Played a few hours - really excited by the progress since the last time I played Elemental. Rated it fair - long way to go, but excited.

Disclosure : Didn't play betas before this, but a good deal of WOM.

Quick thoughts:

A) Early game needs some speed/interest/balance attention. Waiting 29 turns for a workshop or w/e seems silly. Long story short, takes a long time to get going - I got pretty bored pretty fast. Explored everything there was (in several different starts) and either I had good luck.... or was stuck waiting on builds... or was depending on a good map + enchanted hammers. Could aim to make the early game more engrossing - its going to be new players' first impression after all!!!

Love the new spell suite and variety. Needs balance tuning and better documentation ... but love them. Same with the tech trees.

C) LOVE outposts. Except... omg, they need city functionality/upgrades. First, if built next to a resource (ie, fire node) and you've build the resource, they should be linked the way a city is - attack the resource = attack the outpost. Second, they should have garrison capability like a city - and you should have to spend for upgrades, and upgrades past rank 2 or so should cost maintenance of some sort. IE - I can build a little 3 person outpost attached to my fire node and drop a 3man guard in it so I don't have to deal with random monsters... or I can upgrade it to a fort, a keep, a castle, and store more and more people in it - and pay more and more maintenance. (minor sub-rant - I park a trio of pikemen on an outpost, and I have to remind them to guard EVERY TURN? REALLY?!?!?)

D) As other people of said, ouch, purple hurts the eyes. Generally speaking I'm not in love with the graphics - its gorgeous but also super busy, and at times it's pretty hard just to tell whats going on around you.

E) Love the new monster ai. I got chased by monsters after raiding their lairs. That was a fun use of the early game (WHILE I WAITED 50000 TURNS FOR MY CITY TO BUILD ITS FIRST ENHANCEMENT... gawd.) and I like that after raiding a drake army's lair they followed me well outside their 'roam' range

F) Overall, I really like the mechanics changes and where the game is going. Outposts and early game need love. Balance needs love. Memory leaks need love. But .... lots of potential.

I agree bug fixing doesn't seem to have been given any priority. Last beta version various pathing issues were reported and those same issues are still present.

The reloading saves issue you detail is significant and its not a good sign nothing has been done.

I can deal with the bugs. I'm not expecting the AI to be good at this point. So I voted "fair".

I voted "Good," though in the context of the current beta. 

I like the changes -- they are definitely in the right direction. I feel that you guys are working hard to improve the differentiation between the factions and improving the dynamic nature of the game world. Every step that you take here is much appreciated. I noticed the new "wildlands" environments and even killed the glacier monster in the ice realm (sorry, I forget the name, though that was an epic battle for my level 9 sovereign, catapult, two infantry, two mages and champion!). The faction changes that you have released so far are good. They need some balancing, but they are very positive changes.

I would like to accuse Brad of telepathically pilfering some ideas from me in his post (great minds think alike, I guess!):

From this thread: https://forums.elementalgame.com/422946/get;last

• Every champion should have a unique ability. Yes please! 
• Move random events away from being random and into being “choices”.  I have played for about 9 hours now, and I have not come into contact with ANY random events (or at least none that I have identified). In fact, I was going to suggest that there need to be random events in the first place! Make them meaningful (such as a chasm opens up spewing demons, or mushrooms grow).
• Have Civ techs that cause Outposts to get guards... This is something that the game needs. However, to balance this, perhaps a maintenance cost would be in order to balance out Outpost spam?
• More terrain types. 100% agree. Might I suggest a "jungle" environment at regions near the equator or a "crystal" environment to spice things up? Dull brown and dark purple sometimes seem to dominate the landscape far too often. I was VERY pleased to see the snow "wildlands" environment. Snow at the "poles" would improve the appeal of the world substantially.
• Outpost specialization. The best aspect of Sins of a Solar empire (to me at least) is specializing starbases. The system is so flexible and engrossing that I pre-purchased Sins Rebellion months ago, despite owning the other Sins titles and expansions. 

 My suggestions for the Prestige system:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/423148

Might I suggest that you only put snow at ONE pole so as to not give the impression that the map represents an entire planet. More terrain types is a plus, but do please make sure that they also have a meaning. There should be different resources, monsters, quests and tactical bonuses to different terrain types.

Well Mistwraithe, it is true that we don't have extensive numbers but lets use the poll that was recently done for E FE, where Brad asked us how we thought the game was progressing. There were 360 votes of which 64% voted Excellent, or good. 32% voted fair, with 3% voting poor and 1% voting terrible. So, yeah, I would say you are in the minority in regards to E:FE.

I see, well I misunderstood then.

There's 2 populations of gamers that are relevant here -- the one comprising this forum (pop1), and the one that will hopefully buy the game (pop2).  Pop1 is mostly folks who pre-ordered and then put in time/effort to test WoM and now FE.  I'd characterize pop1 as fairly sympathetic to and enthusiastic for the game, but relatively small (a few hundred?).

Pop2 is less sympathetic and enthused and much much larger (how many sales are necessary to break even -- a few tens of thousands?).

The poll you refer to represents pop1 only.  They are important but it's pop2 that will make/break the game.

So citing the poll of pop1 is nice but tertiary to the main goal of making FE good enough in the eyes of pop2 to at least break even $-wise.

Were I in charge I'd listen less to the 'excellent/good voters of pop1 (who have likely already paid, and who generally be happy regardless) and pay more attention to those who vote 'fair', for the latter are the pop1 folks who most likely represent pop2.  Please the 'fair' voters amongst us to maximize the chance to please pop2.

Then again I could be wrong about all of this...

My personal philosophy is I want folks to tell me what they think, especially when they know I don't want to hear it.  That's how mistakes are avoided and improvements made.  In life it's too common for the opposite -- folks telling their boss/etc. only what they think the boss wants to hear (can't blame those folks tho, really, as too many bosses respond poorly to this).

Finally got enough time in to vote.

0.91 is a significant improvement from E:WOM and I feel things are heading in a general positive direction.

I voted "poor". I think it was close to being "fair", but I often felt that I was working for Stardock rather than having a fun leisure-time activity. The main issues for me were probably pacing, balance, and development.

PACING: While I think the bugs and stability issues I experienced were within the realm of the acceptable for a beta, they did detract somewhat, but my main concerns were pacing. After the early game, I found myself quite often hitting "end turn" without much happening that caught my attention. I should say that I did not feel this is any worse than, say, CivIV BtS, the last iteration of Civilization I played -- I only ever completed one game of that. I found it (Civ) to be quite boring after the end of mid-game. In other words, I found CivIV BTS's pacing to be poor at best, and one of the reasons that game is "not for me", despite its many positive elements. Unlike games such as AoW or HoMM(3), I felt that only a small portion of the turns were meaningful.

BALANCE: I often felt that there were too many no-brainers, and hence lack of meaningful choices for me to make. Once I figured out how to make Champions, I could ignore the often moot task of making units, and using them. I just stomped around with my champions and defeated everything else without ever "choosing".

DEVELOPMENT: I did not enjoy managing my cities, and had to think of Derek's "Go Big or Go Home": why not git rid of them (as some 4X games have done)? Be that as it may, I did not yet feel much connection to my cities, differentiation amongst them, or, after a while, even understand why I would need them after founding my original city. Owning vast tracts of land did not seem to be necessary, and I stomped everyone with my sovereign anyhow. Additionally, I found that I could ignore most of the tasks of research, since I felt that what I was getting was coming too late, or had too little effect, to make much of a difference. Again, I mostly ignored making armies, and I am sure I am missing out, and in fact feel that I am, but I felt there was not enough motivation to invest in them.

Overall, I found the AI to be suboptimally idiosyncratic, and while I realize I was playing on default (easy?) level, it did not seem to be making wise decisions. 

I want to say that I believe many of these issues can be addressed before the autumn (possible release date), and I am cautiously optimistic about this product becoming "good" or even better in the future.

Personally i think with so many months ahead to work on the game, they should be biased towards listening to people who think it can be improved further . If they going to take the stand it's "Great" already, they might as well release the game now. 

No harm to assume it is not as good as they think it is, and try to improve further. 

I do disagree though that the poll tells you anything much about pop2. I suspect most people on this forum pop1 are more critical and expect more from the game... We are enthusiastic yes, and we want to be sympathetic yes, but because we have experienced greatness in games so we expect more.

People who haven't got a benchmark to compare may indeed consider FE a pretty good game assuming they go in for 4X TBS strategy games.  But perhaps the only such people would indeed be people like us in this forum aka Niche hardcore veteran players, so indeed our reactions would be a closer approximation than usual.

I still fail to understand this mentality of only wanting one or very few cities in a stratagy TBS game. Now I'm all for specilizing the city and have many choices for each city but I have no problem with "city spaming."  Having said this I think that you should have a unit to build cities only and they should cost more than what they do now. But you should also have a unit with the "build outpost/repair site" ability that is cheaper (Similar top the AOW tower builder)

Thinking as a player and not a tester, I voted good.

Here's why:

A. I do enjoy playing the game to completion as it is now

B. I look forward to playing the game

C. I think about how I'm playing even when I'm not actually playing

Here are two reasons why I'm unable to vote excellent:

1. Replayability - It's not clear yet the game can draw me back after the newness wears off. As it sits now, I suspect after a sufficient number of games the repetition factor will loom large. Modders should be able to blunt that somewhat but I'd rather that be a bonus and not the path to salvation.

2. Competitiveness - The game does not challenge me enough yet with its opposing play. There are occasional flashes of goodness but not a sustained level of competent opposition from start to finish. Addressing this item will certainly boost item 1 above.

Like many, I have high aspirations for the remaining beta releases. FE is maturing to a very promising vintage.

(Edited to remove the darn smiley codes.)

Ok, so I have to reinstall from scratch. So still no direct test for me, but I've followed the thread closely and I am forming an opinion.

I suspect that some of the old issues DO still afflict FE. But I also get the impression that great advancements have been made. Also, while I feel Brad's reactions are sometimes a bit off-putting, I understand the frustration he and the team must feel after reading not-so-enthusiastic posts still, with all that's happened with WoM and FE up until now.

And again, we cannot think that the game can be revolutionized again. It must be completed following the path it is in right now. I urge everyone to just focus on giving feedback to the content that's more or less in at the moment, like faction differentiation, since that was the main focus of Beta 3. Try to forget cities for a while, they will be looked after later after all. For instance, I expressed several times my worries about the excessive streamlining of city development: I still am worried about that, because right now the system seems oversimplified to me, and as a result, a tad boring. But a main resource is missing, and it is entirely possible that with that on the field, and proper, relentless balancing, we'll find a sweet spot with how city mechanics work.

So again I strongly urge everyone to take a step back, no more overreaching posts about rewriting whole sections of the game, no matter how fair and legit the points. I've been one of the harsher critics of the game but I do want to see it finished. So let us all wait for the missing content/mechanics to be added and THEN focus on balance.