Thanks for taking the time to post your first impressions!

Well, I for one think it looks night and day compared to the beta 4.  The tactical combat is much better, the lay out of towns and how they work is also better.

And Alt tab works for me, however if you have an ATI card it will still crash.  I like the main quest so far, I just got to porcipine's city and it seems interesting so far.

We thought all prior alt-tab issues were fixed, but the change to fix a graphics memory leak also caused a recurrence of that issue on some ATI cards on Win7 x64. We have one of the game's lead graphics developers on the task of fixing it.

For now, running in windowed mode (which will fill the screen if you set it to the screen resolution) may help. If not, set autosave to every turn and sit tight for a couple of days.

I agree that compared to the beta 4, its night and day. I've played for about an hour now (sandbox, not campaign) on a large map. So far I'm really liking the game. There are a few small things I'd thought would have been fixed/looked into, but I'll wait for the 0 day patch before comment on that.

One big problem though. I couldn't play much of beta 4 because of the out of memory error (I assume because I'm on win7 x64 with ATI cards). In beta 4 I would only get 30-40 turns before it would crash. Today I got about an hour into the game and it did it. I had (sadly) just lost a town an all of the sudden the game wouldn't respond anymore. I alt-tab and had a pop up saying it was out of memory. Probably for the best, as I really need to get to bed.

Also, I have not tried the modding tools tonight, but I got out of memory errors when working with the map editor during beta 4. Made me sad as I really want to re-create The Kingdom of the Isles on Midkemia from Raymond E. Feist's great books.

I really hope this out of memory error will be fixed in 0 day patch, because the game is a lot of fun to play. And I want to get to work on the map editor.

Thanks for a great game,

Nathan

 PS. sorry if this is a double posts. After I hit the button to post, some odd screen came up about lost pigeons or something??

Bollocks to the f*cking ati/64bit bug. Seriously guys. Fix that shit.

If you're running 64bit windows 7 you might. I don't know if it affects everyone.

If you do have the problem, someone might be along to tell you that playing in windowed mode may help. Or turning down graphics settings. Or playing only in the "cloth map" mode and staying clear of tactical battles. Which is all fine, for a beta.

Wow this game is buggy. I've been playing for about 30 minutes and I don't know if I can continue.

I started out on the campaign and the first thing I did was to go into the menus to see if I could invert the mouse-scrolling. Didn't find it and when I got back to the game it was zoomed in to the max and I could not get it back out again. Not with the scroll wheel or the +/- buttons. Restarting the game solved this.

Next I spend some time trying to figure out how to build the city and how to build farms. I wish the tutorial would have helped me some more here but I figured it out. Seems you can't click a square if there's someone standing on it? Opening the city seemed to be bugged too. When I double clicked, it opened really quickly and then closed immediately. I managed to get around that by double clicking and keeping the button pressed for a while before releasing it.

I now notice the big spider over at the wreckage and go over there with my hero, that other guy and the militia. I kill it easily, pick up the stuff and then try to attack the much smaller spider next to it. Figure it's going to be even easier so I auto-resolve the battle, but it turns out I lose everything except my hero with 1HP. What the hell? Must've been stronger than it looked... Oh well, I reload the game, kill the big spider again, pick up the sword and try to figure out how to equip it, or at least make sure I have it on my hero. Well I can't because the description text on the hero is so long I can't see the items?

I'm now starting to get a bit annoyed at the game but I try to attack the smaller spider again. Except I can't. Nothing happens when I click attack. Why? I click next turn some 10 times and the city grows. I try to attack it again but I still can't. I try to move up to the bandits but I can't attack them either. Restarting the game doesn't help.

I'm on Win7 x64 with an ATI card as well, if that makes any difference to all this?

Hey guys, been following beta closely, finally registered.

While I appreciate Stardock's candor and their enthusiasm, I do have one thing to say.

For a game with MAGIC in the title, Stardock clearly shoved magic on to the back burner in favor of a lot of other features. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt because they've committed to updates for a long time...but that's a pretty big failing in my book. I hope Stardock uses this release as a cautionary tale about getting too excited with your own IP, and pushing too hard toward a release.

Because I think I could have waited until 2011 for a very polished build. I'm just not sure Brad and Random could have.

So Far i'm enjoying it.  I also found the change in the way you build farms and mines a bit of a surprise.  But once I worked it out I think it's actually better.

Might be a few minor SPOILERS for the story below.

I'm having some weird game play issues at the moment in the campaign.  I have 5 towns, and the NPC towns haven't grown at all.  I couldn't build pioneers so no new towns at first.  after I had to build a town for the story I assumed that was design - then I designed a unit that had the pioneer pack and therefore could start settlements .  I'm wondering if i bypassed part of the game in doing it that way.

I can't do any research - i haven't met an NPC to help me get started in that area and If i open the research area it tell me I have no one studying.  Maybe i haven't got far enough into the story to be allowed - or i just missed something.

I've also got stuck in the campaign story.  A scribe sends me for a book - to translate a map - but i can't find the NPC - Town or whatever it is i'm looking for.  The yellow glow on the paper map in beta made that sort of thing more fun. (though it's not really a quest)

Lot of fun - i'm off to restart the campaign and see if it works that way again or if i have done something silly

About the ATI/Win 7 64 known bug. The problem there is, I have windows XP media edition, and an Nvidia 9600 GT graphic card. Edit: I also have the memory leak, but since I can't alt-tab much, I can't find out what increases memory usage easily either. (I'll try the maximize window thing next.).

@Stardock: PM me and I'll happily help with doing whatever is needed to help identify the problem.

@Rune_74: Yes, I agree completely. The game flows much better, although I did have to go sleep for a while. Now I'm back and going to log a lot more hours on this.

 Changes:

The biggest change is in many of the small details. Character creation has less oddities, more icons (for talents/weaknesses, for instance), the nations include information on what race they are (The Yithril are just 'Fallen', but the rest are a specific race.). The Yithril no longer start with an exceptional longbow, but they start with piercing weapons researched, so you can create archers from the start. BIG advantage as far as I can tell.

Interface has a few more subscreens, the Hiergamon infromation windows has more consistent links and descriptions - better organized, tabs for the spellbooks, etcetera.

One surprise - casting spells is no longer an action you can do; you need to click on 'abilities' tab and 'channeler' to cast spells. A little unintuitive, but it's still on the character, at least.

About tactical combat, bows no longer shoot at 45 degrees to the right or left of the target and still hits. Jay.
Unfortunately scrolling with ASDW or edge scrolling is not enabled, you need to zoom out and then in to do anything at range. That's a bit clunky.
I did get an all-white tactical screen (landscape and units, not interface), which was a Beta 4 bug as well. I think it's connected with the out of memory thing, but not sure. I did take a screen shot but not sure how to put them here.

More huts, more quests, more lairs, more STUFF.