Longer match is kind of boring - am I missing something?

Yes, you are missing something. Its a beta version. There is no real AI and therefore you cannot expect an actionfilled quality game.

The game is missing a lot of stuff right now, like a good AI and most of the technologies in some trees.

I for one have put down the game and wait for release. Day 0 release will be a complete different game if what i hear is true.

Frogboy mentioned FPS .

Edit: Ninja'd

Such comments do not help much. I am fully aware that it is a beta.

I already read something like that as well but just wanted to make sure I am not missing something.

Yes it would have been great to have a near-final beta, but that just didn't happen this time, at least.  It may happen in the future.

Best regards,
Steven.

Except the comments do help though, because the fact that it's a beta may be understood, but the fact that it's a beta that only has placeholder AI that can't think it's way out of a wet paper bag with a hole in the bottom may not be understood. The complete lack of AI in the Beta4 version would make the game a big, boring plate of suck on the long term, because the challenge is going to be utterly absent. This has been Frogboy's prime goal for the past week, so I would suspect it would be both more challenging and more interesting as you'll have people to deal with that will be able to fight back...

my suggestion is to start prestige wari on yellow by building up your frontline towns with all the prestige increasing buildings you could, and another idea could be to build a stack of doom ie a dozen troops with master armour, master heavy iron shields and claymores, then declare war and go and conqour it, then set up a town near the out of reach ai  and prestige it  back, then use the stack of doom on it

harpo

I also find it difficult to give qualified feedback on a beta whose state has been called "painfully" boring by its developer, while at the same time realizing that it has gone gold. I too want to be able to give feedback in terms of gameplay balance and overall fun, but that is difficult for the reasons many posters above have listed. I too, therefore, belong to the group of testers who are still "missing something".

This would all be true if this beta was a test of the total game .. but it was not, we tested various mechanics to see how/that they worked.. we never got our hands on beta of the full version (it was never planed that we would get one)..  Not all beta's are handled the same.. Nw had the game had an open beta phase (this is usually mostly done in MMO's or online games to test infrastructure more then the game it self)

Although if we do get our hands on the gold early we may still get our chance..

Seriously guys, this is a beta. I know you probably don't want to hear it but we are beta testers and our goal was intended to find bugs and errors so Stardock can correct them. This is NOT a demo and it's not for our pleasure.

However, if these issues crop up in a release candidate, then I'm inclined to agree with you. However, we're certainly not there yet.

150th step and already bored?

I play Civ on marathon speed and still consider it too fast! - No time to REALLY use all the technologies you develop.

I'm not worried about the game being boring because the elaborate modding will add more fun and strategic game content...  I'm worried about game stability since the last BETA version still had serious major problems and broken/incomplete editors.  I'm also worried about multiplayer.

It is just I hoped that we would be able to help them with gameplay, not only with straight forward bugs and crushes. But the way beta was run, it is not the case. I am glad that we were able to help with bugs, and the game will have good modding capabilities, so we can create whatever we want, still it is pity that the main gameplay, which will be played by 95% of the gamers without ever modding the game, was not really tested by us.

Well, the good thing is that Stardock by themselves have quite good knowledge of what a good game should be (judging by the past products), and that they will, as usual, produce lots of patches where we will have opportunity to give our input about actual gameplay.

I also do understand that that this close to the release, there is no sense to give us updated version of the beta, since the changes will not be able to propagate into the game even for day 1 patch. Oh well... counting days...

Civ4 also has functional AI that battles you pretty hard. Try playing it on Settler or Chieftan. You'll be bored to tears by turn 150.

I think that's the point. We have spent about a year testing individual elements and concepts of a game for their functionality, which was all (correctly) dubbed "painfully unfun" by the developer, but even a few weeks before release, we have not tested the complete rig for anything like "fun", which is possibly the one greatest single element of any game. I was led to believe that the ultimate goal of the beta testing crew was, however, in the end to do that, which, it appears to me, would have made a vast deal of sense.

Thanks, I did, and I really liked it.