i have a feeling this game ain't gonna be released before march 2011 at least.

while i'm happy that it's gonna be polished and well done, i hope it will not be old right when it's out.

Elemental's potential is huge, especially because of the hardcore modding support..modding is what keeps games alive...that being said, I don't really understand your sentence.

I'll trust in Frogboy's estimates over your gut feelings. A lot of game companies float release dates that they know they are not going to make for marketting reasons - StarDock does not play that game in my experience. You have no idea about other game elements that are being developed in tandem with the current beta and which we have not seen yet. The current beta release is no indication at all of where the game is at overall. I don'want the game to be rushed by any means, but I also don;t want people to take a slipping release date as a given, either.

Well, when i pre-ordered Elemental in early 2009, it was smelling like the best thing to come in the genre. Now we know there is a little game called Civilization 5 coming soon.

I mean 'ouch'. It's another story now.

Hopefully Elemental will be able to face it with no blush.

It won't be old, it'll be classic.

And as long as it comes out before the end of the world (2012... although in theory was to end in 2003? And in 2000? And....?

You know.. I discovered this game also ealy 2009. Didn't preorder until second opening window for beta-testers. But as far as i'm concerned. Elemental and Civilization V might be in the same genre. But I have never plaid anything like Elemental before. (Maybe Master of Magic might be the closest thing).

Civilization V is a wrapup of the same old game play. Don't get me wrong. I've plaid Civ 2, 3 and 4. And they are good. But I can see even better potensial in Elemental. Just the dynasty-system in it self is pretty exciting.. The magic.. The changing of landscape.. Your world is at the fingertips to a certain degree MORE in Elemental then just city building and conquest in Civ V. And as someone allready mentioned. The modding will expand the lifespan of this game. And I believe that Elemental will become a classic in it self. It's pretty unique..

Almost a year a go Frogboy said this:

Heh, how can you compare this game to Civ5? These games are completely different in many aspects.

As one of those shunned freaks that aren't really too keen on Civ, Elemental cannot arrive swiftly enough.

The TBS industry needs a bold innovator like Stardock. The Civilization gameplay as we see it has basically stagnated with changes that do not go far enough, that's pretty obvious to everyone that the game will be basically the same game.

The really innovative stuff that Call To Power brought never made it into the base Civilization line. It took modders to run wild with the game and do something like Fall From Heaven and bring in some new considerations, and experiment with what was possible in the genre and they produced some strikingly good ideas.

Here we seemingly have a company that's prepared to do the same thing and has serious financial backing. They've launched their own titles and published the titles of other companies, and it's possible that they will produce a genuinely fun game that has an impact on games in the future.

----

If the company commits to the game post release, it won't matter that Civilization might have shadowed them on release date. You don't need to look far to see what can happen - when NWN came out, it came out at the same time Morrowind did. Morrowind had a bigger advertising budget and higher profile attention. Both had decent modding tools, just like Civilization and Elemental will.

The big difference is that when Bethesda shipped their game, they stopped patching it and doing any work with it at all, aside from show stopper bugs and a few little things. Bioware continued to patch and patch and kept a two-man team employed on NWN for the next six and a half years. The website was kept constantly up to date with the latest fan-relevant material and they encouraged modders and linked to fan-made content from their main page.

The post-release support is vital.

Well said!  I like Civ, but I played the original way back when to death, so now it is all old hat for me.  Elemental seemingly will have everything I ever wanted in a medieval-based 4X game. The only thing that scares me:  will it be so good that it starts to eat into my chess time (the world's best 'medieval' wargame ever)?!?  I don't think I could handle that. 

We will see. i am all for cheering Stardock too, as I bought and loved every games they worked on.

I am just getting a little scared with the pushes of the release date and with the big opponents showing up. At the beginning it was supposed to be released in feb 2010 if i'm not mistaken. But right now we're at beta 1 out of 5. The good graphics aren't here yet nor most of the real gameplay which could take more time than what we currently have in Beta1 and already took forever. I thought we'd be closer by now.

The easy-modding feature is sweet though. It sure will help the game a lot.

I've never worked on an RTS campaign, so I have no idea how long that will take them. That could be a point where they end up looking at pushing the game back further.

I am happy to hear that you are trying to polish the game. Since the first "z" beta the game does not work at all in my computer. The intro is like a slideshow and the graphics is in the game is broken, so I cannot use the clothmap  (Nvidia Geforce 7800 GTX).

YOU FREAK!

Have you tried to play in windowed mode with all video option set to minimum (no GFX, no anti aliasing ...) ?

I am able to run elemental with a Directx 9.0b card (automn 2004 ) with those settings.

Good that there will be a beta 1z3 since I have yet to play one single turn in beta 1z because of the ctd when the world generates...

I would much rather have Elemental in Q1 2011 than a game I find suboptimal. I'm in no rush, even though I am, of course, NOT having fun.

Weird stuff. I used to have lot of CTDs in 1z1 and 1z2, but I had no CTDs in 1z3, "only" lock-ups + reloading saved game problems. Developing a game must be really annoying in these stages....

When did you get Version 1Z3 Tormy?

@Peace

Considering we are Testing a Alpha/Beta doing the above is great and all but sadly negates finding any of the problems/issues that some of us that use ....say... an ATI 4850 X2 2GB video card, that should allow, at minimum, a Full Windowed mode, limited (2X) AA pass etc.

Or that was the impression I got when I signed up...

Oops lol ...I meant 0.298 and 0.299 with regard to CTDs, and 0.3 which is quite stable for me. I am a bit messed up with these Z version numbers....

Pheew! I thought i had missed out. Been running Impulse at regular intervals since the mini-patch was put out after 1Z proper.

Elemental and Civ V might be in the same genre, but if you ask me they're in totally separate "classes". Elemental will blow Civ V away in every respect, Especially Combat. The Civ games are good for what they do, sure, but the overall game hasn't had any significant improvement since Civ 2. It's the same old game with the same lame combat with a rehash of the diplomacy model every time...ZzzzZzzzZZzzz

Elemental on the other hand...We have city planning, a moddable economy model, Awesome Combat, World Changing Spells, armies that we can make, right down to the names of the individual soldiers on the battlefield, customizable leaders, a deep rich world created for every game.... Civ V won't even compare in my book.

In fact the only thing the Civ games have going for them over Elemental is that they've been around forever and being more or less the best option for what they do have had all that time to build a fan base. If the situation were reversed and this was Elemental 5 coming out against Civ 1, Elemental would have a Legion of fans as well. I'd say there are probably as many fans out there of the original "Masters of Magic", maybe more, then there are Civilization fans.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here, Shurdus. 

Morrowind had about four million sales and NWN's last released sales figures were three million, and that was before they released the diamond version. Morrowind may have broken the charts in the first few weeks, but Bioware caught up over the next few years, and continued to sell long after Morrowind had hit the dustbin.

Not bad for a game with a small advertising budget. Are you saying post-game support in the form of actually having an employee working on the game isn't meaningful? For the price of a couple billboard advertisements in this city, you've got his yearly salary right there and goodwill from the community that you can't buy, only earn.

I sort of feel it's a worthwhile investment.

Wow mister Raven. Fanboi alert!!! CIV IV is a VAST improvement over the earlier CIV games. I count CIV IV as the best strategy game ever made. Elemental may be a better game than CIV V, but I am far from sure at this point.

Me hopes that both be BRILLIANT