Some us knew what to expect..  from the Galciv days and information gleaned on these boards and the available videos.. Not only that some of us enjoyed the ride because we knew what to expect from a Stardock Beta.. Those who expected a demo.. well honestly that's not Stardock's fault. Bottom line when going into a beta  anyone who does not do good research on said beta and then does not understand what their doing is kind of getting a little of what they deserved.. As backward as beta 3 was from 3b and 3c (let alone 4) I had a blast getting an inside peak at the sausage factory, while finding bugs .. Hope next time ya all do need testers I can get in on it as well...

can not wait for finished product...

Indeed I agree completely. A lot of testers expected to have a good deal of time with balancing and tweaking and pacing. Trying to find strategies that could "break" the game. Put the game through it's paces etc etc. Internally this might not seem like that big of a step when mechanics are falling into place and the code is flying because values can always be gone over and tweaked later. Honestly though, (and I kinda feel like I'm gonna get yelled at for even saying this..lol), but I think the Lack Of This Phase Of a Beta is the Exact Reason why so many people complained that the game was being "rushed" (notice I wasn't one of those people). Still, I think that's what a lot of people expected. Honestly, back when the beta started, that's what I expected too which was why I was glad the other phases were going so slow, so that the balancing and tweaking phase would go slow too and we'd have time with it. That phase isn't so much in a Devs eyes, but in the players eyes that phase IS the Game. It's the game-play, the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul of the game. In most major projects I've been a part of how-ever, most of the "Game" was hammered out on paper (virtual paper) in the design phase while the engine was being built.

This time around the chips didn't fall the way we all wanted when it came to what kind of time we'd get with certain parts of the game. In future betas though I think it should be something that's planned for from inception to keep precisely that thing from happening. Of course there's always going to be a small population in any game's beta that will Never say a game is ready. I think in Elemental's case though specifically that it could have been avoided if there was a longer "design testing phase". With business agreements being what they are it was unavoidable this time, next time though it should probably be something that's planned for.

I don't know, you can if you want, I wouldn't argue . I've had my share of dumb guy employees at video game stores too. I think the "climate" for it might be different down here in Florida though. My town, Deland, is a college town. Stetson College is here. You can imagine the type of air heads we get here. You know the "dumb blonde" cliché stereo type? I think that stereo type originated here...LoL.

You, you not argue!? Hah! Excuse me, I think i better wipe up the water that went flying across my desk at that not.  
I've been in this area for going on 20 years now. I've never seen a single female employee in either of the two stores at my mall. I don't think they will hire women, and they're still terrible. It has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with the fact that GS doesn't care enough to train their employees. They just want their cash, their exclusives and for people to trade in games to get a 50 cent credit.

Actually, there was a female GS employee back at my college. I bet she is still there right now. They do exist but its rare. Also, GS seems to rely on first hand knowledge that employees bring with them upon being hired.

But, then again, I'm a GS fan

maybe where you live. But in my town all the game stop employees are avid gamers including the most the girls that work there. We have alot of female employees for the measly 4 gamestops we have. I think theres 1-2 female employees at each store.

Well we're all basing this on our own experiences, but only one person is making some sort of sweeping claim on an entire gender over it.

I'm not making a sweeping claim on the Entire female gender, dear. Just the ones here in Deland...lol. I am known not to argue on occasion

Yeah because when you said gender does have something do with it, what you "really" meant was just the ones you encountered in Deland. I must have missed that part because that is not what you said at all.  I especially liked the part where you told people to travel to "every" video game store to pretty much verify what you said. I call BS on you sir.

Trolling eh?  Did you bother to look up Australia EB?  http://www.ebgames.com.au/search?title=elemental

No I didn't think so. 

It's a good game, and it's a shame it hasn't been flooded more in game circles.  But it won't sell well if people don't know about it, nor can get it.

I'll accept your apology for that insulting comment.  I just quickly flicked through my two years of posting history on this site, and only 21 posts have I replied where "Steam" was mentioned, and a lot of those posts I didn't mention the word it was in the reply I was quoting.  And all of those in the last few months.

So what if I like Steam?  I don't think it's the evil entity you do.  I'm no fan-boi and prefer boxed copies, but I'm also a supporter of the Indie games circle, of which Steam is a great central repository to get them from.

So I'll thank you to get your head out of your ass and stop commenting where it's not warranted.  And if the CEO of a game's company can think they can insult paid customers, then fuck you buddy.  You'll never see another cent of mine.

Hell yeah!

Well, I don't agree with that. My current computer has run W7 Beta, Office 2010 Beta, and VS 2010 Beta, and it has now XNA 4.0 Beta on it. I run CTPs and betas of Microsoft constantly and they are things that work. You can have a technical feedback about performance, crashes,... with a more finished product that allows you go get feedback on many other things.

About the current beta and Elemental, I'm in the camp of people who enjoyed the technical betas at the start but then I missed a more complete game, because the endgame of most of my games has consisted in a sovereign with some summons and a company of guys with metal swords and metal armors (and in some cases with wood weapons and leather armors).

I suppose one problem has been that we have been told that betas weren't supposed to be fun but at the same time we have been hearing since very early that there was a much better internal version. Last chance to prove that is day 0, I hope it works.

And now as a customer, MoM, X-Com,... those games were great at day 0, as a customer who bought this game a year ago, I don't like hearing that this game is going to be awesome 6 months after launch, nor I think that should be encouraged. The game should be awesome at day 0, period (and more awesome later perfect).

But well, this game was hyped too much on the early phases and now it falls short of expectations. Maybe with time it will reach those expectations, who knows...

Or maybe it will reach those expectations at day 0, since no open beta tester played the final version, who knows?

If you want to go there, most betas also don't have you test what would by most studios be considered an alpha (at best). Betas 1 and 2 were not "beta" by the standard usage of the term.

But that isn't the problem. Betas 1 and 2 got useful feedback and were productive parts of the process. Those existing was a good thing. The bad thing is that there was no beta 5 where every system is in place and enabled to test the game as an assembled whole.

Anecdotal evidence from one person is not a "statistical fact". You don't have a statistic at all, and if you tried to gather one the sample size is so small that it'd be completely meaningless.

Furthermore, the "gaming population" isn't relevant. EB doesn't limit their hiring to the gaming population. They'll hire anybody who is available and can sell used games to people who come in for new ones (particularly around here where the job market is reasonably strong and people have other options).

Around here, I can go in and ask ANYBODY about an obscure PC game and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about. Doesn't matter what gender they are or how good looking they are. PC games aren't the focus of the store, and they don't hire people on the basis of their knowledge of the industry. (Hell, I had to tell them once that they had The Witcher: Enhanced Edition in stock, because they didn't know. He went back and sure enough it was in a box they hadn't gotten around to yet.)

I'm still debating if I should upgrade to the limited edition or buy the book.  Decisions ...decisions.

Frogboy you had said that a modder could remake Ultima IV with the modding tools for Elemental. Could someone recreate Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic?

What would you want to create about Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic? It's already been done with Master of Magic. Now Ultima IV that's a different story and a well written one at that. I could see it getting modded and remade but not AOW:SM

Well AOW:SM IMHO is the best Fantasy TBS game to date. And I even like it better thant Ultima IV and MOM. So that is the reason I'd ask because I would like to see it recreated.

Yes, I did mean to work my original "sweeping post" a bit differently, you're right. The GS here in Deland is managed by 2 guys and last I knew they had 4 female employees. One of the guys names is John and he's the manager. The other guy is Steven and he's the assistant manager. The four girls are all blonde except one who's hair is more dirty blonde and all four of them are increasingly ditzy the better looking they get. I've known John for about 5-6 years now just from going in that GS. I know first hand he looks for dumb hot girls to hire so he can get laid...lol. Kinda sad, I know. Then again if I had that kind of power....I probably wouldn't have gotten married lol. It almost makes me miss working at McDonald's (where my wife and I met).

Fairly new here and only recently found out about elemental through Impulse's "coming soon" section. I'm an old school veteran of eagerly awaiting games and reading beta reports. My unfortunate experience has been that 100% of the time when the final beta that the testers get to play with was buggy and unfinished, then there will always be dramatic claims about how much better the internal beta is and how much is being fixed between beta and release. However I have never actually seen a case when the final release didn't turn out to be a disaster.

Anyway I hope this will not be the case here, and maybe as some say this is just a Stardock thing. I do like them as a company which gives me some faith. But every other failure I saw had similar arguments made about how this was all to be expected and normal as well, so you can understand a certain skepticism on my part. But I hope I'm wrong, and that in the future I can mention this game as a ray of hope among all the other disasterous launches I've seen.

What I do have faith in though is that even if the game has issues at first, it will eventually be good or at least decent. If it is released unfinished a lack of publicity may be a good things because it will let them fly under the radar until it's done. When a game website writes a review they do it once with the current version of the game.....they don't go back 6 months later and review the fixed version (or at least they rarely do).

As a side note, I played MoM through every patch and despite our fond memories of it, that was also a game that was released way too soon with major bugs, balance problems, and horrible AI. Even the final version was deeply flawed, though that didn't stop me from playing it all the time.

There was a beta 5. It just wasn't public (for, I think, obvious reasons but clearly not obvious to some).

This is such dejavu.  Anyone here remember the Sins of a Solar Empire beta? Same conversations.

I think "not obvious to Most" would be a better wording there, chief. I think a lot of us expected access to that stage of the beta when we pre-ordered. I know I did. A lot of us buying into the beta had expectations of having just as much input into balancing and tweaking as we've had with the rest of the game and it's mechanics as well. Without public (I wouldn't exactly call it "public" since we bought our way into it) access to beta 5 we don't have any idea what the launch balance will be like.

TBH I thought we would be testing balance on the cloth map. There was a lot written in the early days that the game needed to be fun to play with minimal graphics and that playing on the cloth map was going to be the acid test for game-play.

Not that I'm complaining about it now. Less than two weeks to go and I want to play the release version fresh.