth. Now if only mobile Safari could render as smoothly...
" Heh I remember hearing about this game like a month ago for a preview. Sounded like it was quite a ways off. Guess it was. Sounded pretty cool though. Stardock just don't seem to give me much faith as a company. Their supposed to be a published but they claim that the main problem with their game is that they either released it this week or wait for next year? My calender has a few more months than theirs it seems. Who knows, if there's a crazy sale and somebody promises me that it's been fixed maybe I'll buy it but I doubt that day will come. Sorry Stardock, you can only blame yourselves. "
This 'this week or next year' has to do with retailers' release schedules. They plan at least 1 quarter in advance, so if you miss your date, your next chance to ship will be the following quarter.
I think market-wise, it would have been better for SD to release Elemental next year since Civ5 is coming out in a few weeks :|
I'm actually glad for the drama because Elemental is now getting way more press coverage :)
I was one of the pre-orderers who got the game early and my experiences don't quite jive with the Mr Francis'. I've been playing for ~10 hours across 2 machines:
The game crashes yes, but only once every couple of hours or so. Bad, but not 'constantly'
Battle system has never broken for me
Multiplayer is coming in about a week. But does anyone buy 4x games wanting to play multiplayer within the first week?
The only AI controlled races that are 'dormant' are the minor races, not the majors who smack me around. A lot.
Even with these problems, it's a really fun game with a lot of ideas that nicely spice up the 4x genre. And Stardock's commitment to GalCiv 1 and 2 even years after release show their dedication and have earned me as a long-time customer.
So apparently this is only open to those who pre-ordered: http://forums.elementalgame.com/391533
Also, it's the "Gold" version (i.e. the version sent to retailers). On Tuesday, Stardock expects to release a Day 0 patch, which should fix some of the problems, tweak balance, etc. As a side note, I love the transparency and level of dedication at Stardock; this day 0 patch was the work they did in the 1.5 weeks between release to manufacturing and actual general availability.
Anyways, some of my initial takeaways (note: this is the 'gold' version, not 'day 0 patch'):
Spent ~7 hrs, over 2 games
Some balance issues (Magnar race killed me the first game so I tried them on the second and found they have a unit with >2x the HP of other units...hum..)
Couple of bugs (was able to build > 1 of the same improvement in a single city, cloth map disappears when you bring up the options menu, couple of CTD but restarting/loading is fast and there's autosave)
Tactical combat is fast and way more fun than I expected!
Organized trait + high movement == large stack of highly mobile units == force recon :D
The spells animate fast (hate waiting 30s for a spell in other games) and are beautiful
Map graphics are really nice and stylized; but I keep using the cloth map b/c it's easier to see resources/etc.
The beta was a pretty fun departure from the standard 4X strategy game (though being a true beta, it was pretty rough around the edges/buggy). I felt like it was more RPG than traditional empire building, so keep that in mind. Hopefully adding the heavy RPG divergence means that it won't get eaten alive by the monster that is Civ5, but we'll see.
It's turning out to be a pretty good year for 4x strategy game players!
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